Anime : an expression of alternate architecture & landscape

Abstract

Since Osama Tezuka's Astro Boy (1963), Japanese anime artists and studios have produced a remarkable array of real worlds, futuristic worlds, surreal spaces, and imaginary landscapes in the last decades. Works such as Space Battleship Yamato (1974), Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Steamboy (2004) present vivid alternative worlds, drawing on sources from Japanese lore to atomic devastation to post-modern cities to cities energized only by steam. Anime has spurred the production of architectural narratives and landscapes perceptually unachievable in realms limited by contemporary physical structures. This dissertation will try to explore the intertwined notions of imagined space and architecture in anime and address the relationship between landscape and Cityscape and thus studying the production of space in visual and physical landscapes. Various research approaches, including those of history of art and architecture, material culture, and visual studies are valid in the pursue of this study. This dissertation aims to extend beyond the boundaries of conventional architectural history to encompass the visual realms of real and imagined architecture, landscapes and cities in all their manifestations in the universe of Anime. Furthermore, this dissertation is not limited to historical perspectives; it gives an extensive insight on contemporary views on the architecture which can be made and styled by everything.