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Strange. I've picked up sketching again, it seems. I dug out my old sketchbooks a few days ago, and was paging through them nostalgically. I must have sketched a lot before. Not to the same extent as I read (I don't think I do anything as much as I read, unless it's sleep), but enough to fill up a good three sketchbooks located here, along with several other sheafs of paper back at home that I dug up when I was there during the winter.

And yet, I stopped doing it around sophomore year of college. No time? No inclination? No idea. I think maybe I ended up feeling like I was good enough -- I used to go to a small class with two of my friends, both of whom I thought were much better than me. They probably were, but it was the competitiveness that did me in, because they were better at me in badminton as well, which was a very large sore spot for me. I had a love-hate relationship with badminton, because I was probably the worst person on the team and developed a bit of a complex about it.

So I tried picking it up again yesterday, and I still have my old pencil set from high school, though I've lost my nice gummy eraser. Maybe I'll try to find another one. And... well, I don't know if I'm good or not, but I guess I haven't forgotten anything. Not that I've had formal training, just a few weeks of the class and years of just doing random stuff on my own. I still remember when I figured out shading and what it could do. Actually, I remember the exact picture where I discovered it via pencil smudge. It's just funny paging through them and watching the sketches go from flat people to something slightly more 3D (of course, then it was completely derailed by the anime obsession).

In other news, loligo has read The Game of Kings, and already a horde of Lymond fans are gathering in the comments, me included. I had so much fun reading it last year with everyone on LJ vicariously participating, and this brings back good memories.

A personal history of anime and manga (the culture shock side)

I found some of my old sketchbooks a few days ago, and I've been flipping through them nostalgically. I forgot that I used to draw a great deal before... wasn't particularly good at it, but apparently it was just something that I did. Maybe I'll try and do that again, not so much serious drawing or anything, but just trying it out every so often.

It's rather funny. There's a giant chunk in there of Gundam Wing inspired drawings (aka me learning to draw anime by copying artbooks and the like), and now I'm also slightly nostalgic for the days of GWing obsession and first discovering anime.

In the Beginning...

I had watched anime and read manga prior to the discovery of Gundam Wing in junior year of high school, but most of it was Sailor Moon (the season with Sailor Uranus and Neptune, who, btw, were really cool. Esp. Sailor Uranus). I also read a good chunk of the manga while I was getting my braces done, because the dentist's office had them and I wanted to find out what happened with the Sailor Uranus/Pluto/Neptune/Saturn arc.

Of course, this was in Taiwan, so finding oft-read copies of manga in the dentist's office was par for course, as well as the (really bad) Chinese dub of the anime. I also watched a lot of Robotech, dubbed in English, which I didn't know was actually a rather cut version of Macross. Fighter pilots falling in love with the aliens sent to assassinate them is apparently one of those plotlines that will always get me. Who would have thought.

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Culture Shock and Confusion

College was in America. I realize this is a bit of a silly statement to make, but while I had intellectually realized that I'd be moving to a different country, albeit one I'd lived in before, eight years is still a long time, particularly when those eight years happen during childhood.

Sorry all people reading this who are really bored by the Third Culture Kid talk by now. It does seem to be rather inseparable from pretty much everything in my life ;).

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Homestay

I did a two month homestay in Kanazawa, Japan to study Japanese, and my host family was rather amused to learn I was an anime fan. They actually had all of Evangelion stashed somewhere, and my host mom let me borrow their copy of the Nausicaa manga, none of which I could read, since having taken two years of Japanese does not actually mean one can read sci-fi, to my great dismay. I never really talked with my host family that much; it was difficult to maintain anything resembling an intelligent conversation. I do remember several instances of pointing to the Evangelion videos and saying something like "I watched that and liked it."

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Miyazaki in Three Countries

Despite announcing his retirement after Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki had a new movie coming out the summer I was in Japan -- Spirited Away. I was very, very excited, as I'm sure everyone can imagine (insert lots of loud squeeing and the mad waving of hands, and you've probably got it right). It was coming out around my birthday, and there were ads everywhere. The studio or someone had made some sort of partnership with NTT DoCoMo (the lead cell phone company at the time) and Lawson's (a popular convenience store) to provide i-Mode kiosks everywhere advertising the fact that you could buy your Spirited Away tickets with your phone. The stuffed animals were already in department stores -- I also desperately wanted a stuffie of the fat purple mouse with the buzzy bird on his head, but alas, Japan is expensive. Posters, TV ads, everything. We all pre-ordered tickets and went when it came out, to a crowded theater. I had no idea what it was going to be about, only that there was a girl with some pigs on the poster, with the caption "At the other side of the tunnel, there is a mysterious town..."

I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I laughed hysterically everytime the purple mouse was on the screen. All the other people seemed to enjoy it though.

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Things Change

When I was doing research for my thesis, I dug out some old newspaper and magazine articles on anime and manga in the US, to frame the general climate most English anime and manga scholarship was written in. The trend wasn't surprising to me -- there were many articles on the shocking nature of anime and manga, emphasizing the strangeness of using animation, generally thought of as a medium for children, to portray sex and violence. Several articles were on the manga industry in Japan, and while there were mentions of the broad array of subjects that anime and manga could cover, the author inevitably reverted to the "But it's animated sex and violence!" theme. Around 1999, things had started to change a little, with the Pokemon phenomenon reaching the general audience and with Princess Mononoke winning critical acclaim. There weren't that many other articles published; the bulk that I found were written around the Pokemon/Princess Mononoke timeframe, since that was when everyone started to sit up and notice these things.

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coffee_and_ink also has a post on feminism, manga and anime in the form of a personal history.

Anyone else have their personal anime/manga experiences posted?

Personal history of anime/manga index