Summer Wars

[merin_chan]

Woo, review time! Here’s how much I enjoyed Hosoda Mamoru's Summer Wars. I saw it this weekend at Winnipeg's Plastic Paper Animation Festival with my friend Adam, who brought along delicious chocolate raspberry truffles. I had one before the screening and he set the bag between us as the movie started...but I didn’t get to eat another truffle. That

Comments

[merin_chan]

Hmmm, that is an interesting question. I can see how anime that show teamwork might be more feminist-friendly than the Superman-style "lone hero saves the world single-handedly" plot. But I think there are sometimes problems of representation and tokenizing with team/ensemble anime. If it's not the old "token woman" chestnut from sentai shows, it's a more subtle sort of character typing. Take Sailor Moon for example. Each girl represents a particular image of femininity (ditzy, smart, glamourous, mysterious, athletic), different from the others only insofar as her difference makes her useful to the team. It risks falling into Spice Girls-brand empowerment: girl power, but only through these certain acceptable roles. The team mentality can minimize real, disruptive differences, just as certain kinds of feminism gloss over ethnicity, class and sexuality in the rush to unite women under the common banner of gender. I go in for coalitional politics, the motley crew approach, and I tend to like anime with a mixed cast of characters that fight amongst themselves a lot, like the Cowboy Bebop crew, rather than "teamwork" per se.

Well, that's just one way to look at it. I hope you can write up a con report saying how the panels go!

[starlady38]

http://starlady38.livejournal.com/348067.html

And also, thanks for your thoughts! They are appreciated, and will be used, I think. :-)