Hello, friends—Roof-chan here.
As you can see, we’re doing something different today. Instead of our usual article, here’s a change of pace: after our club members’ meticulous planning (read: slacking off), this column’s first essay contest is officially under way!
The main aim is to get everyone exploring and discussing a set theme. On the one hand, we want to open up a space for critical discussion, encouraging everyone to discuss particular themes in animation and express their own views. On the other, we hope that a call for essays will lead to all sorts of dealings between readers and writers (laughs). We hope you’ll join in! If you have any comments or suggestions, leave Lab on Roof a message.
Essay Theme: Cities · Space
Introduction
From bustling cyber cities to the floating city of Castle in the Sky; from the mental spaces of Paprika to the spaces of desire in Sarazanmai. The “cities” and “spaces” of anime, comics, games, and novels have a character all their own. In real life, different disciplines also offer different readings of the city. Early sociology held that, once industrial society had freed up labor, the division of labor produced a new form of solidarity, and accommodating this form of solidarity necessarily gave rise to cities characterized by industrial agglomeration. The establishment of cities is also bound up with the concentration of capital; cities are a hotbed of the problems of modernity and of resistance to them. Folklore studies focuses on all manner of uncanny, mysterious urban legends, discussing the cultural meanings behind the stories; architecture examines the layout and design of public buildings, their practical functions, their social and cultural dimensions, their aesthetics…
Among the many approaches to studying cities, Henri Lefebvre was the first to place “space” at the center of analysis, providing urban studies with an entirely new paradigm. The city is a space on an immense scale, while particular spaces are also ways in which the city comes into view. A spatial perspective overcomes the opposition between the city at the macro level and the places where individuals go about their lives, abolishes the divide between physical and mental space, and connects the ways individuals interpret the city with the ways they reproduce it.
Landmark buildings, supermarkets, squares, slums, street corners, anime pilgrimage sites, izakaya, an otaku’s room, cyberspace—all these objects now enter the field of analysis. Moreover, the flexibility some animation displays, surpassing that of film, shows us still more forms of fictional architecture that go beyond the modern or are nonmodern: shifting dreams, Gensokyo, opera stages. All merit discussion.
Submission Requirements
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Submit criticism of animation, comics, games, or novels (ACGN), focusing on “cities,” “space,” or both. All we ask is that you develop your own thoughts in depth. Citations are not required, but if you do cite sources, follow proper citation conventions.
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There are no restrictions on your choice of disciplinary perspective. We look forward to fresh angles; just keep your subject focused on space or cities. Mental space? Architectural metaphors? All are welcome!
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Submissions must be at least 2,000 Chinese characters long. Pieces will be edited and published, and authors may retain the rights to their work.
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Every participant must keep up with the other participants’ articles. Once all submissions have been published, choose any one article and write a response of 200–400 Chinese characters. After the event, we will include everyone’s responses, with their names, in a wrap-up article.
Submission period: From today through Sunday, July 14.
A Message from the Club Head
Whether urban legends or anime pilgrimages, whether other worlds or the internet—
we depend on them constantly, yet so often forget them,
so that our lives may lose their vividness…
Now, it is time.
Street corners and alleyways, skyscrapers, the many facets of culture behind those pilgrimages; those little disputes between neighbors;
or the metaphorical relationship between a character’s dwelling and their personality, and space as a shackle binding the story as a whole;
it may always remain hidden behind the story, yet it witnesses the protagonist’s growth and is the unnoticed builder of the story’s background…
Animation and comics have never lacked cities and spaces; all that is missing is a distinctive eye for them…
—Now it is your turn to release its true name!
—Zimo, June 7, 2019.