Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemBrass and the Subversion of Cultural and Gender Normativity in Shoujo Anime Openings( 2023-06)This thesis explores how the treatment of brass in anime openings reflects gender bias across various areas of Japanese Popular Culture including in the history of shoujo manga, Japanese Idols and the kawaii movement. By highlighting the ways in which the shoujo genre is often discriminated against in favour of its male-dominated counterparts, the use of brass in shoujo anime openings is being utilised as a tool to represent how anime is being marketed to audiences through a binary societal view of what is feminine and what is masculine.
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ItemCowboy Bebop and Lupin lll: an investigation of the role of brass in anime opening music( 2021)This thesis identifies and examines the role of brass instrumentation in the opening songs for the anime, Lupin III and Cowboy Bebop. This examination is conducted through an investigation of the impact of Japanese jazz and nostalgia in Japanese culture together with specific influences of Western television. By providing contextual and historical information through this investigation, and using facets of both Western and Japanese culture, I describe how and why brass instruments are being used in the opening sequences for Lupin III and Cowboy Bebop. Through an examination of these two anime, this thesis provides a framework to understanding the interaction between brass and anime opening music. The findings for this thesis were drawn from books, journal articles, various fan sites, and anime cataloguing systems. I used an interdisciplinary approach engaging with resources spanning the literature on Japanese jazz, nostalgia, Western television, and anime. This thesis discusses how through the two anime series, Japanese jazz has come to reflect a point of nostalgia and resistance for Japanese people. This discussion looks at the presence of jazz cafes, the banning of jazz in Japan from around 1937 as a result of hostilities towards the United States, bebop, and jazz fusion. I examine how these facets of Japanese jazz work together to describe the interaction between how brass is portrayed in the anime opening songs, how brass works together with the visual elements of the openings, and the overall themes that each anime represents.