Events

Time & Location

December 12, 2pm EST
Online

About

The Japan Foundation, New York presents a monthly online series that delves into Japanese pop culture from academic and professional perspectives.

It has been 10 years since Japanese anime director Satoshi Kon passed away at the age of 46. While he directed only four movies and one TV series, Kon is one of the world’s most applauded creators of anime films, who is often mentioned in the same breath as Hayao Miyazaki and Katsuhiro Otomo. His films masterfully blur the lines between fantasy and reality, and have influenced countless other films such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

On the 10th anniversary of Kon’s passing, we will explore his body of work—from Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent to Paprika—and their impact on the film industry. Please join us for the panel discussion with Andrew Osmond, Alice Teodorescu, and Will Gardner, moderated by Sandra Annett. They will discuss Kon’s innovative style and background as well as common themes in his work and the way he expressed them visually.

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session. If you have any questions about Satoshi Kon, please submit them on the Eventbrite page when you register. Live commentary will be also enabled on the YouTube stream.

This is a free event. Registrants will receive the link to the stream via email. The date and time of the event are Eastern Time. Please check your local time zone.

Speakers

Andrew Osmond is a British freelance journalist, specializing in film and animation. He has been writing about cartoons and anime for more than twenty years and has interviewed numerous anime professionals, including Satoshi Kon. His book Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist is the first English book solely covering the works of Kon, which provides a comprehensive introduction to the work and vision, with background and analysis of the key reality-warping films by anime’s premier illusionist.
> Official Website

Dr. Alice Teodorescu is an independent researcher and Doctor in Communication Sciences (University of Bucharest). She has published Japanmania în spațiul cultural românesc (Japanmania in the Romanian Cultural Space. University of Bucharest Publishing Press), her first book on Romanian anime fandom, and has contributed to various scientific magazines and academic conferences. Her current research interests include popular cultures and fandoms, visual and youth cultures, fan media artifacts and transculturality.
> Official Website

Dr. Will Gardner is a professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and teaches Japanese language, literature, and film. His doctoral research was on Japanese modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and he continues to be interested in Japanese modernism, particularly in the relationships between literary media and visual media including film. More recently, his interest in intermedial relationships and urban culture led to a new project on postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction, culminating in the book The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
> Official Website

Dr. Sandra Annett is an associate professor in the Film Studies program at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, where she is the resident specialist in digital and new media studies. She is the author of Anime Fan Communities: Transcultural Flows and Frictions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) as well as articles on animation, global cultures, and new media arts in journals, such as Transcultural Studies, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, and Mechademia. Along with Frenchy Lunning, she is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Mechademia: Second Arc journal on East Asian popular cultures. Her research interests include world animation, digital cinema, film theory, and fan studies. Her hobbies include gardening, swing dancing, and modular origami.
> Official Website

Previous Sessions

EP1: Roundtable: Why Do We Study Anime and Manga?
EP2: Through a Glass Darkly: Identity Crises in Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion
EP3: The Power of Music in Anime

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