Lecture 8

Globalisation and sustainability

The lecture covered many different aspects of globalization, mainly the fact that you shouldnt trust contemporary media, and how the world is being 'Americanized'.

How can we relate globalization to animation?

Going back to what was previously stated, the world is being Americanized, lets look at Disney for example, an American animation company that has been the flag ship of animation from an early age!

If we look at he studio gibely animations, the animation is of the style Manga, with a heavy Japanese background which has been very Americanized for a mainstream american audience. it loses its values and traditions, some of the stories are changed to make them similar to fairy tales/ present top grossing animations.

Which is a prime example of globalisation in animation.

Lets explore further:

This is also true for westernisation specifically.

is it bad to portray the characters of an animation to be westernised?

It isn't always a bad thing.

If we look at it from a historical point of view, at the fall of the samurai, when Japan was in the struggle of riding the country of what they perceived samurai as being 'rebels' the government employed various different western experts to influence the country: training their army, introducing photography, fashion and religions.

So the country wanted that change, the westernisation. but we cannot forget the samurai. they were fighting to keep tradition, so for arguments sake, if we super impose the historical westernisation to the westernisation that we are talking about; The samurai are are small group of people that want to keep tradition who are fighting (metaphorically) the people who want the westernisation who happen to be a larger demographic so obviously the larger group are going to win.

But this is a very trivial view point.

Forgetting about Globalization in animation just for a second, lets better familiarise ourselves with Globalisation and Americanization.

Undoubtedly the prime example of Americanisation is McDonald's  ...

A huge sweep of fatty foods and fizzy drinks that has swarmed the world with restaurants and the floor with empty wrappers.

It can be very disappointing to middle class western holiday makers who want to travel to distant lands to experience different cultures and exotic foods but instead get hit by the huge Mcdonalds 'M'.

So going back to animation: the disappointment can be reflected, people investigating into different cultural animations but due to the globalization and westernisation they aren't that dis-similar to animations that many are used to, so the disappointment will be very strong.

So to conclude, there isn't really a positive to globalisation other than the rich get richer and the poor pay them, and without resorting to babbling on with a utopian attitude, it is very much negative.