I just received an interesting report from Mohamed Ghazala. Director of ASIFA Egypt, on celebrations of International Animation Day across Africa  on October 28 (Tunisia, Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa) and November (Cairo and Alexandria). (IAD commemorates the opening  of Émile Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grévin in Paris on October 28, 1892.) The basic approach to these events were screenings of films submitted by ASIFA chapters from around the world, but also included a wide range of presentations, screenings  and workshops, which I thought I would sample with the following images:

ASIFA Egypt Alexandria Team Maha Sherwin and Ahmed El Ashwah speaking at 2009 International Animation Day in Alexandria, Egypt.

ASIFA Egypt member, Alemu Damena organized the festivities in Addis Ababa, which took place in the Ethiopian National Theatre and the Candle Theatre in collaboration with the Ethiopian Animators Group. Pictured above is Ethiopian poet Ayaleh Mulat speaking in Addis Ababa. The event featured an hour long screening of films by 10 Ethiopian animators.

Animation Africa’s Samuel Quartey is seen here introducing a panel discussion in Kumasi, Ghana.

A children’s workshop was also featured in Ghana, in which animators Salamatu Yakubu and George Opare instructed 20 students from Kumasi’s Ridge School in “basic digital photography exercises and Pixilation.”

Wassim Ben Rhouma of ASIFA Egypt Tunis is here seen introducing an IAD panel in Tunisia. The Facebook page in French promoting the event can be found here.

The IAD celebration in Cape Town, South Africa featured a screening of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a selection of African animation put together by ASIFA Egypt, and Animation SA indents by students from Learn2. The two students above were the winners of Toon Boom software prizes.

The Algerian event, which took place December 13-15 with the theme “Africa Comes to Life, in which Moustapha Alassane, the “dean of African filmmakers” happened after the report was written, but a story on the event, in French, can be found here.

For more on African and especially Egyptian animation, check out Mohamed Ghazala’s Animation from Egypt & Africa blog.

I just noticed that the story The Schenectady Daily Gazette reporter Pam Allen interviewed me for a month ago about the popularity of anime was finally published on December 30. In response to her questions, I noted one of the reasons for anime’s popularity was that its fans appreciate the wider subject matter versus what’s usually offered by American studios.

As an afterthought, I recounted the time an undergraduate came to see me and I saw he was carrying several Japanese-language magazines and a handheld translation computer. When I asked him about it, he told me he was teaching himself Japanese. When I then mentioned this in a graduate class, a Taiwanese student said he did the same when he was younger.

As Americans are traditionally phobic about learning foreign languages, let alone one so different as Japanese, this sort of thing is nothing short of amazing. And it an aspect of anime fandom that the animation community generally overlooks and bodes well for anime’s continuing popularity.

It is really not surprising that Japanese language instructors would use a film like Grave of the Fireflies (pictured above) as a teaching aide, just as a French instructor might use The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. For instance, see the article “‘Those Anime Students’: Foreign Language Literacy Development Through Japanese Popular Culture,” in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. More to the point is a recent article in California Educator (also here) about “Kimie Matsumoto, who teaches four levels of Japanese language classes” at Los Alamitos High School. It notes that,

Years ago [her] students wanted to take Japanese because they felt it would help them succeed in the business world. Today’s generation of students, however, is drawn to the Japanese language because of anime, the hugely popular animated cartoons produced in Japan.

… Matsumoto, wisely, has decided to incorporate her students’ interest in anime into the curriculum whenever possible, and sponsors an Entertainment Club that includes watching anime in her classroom during lunch.

Though this increased interest in all things Japanese is healthy and can lead to a broader approach to animation in general, this is not always the case. For instance, in my graduate Media Theory and Animation class, I usually start by having students analyze a classic live-action film, such as The Blue Angel, and talk about how it reflects its time and the culture which nurtured it; I then do the same with an animated movie like Dumbo. The reason is that I find we tend to look at animated films as more of a pure aesthetic experience than anything else, while it easier to look at a live-action in a broader context. In this, there does not seem to be much difference between anime fans and non-anime fans, despite the former’s seemingly more catholic approach.

This sort of tunnel vision extends to other matters as well; thus, most of my animation students seem puzzled by the question, What film genres are represented by David Hand/Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira? (Answer: Musical and science-fiction.)

This narrowness of vision is comes from nearly a century of bad habits, though animation and film schools do help. In this regard, one should take advantage of the intellectual curiosity anime fans profess, rather than dismiss them out of hand.