Animania Festival will visit Adelaide for the first time this October!

Since the famous Japanese anime, Astro Boy, shows that anime has become commercially profitable on western TVs. With Pokémon, Dragon Ball and other anime, Japanese animation creators have achieved extraordinary global success in part because of their ability to indigenize their programs for local markets. Japan is the source of sixty percent of the world’s animated television programming .

In partnership with the OzAsia Festival, Animania will bring its classic events to Adelaide including Karaoke, Doodling competitions, all-day Screenings video games and of course, Cosplay. This Festival will feature the traditional Cosplay Competition plus the second Preselection Round for the 2010/11 World Cosplay Summit Preliminary.

Find out more about What’s On at this Animania Festival.

• Venue (and how to get there)
• Festival Times
• Plan Your Trip

See u guys@Animania!

Halo ODST

Modern Warefare 2

Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma

DJ Hero

Tekken6

Uncharted2 Among Thieves

FF XIII

Japanese popular culture appears in various instances, it covers the following forms such as anime, manga, video game and pop song. Although artistic interchange between Japan and the West is centuries old, it is cleanly show that nowadays the West is embrace of anime manga and video games. More and more people are interested in Japanese culture. People even can find lots of Otaku in Australia and America, outside Japan. An Otaku is a “diehard fan enthusiast expert of something (not just anime, but anything)”. This term is most frequently used to refer to people interested in anime and anime-related media such as video games and manga, because they are the community responsible for coining the term when referring to themselves, and this is a global trend.

Japanese pop culture have change Australian and American’s life style. A example which can show the impact of Japanese anime and manga on Australian and American life style is cosplay. Cosplay (コスプレ, kosupure), short for “costume play”, is a subculture centered on dressing as characters from manga, anime, and video games, and, less commonly, fantasy movies, Japanese pop music bands, novels, and anything in the real world being unique and dramatic (or their moe anthropomorphic form). However, in some circles, “cosplay” has been expanded to mean simply wearing a costume. In the past, most cosplay in the western country, such as United States, Australian, and UK are differs from Japanese cosplay culture. In Australia, the trend mirrors the American in that the subject costumes may be selected from sources other than manga or anime. Sources include American comics, computer games, science fiction/fantasy movies and TV shows, animation shorts or features, period drama, novels – any source that provides vivid and graphic inspiration of a character and their costume.

However, since Japanese anime and manga become more and more popular in the world, animation cosplayers become more and more common in western country. The most important reason is that Japanese anime and manga are more related to real life (most Japanese anime are about school life compare with the western science fiction world), the structure and interface of Japanese anime is simple and easy to understand. A good example is the world famous Japanese anime “The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi”, the title character, Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮 ハルヒ), wear a blue sailor dress, which signified a Japanese High School girl (the dressing in Japan’s high school are very similar with the dressing in western country high school), have been cosplayed thousands time all over the world, especially in western country. The fact is that people who like anime, depending on their exposure to Japanese culture, tend to like many aspects of Japanese culture, from popular to traditional, as well, and develop at some point either the desire to learn Japanese or visit Japan.

With the influence of Japanese pop culture, more and more Anime conventions began to appear in the early 1990s, during the Anime boom in order to create a market that would be ready to accept Japanese pop culture, anime and manga not as an “exotic oriental perversion”, but as a valuable part of entertainment. In Australia, we have Animania in Sydney, Supanova in Brisbane, Manifest in Melbourne and Avcon in Adelaide every year. The fact is that people who like anime, depending on their exposure to Japanese culture, tend to like many aspects of Japanese culture, from popular to traditional, as well, and develop at some point either the desire to learn Japanese or visit Japan. This makes some people in Australia and America much more involved in Japanese culture, they have greater contact with and knowledge of Japan. They are most likely to be constantly immersed in collection huge amount of anime stuffs. They may have a strong interest in Japanese culture, and have probably at some point studied Japanese in university.

Since the famous Japanese anime, Astro Boy, shows that anime has become commercially profitable on western TVs. With Pokémon, Dragon Ball and other anime, Japanese animation creators have achieved extraordinary global success in part because of their ability to indigenize their programs for local markets. Japan is the source of sixty percent of the world’s animated television programming.As anime and Japanese pop culture became increasingly popular, some animation studios in United States began making some anime style cartoon, such as the Avatar series. The amount of anime that was available in the US has drastically increased. Lots of Japanese animated program have being translated into English, some cartoon channel begin to offer Japanese Anime in prime-time，Japanese Anime contained more “mature” content than traditional animated television series, and more and more cartoon channel in America and Australia begin showing anime. At the beginning of 2000s, Time Warner launched its new channel called Adult Swim. As a sister channel of Cartoon Network, its mainly features animated shows and Japanese anime, the main audience of Adult Swim is mature audience, in contrast to the child and young people program on cartoon network. According to Nielsen Media Research, Adult Swim set new viewership records among men in 2005, 2006 and 2007, it become the most visited standard cable channel for adults. Now, Adult Swim is the leader of the adult-oriented anime.

As a part of the general process of globalization, Japanese pop culture, especially anime, manga and video game, began to spread rapidly around the world. And in the Video Game industry. From Japan External Trade Organization’s 2007 Japanese Video Game industry report, compare with 2005, the exports of hardware and software rose 70.3% to ¥961.371 billion (9.74 billion US dollars) in 2007.By one major metric, the success of toys and games with anime or manga links, anime has already conquered America, and the world. With the newest VG chart’s video game sales charts, it shows that Nintendo Wii have sold 35.04 million console all over the world, which own the 47.6% of the total video game market, this number rise to 84.01 million on Nintendo’s DS system.

As mentioned above, business corporations have begun to exhibit and interest in financing projects dealing with Japanese pop culture. Like the Pokémon, with can serve as a Rosetta stone for the Japanese anime industry, it is a critical translation device that unlocked for Americans and Europeans an entirely new language of entertainment, until 2006, after ten years sine Pokémon launch in America, it has made Nintendo and forty different companies around the world a total of $25 billion. In 2002, Japanese anime director, Miyazaki Hayao’s film Spirited Away, ultimately earned over $260 million in global ticket sales, and received the Academy Award .

Another good example of the Japanese pop culture influence on Australian and American culture is the anime magazine “Newtype USA”. In 2002, the United States based anime producer/distributor, A.D Vision, acquired the rights to “localize, publish and distribute” an English language version of Kadokawa Shoten’s Newtype anime magazine “throughout America and the English speaking world”.

Originally a Japanese publication, Newtype is now distributed world wide in Chinese and English language versions. Newtype USA began publication in November 2002, and has since established itself as an important source of images and information for the English-speaking anime audience.

In the United States, the first issue of Newtype USA sold out within weeks and print runs for following issues have been repeatedly doubled to cope with demand.The Australian distributor, Madman Entertainment, has increased orders for the magazine, as its distribution points have expanded beyond specialty stores, to national franchises such as Electronic Boutique.

Newtype USA provides more than just images of, and information on anime. It also provides a context within which to understand anime, in addition to a variety of related products and events—from industry expos to fan conventions. Its inclusion of different anime related commodities, including manga stories, anime samples on DVD, interviews with animators and voice actors, as well as glossy full paged pictures of anime-including posters and postcards-places anime within “supersystems of entertainment”, or “total cultural packages” of various media products grouped under a single media conglomerate. Central to Newtype USA’s success is its ability to take seriously the potential Western anime fans see in manga and anime as ‘global identity projects’. In the United States and Australia, there is an obvious increase of licensing publishers and titles in response to the demands of the past five years. Mangas are now available not only form specialty stores (such as Shin Tokyo in Adelaide) but also in the regular bookstores (Dyomck and Border), with a separate shelf and section.