[Apr 1] The Colors of Anime's (Non)Places: Mediating Japanese Locality under Globalization

Date: April 1, 2026 (Wednesday)

Time: 15:30-17:30

Venue: MB256, 2/F., Main Building, Main Campus, HKU

Speaker: Prof. Stevie Suan

Speaker's Bio:

Stevie Suan is an Associate Professor at Hosei University in the Faculty of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies. He is the author of Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2021: winner of the Japan Society for Animation Studies Award)

Abstract:

Examining some of the ways color operates in anime allows for an exploration of place production in anime as it mediates Japan in a global context. Specific strategies of utilizing color to depict place will be revealed through a comparison of two anime: Bakemonogatari and Non Non Biyori. Employing large blocks of segmented solid colors, the former anime tends toward the production of what Marc Augé calls “non-places,” but ones that do not exist in the real world; the latter tends toward a painterly pastoral image, producing the impression of a locality in Japan through a textured merging of various colors. Both can be read as depicting places engaged with globalization in distinct ways. Bakemonogatari echoes the tensions of the breakdown of classically considered localities, presenting non-places of “passing through” (like airports) prevalent in contemporary globalization. Based on disparate parts of rural areas of Japan (but with some backgrounds painted in Vietnam), Non Non Biyori presents the sense of a local place, but one of hybridity and interlinking of dispersed places to produce that locality. Through the specific strategies of coloration, both tendencies—segmented solid colors and non-place, and painterly pastoral imagery and place—are never fully subsumed by the other and appear in varying degrees in these and other anime. Such methods of analysis open a means to explore mediation, hybridity, and the various forms they may take to better navigate the shifting notions of place in relation to Japan and beyond.

For enquiries, please contact Prof. Edwin Michielsen at emich@hku.hk