Date of Completion
2016
Document Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
Department of Asian Languages and Literatures
Thesis Type
Honors College, College of Arts and Science Honors
First Advisor
Kyle Ikeda
Keywords
Japan, Postmodern, Database, Narrative, Yamato, Gundam
Abstract
The past twenty years have seen significant shifts in patterns of digital media consumption which reflect the fracturing and proliferation of narratives characteristic of postmodernity. Japanese scholar Hiroki Azuma described these shifts in 2001 as characteristic of an “Era of Animals,” in which grand narratives have broken down and given way to a new form of non-narrative. Azuma’s work focused on emerging forms of media and anime-related products, but the contemporary moment is now far deeper in this “Era of Animals.” This project will examine a different set of animated media that have appeared since the release of Azuma’s study: remakes of foundational anime from the 1970s. By specifically comparing the fictionalized grand narratives of 1970s anime to their remade forms in the postmodern, this thesis will address the status of fictionalized grand narratives in the contemporary Space Battleship Yamato and Gundam franchises, and reveal the ways in which grand narratives break down, and are maintained, in postmodern otaku-oriented anime.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Kane, Aaron J., "Repackaging Grand Narrative: From Narrative to Database in the Remakes of Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam" (2016). UVM Honors College Senior Theses. 195.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/hcoltheses/195