Japanese Media Art 100

[Aaron Gerow]

The Agency for Cultural Affairs, to commemorate the 10th edition of the 
Japan Media Arts Festival, conducted a public poll to decide the 100 
works that best represent Japanese media art. The results (in Japanese 
only) are available at the following URL:

http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/hundred/index.html

In short, the top films for animation are as follows:

1) Shinseiki Evangelion
2) Kaze no tani no Nausicaa
3) Tenku no shiro Laputa
4) Kido senshi Gandam
5) Lupin sansei Cagliostro no shiro

Since this was a poll done on the internet, the results are weighted 
towards recent works (Mushishi comes up no. 6).

Given our discussions of animation versus film, it is interesting that 
animation has its own section in the poll, but not film (film is just 
stuck into "Entertainment," with only Godzilla breaking the top 50). 
Does this signal that to the Bunkacho, animation and manga are more 
important than film? Or does it too separate out animation from 
live-action film as completely different entities? Note that film used 
to be part of the Geijutsusai (Festival of the Arts), but is not any 
more. The Film Award (Eigasho) started in 2003, but that is only for 
documentary films. Earlier, the Bunkacho had a system for awarding 
excellent films, including fiction ones, but I think that stopped in 
2003. Does the Bunkacho now have any festival or award for live action 
fiction films?

It is always intriguing to see how bureaucracy defines the cinema.

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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