Author: zactmccall

Week 6 – ‘Naruto’ Anime viewing

So I have decided to base my individual artifact around Anime, in particular the way in which people consume Anime. As I discovered through my investigation into the Godzilla film, I want to further look at how effectively individuals connect to foreign texts whether that be through subtitles or dubbing.

To begin my auto ethnographic experience for this task I viewed the first episode (which may have ended in finishing the first season) of one of my favourite Anime series, Naruto. I was able to find versions where I could watch both the subbed content and then dubbed content immediately after so I found this very enjoyable and insightful, as I had never previously watched the series in its original form before.

After watching a few episodes back to back it brought up some mixed emotions. Initially the first notable reaction to the content was the sense of nostalgia that…

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Week 7 – Further investigation into Anime viewing

Zac T McCall

After spending the week tirelessly watching back-to-back episodes of anime subtitled and dubbed, one major realisation I made was that the quality of subtitles changed from episode to episode. This I noticed across all of the different series I looked into, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, Digimon and Yu Gi Oh, many stating to be ‘FanDubs’ in the opening credits.

A quick look into this showed the dense history and community behind the anime series’. This realisation worked as an ‘epiphany’, as the Ellis reading describes it, within my auto ethnographic research of anime consumption. I found the community built by anime lovers to be extremely interesting, especially the sections that produce their own subtitles along with a wide variety of other content.

I am going to attempt to investigate different Fansubbing groups and communities and find out why they produce content and be apart such communities for little…

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Week 8 – Academic Research into Anime Fandom

Zac T McCall

As mentioned in my post from last week I am going to analyse the wide spread anime community, or ‘fandom’ as it is referred too, in more academic depth. Searching through Wollongong’s catalogues I found a handful of academic articles relating to the anime subculture, and in particular “fan subbing”.

In terms of its origins the Hye-Kyung Lee (2011) article claims that it began in the early 1990’s in the US, “as part of anime fandom, its key aim was to provide English-speaking fans with a wide variety of animes that were not available through authorized distribution”. The new fan subbed versions were shared by mail across the country to the many anime clubs that were forming.

The process of making a fansub has dramatically changed since the beginning of the 90’s as technologies have improved. As the Rusch (2008) article claims “fansubbing has its origins with VHS cassettes, which…

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Week 4 – When Godzilla becomes Westernised

Zac T McCall

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Sub vs. Dub

Zac T McCall

In class this week we spent time reading and listening to a handful of our classmates first attempts at auto-ethnographic reflections, based on our experiences last week with Godzilla for the most part. We were challenged to highlight the ‘primary narrative’ that is being told in our posts and find ways to expand and further these discoveries. This gave me mixed feelings as it showed just how much more effort some of my classmates put into the formatting of their posts then I do, but definitely highlighted some new ways at approaching auto-ethnographic research.

So after looking back through my post from last week it is clear that the primary narrative being told was the level of engagement in the text after overcoming the challenge of reading subtitles while fully taking in what is happening in scenes. I still stand by this view and I completely understand this being seen…

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First attempt at auto-ethnography: “Godzilla”

Zac T McCall

To begin this post to make up for missing the introductory blog last week I thought I would give a brief account of my history in consuming Asian media. Unlike a handful of my classmates that have mentioned in their opening blogs I do not have an Asian cultural background and was born and raised in Australia, so the majority of my conscious experiences with Asian media comes from my childhood and my love for T.V series like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, Yu Gi Oh and BeyBlades and all the merch’ and collectors items that came with them. As an adult I have also looked into multiple Japanese animated films like Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Castle in the Sky’, which I was very engaged with highly due to the beautiful scenic and almost psychedelic animation, so this could definitely be an area I could explore more for my digital artefact.