Anime and genre

[Alexander Jacoby]

Jasper is quite right to say that I'm not personally very interested in animation. But that has nothing to do with the point I made here, which is that I perceive photography and painting as different media, a comment which implied no value judgement. I'm not particularly interested in symphonic music either, but that doesn't mean that I dismiss the aesthetic achievements of Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner, et al - just that I don't choose to devote as much time to them as I do to great movies, books and paintings.
   
  An art historian might, as Jasper says, examine twentieth century visual arts and discuss both painting and photography. Or he/she might write a book about the Renaissance and discuss both painting and sculpture. Nevertheless, one would not feel that a book about "Renaissance painting" specifically was necessarily lacking something - the author  might have just chosen to narrow the field. Conversely, one could widen one's field and focus on Renaissance arts as a whole - ie including literature, music, etc. All these choices would be defensible, because painting and sculpture, or painting and photography, like animation and live-action film, are related but distinct media - one might want to discuss them together or separately, according to context.
   
  I think that what Miyazaki does in order to receive credit as "director" is substantially different from what Mizoguchi did to receive credit as "director". If someone wants to argue that Miyazaki is as great a master of the medium of animation as Mizoguchi was of the medium of live action film, then I'll be happy to listen to their argument. But I still think you'd be comparing two masters in different media. Similarly, one could argue that Ansel Adams was a master of twentieth century photography as Picasso was a master of twentieth century painting; this argument would in no way imply that one valued photography over painting or vice versa, or indeed that one preferred Adams to Picasso or vice versa.
   
  The crossover artists like Oshii are interesting, and Jasper's right to suggest that the lines are being blurred by films like Avalon which are "live action" but use some elements deriving from animation. But my answer to the question "Where do you draw the line?" is that I don't, but discuss individual hybrid films on a case-by-case basis. Still, this mixing of genres is a very old phenomenon. Are the original, illustrated copies of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" literary or visual art?
   
  ALEX 

 		
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