Post Modernism and Indie

Out of chapter 8, what I found the most exciting topic was the progression of the video industry and the focus on post-modern themes. Having just finished a massive (rough) draft on the progression of video games and how they've adapted to the times, so caught my eye in the terms of film.

In 1988 Katsuhiro Otomo released his animated film, Akira. Akira, to those that know anything about the anime or japanese animantion pop culture, is one of those indie, cult films that is almost a requirement to see (think of it as akin to today's Boondock Saints). The theme of the movie is that a nuclear explosion has erupted in Tokyo, leaving the world crumbled and desolate in it's wake. From the rubble, however, comes the Neo-Tokyo in the age 2019.

Akira was an international cult success -- due not only to the underground popularity in anime, but also because of the cell animation, and the broad reach it had to adult audiences of the science fiction genre. According to the book, Akira demonstrates that "we do not live in a fully postmodern world but in a world in which postmodernity is lived in the crumbling ruins of modernity...through these films, viewers engage with simulated environments with the jaded sense that we know what is to come and that our bodies may be physically malleable and changeable through technology and medicine."



Following the Akira phase came things such as CGI animated films like Toy Story and A Bug's Life. What's interesting about these films, however, is the intertextuality within the films. Films, now, are hardly ever based on an original concept. Scenes in Shrek obviously had tones carried from the Matrix series that proceeded it, just as Aladdin had references to Julius Caesar with "et tu, Brute?" I had known about intertetuality in terms of novels and stories, but had never applied the concept to film.