Kanye and Anime??
In class we were talking about how our professor isn't crazy about the film Akira. He said he believes that mot of the time, people either love it or hate it. Before I watched it last week, when we were introduced rtf the title, I told my boyfriend. I was complaining to him that we had to watch an anime movie. I'm honestly not very fond of the genre. I've given it a try a few times, so don't worry, I'm not just blindly judging it. Anyways, he said "by chance are you watching Akira?". I was really shocked... (he goes to school in Delaware so there's no way he could've known). He told me that Kanye West had an interview where he was jus craving about the film. I thought this was interesting, because already knew people enjoyed this anime film more than others. I started to wonder... is it because Kanye popularized it? Maybe. Sure it's an amazing movie... But, could it have possibly reached as big of an audience as it did without Kanye's interview? I'll go out on a limb here any say that Kanye's loyal fillers, those who watch his interviews, are not the same people who are loyal fans of anime. This allowed people who don't usually watch anime be exposed to it. This leads to the overall question of: did Kanye help lead Akira to its current success? This has to do with how your culture can affect the film industry, which I thought was interesting.
I think that might be giving Ye a bit too much credit. Like sure, he's definitely shown that he's a fan of anime, and could have potentially opened the doors for other rap artists to put in anime references. Also, I remember watching his Stronger music video recently and noticing some pretty overt Akira references (https://youtu.be/PsO6ZnUZI0g). But Akira has been pretty massive in influence for a while now. It's kind of unavoidable when someone brings up 'all-time best anime films'. I do agree though that it's super interesting to see how stuff like this bleeds over into entirely different industries and mediums.
ReplyDeleteKanye is the reason I first watched Akira. I heard him raving about it and even though I don't like anime I decided to give it a watch. And I think he possibly has opened the door for other hip-hop artists to speak about anime as Tyler said. That being said, Akira has been influential long before Kanye's career began and was a source of inspiration for many anime films that followed it.
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