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World Festival of Animated Film /
short and feature edition 5 to 10 June 2017
World Festival of Animated Film / short and feature edition 5 to 10 June 2017
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Jiajia_li

ANIMAFEST PRO | ANIMAFEST SCANNER IIII - Symposium for Contemporary Animation Studies | PANEL 2: COMIC AND ANIMATION

On the Origin and Evolution of the Vulgarity Taste in Japanese Yonkoma Manga Centering on Daily Life of Average People - Jiajia Li - China Academy of Art - China

6/06 TUE 15:05 - 15:35 Chilloutka, Ilica 15/1

In Japan, Sunday dusk falls with an animation series on Fuji TV – Sazae-san, or the Wonderful World of Sazae-san, which debuted on Fuji TV in October 1969. With its comic debut in 1946 following the end of the Second World War, Sazae-sanran for 28 consecutive years adding up to over 6000 episodes, making it truly a post-war Japanese classic of comic strips. A quick look at the newspapers publishing environment of the 20thcentury Japan will suffice that family yonkoma comic strips similar to Sazae-san emerged since the early days of the Shōwa period. These manga creations introduced to the reading public various ordinary characters who were just like next-door neighbours. In popular content and simple forms the artists showed their concerns for society and the general public to create a vulgarity taste featuring wit and realism. A taste or style as consciousness does not happen independently of social contexts, it is traceable in the development of Japanese painting history. For example, during the Sengoku Jidai genre painting depicting situations and scenes of everyday life emerged as contrastive to traditional subjects of court noblemen vis-à-vis the warrior class.

Seemingly “derailed” in expression, some paintings like Hungry Ghosts Scroll and Victories Scroll managed to entertain readers, although depicting utmost vulgar scenes like defecation and farting, in a way that is easy to understand and trigger roaring laughter. The kind of humour embedded in such paintings appeals directly to human nature in a primitive, unrestrained way, and therefore presents an unaffected, strong appeal born out of the everyday life of the general public. Today’s yonkoma manga centring on everyday life in Japan captures the vulgarity appeal of the more traditional. And that explains why in the present thesis the author endeavours to track from an aesthetic perspective the historical threads of Japanese manga so as to explore the possible aesthetic principles and philosophical connotation of the vulgarity taste embedded in today’s Japanese yonkoma manga centring on everyday life of average people and investigate the cultural roots from which popular Japanese yonkoma manga has derived and thrived. Key words: the vulgarity taste, aesthetic awareness

Jiajia Li graduated from Department of Animation, China Academy of Art with a bachelor degree in 2012, and an MA degree in the program of Animation Practical and Theoretical Research in 2016. After that, she was employed by the same school to teach and do research at the Animation Department. From November 2011 to April 2012, she exchanged to the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in Germany as a visiting teacher. In 2016, she acquired her PhD degree with a thesis investigating the vulgarity taste of Japanese family manga. She is currently making her animation film as well as working on the studies centring on the internal connection betweenthe Chinese genre paintingsfrom the 16th to 19th centuriesand modern Chinese comics.