Week 5

Is it a high or low cultural genre, according to Napier(2005)? What are some of its subgenres?



According to Napier (2005), since Japan “began to develop an export animated filmed and videos-anime” in 1990s (p.5), anime becomes a significant cultural economy and infiltrates into people’s life body. On the other hand, an ominous opinion points out that anima has impacted the social morals. However, Napier tends to defines Anime as a high cultural genre in several reasons.


First of all, there are many scholarship articles are related to its subjects as it is a high intelligence art form. Furthermore, this art form originates from previous high cultural traditions such as Kabuki or woodblock print. Thirdly, the issues which involved in Anime are familiar to contemporary high culture literatures which are easy to be accepted by readers. Moreover, as it not only entertains readers worldwide but also incite audiences to work through the issues and more accessible than old high cultural genre. Therefore, it is “worthy of being taken sociologically and aesthetically” (p.4)


Napier argues that Anime has some subgenres, such as Cyberpunk and Mecha. Cyberpunk generally presents the people’s struggles in the impacts of technology becoming dominant on their life. Macha “(a shorting of the English word “mechanical”)” (Napier, 2005, p.11) focuses on robot or humanoid machines. “Both these genres are particularly appropriate ones for our increasingly high-tech world (p.11).

Napier, S. (2005). Why anime? In Anime: from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle (pp.3-14).Hampshire: Palgrave/ Macmillan.