ANIME RESEARCH GROUP PRESENTS: MOE ANTHROPOMORPHISM (MILITARY HARDWARE)
Hello everyone this will be our last screening of our year long series. Thanks to all the people who have come out and supported us. Please stay tuned for our 2016 projects!
Sunday December 20th 8 p.m. $10
The Producers Club
358 W 44th St, New York, NY 10036
Tickets must be purchased in advanced! purchase them here: http://animeresearchgroup.eventsmart.com/?p=124
Moe Anthropomorphism (military hardware)
Moe Anthropomorphism (specifically military hardware) is a popular trope in contemporary manga and anime in which real-life military aircraft, naval ships and weapons are depicted as Moe girls: an ill-defined otaku term of a character possessing the ability to instill in the audience an irrational desire to adore them, to evoke a sort of big brother instinct in both men and women. For example WWII Imperial Japan Naval Warships (Kantai Collection), and a school whose entire student body consists of assault weapons (Upotte!!) are all epitomized this way. These kinds of personifications could have their origins rooted in Kami, a belief system indigenous to Japan; which refers to the divinity, or sacred essence, that encompasses the belief that there is no separation between the spiritual and physical world and that spirits embody multiple forms such as rocks, trees, rivers, vending machines, operating systems and in this case military war machines. There is also inherent object fetishism at play in which typical machismo subjects (in this instance war machines), take adolescent male hybrid cum-fantasies which are made flesh by forming to these desires by way of a scantily clad female body. It is both a reflection of pop-cultural trends, fandom, male-desire, history and a way retroactively softening japans’ complex military history and it’s recent rearmament of the Japanese defense force. This month we will be screening episodes from Kantai Collection, Upotte!! and Strike witches which best exemplify this recent trope in Anime.
Kantai Collection: Fleet girls (艦娘 kanmusu)
This animation series originated as a turn based online web browser game in which personified warships are based off real-life Imperial Japanese vessels. The physical appearances and personalities of each of the girls embody the vessel they are modeled after (e.g. ships with larger displacement tonnage are usually depicted as older girls with more mature bodies, while small ships are more petite with underdeveloped figures).
Upotte!!:
The series takes place at a school known as Seishou Academy. Unlike an average school, all the students are actually anthropomorphized guns, training to one day become a useful weapon, and is divided up into elementary school (sub-machine guns), middle school (assault rifles), and high school (Battle rifles/sniper rifles). They are capable of drawing the weapons they represent from out of thin air and using them, and any student or her manifested gun can suffer from any gun-related problem the other might have.
Strike Witches:
Set in an alternate Earth in the mid twentieth century, Strike Witches tells the story of a fight to protect the world using a combination of magic and technology in a fictional recreation of events occurring in World War II with the national armed forces joining together to confront an overwhelming alien threat, instead of fighting among themselves. Strike Witches are young women with high magical potential who are recruited into military organizations around the world to fight against the enigmatic Neuroi, which began an invasion of unprecedented scale on human territory in 1939.
Curated By Elliott Wright
