• Anime in America

    Anime, a Japanese cartoon art form, has become so popular in America that it has grown to a $4.3 billion industry in America.

  • The Research Question

    What are the thematic differences in Japanese anime when analyzing the subtitled versus the dubbed versions of the anime for an American audience?

  • Dragon Ball Z

    Dragon Ball Z is arguably the most well known and influential anime show to ever air in the United States.

  • Spirited Away

    Spirited Away is considered to be one of the greatest animated movies ever made, Japanese or otherwise.

  • Cowboy Bebop

    Cowboy Bebop, along with Dragon Ball Z, is credited with bringing anime into mainstream American culture.

Monday, December 12, 2016

A Plan for Action

  7:24 PM      3 comments   Edit
My anime sample size is the following three anime: One Piece, Dragon Ball Z, and Spirited Away. For One Piece and Dragon Ball Z, due to time restrictions I will be watching only the first season of each. There are 43 dubbed episodes of One Piece in its first season, and in Dragon Ball Z, there are 28 dubbed episodes in the first season. Finally, Spirited Away is a 2 hour and 5 minutes long movie.

During my initial viewing period, I found that it was best if I used played both the subtitled and dubbed on a split screen and compared them scene by scene. From the initial viewing period, I found that I needed about one hour per episode to accurately transcribe all of the changes in the anime. So judging by that number, I expect to spend around 43 hours on One Piece, 28 hours on Dragon Ball Z, and around 4-5 hours on Spirited Away. Based on these numbers, there will be a minimum of at least 76 hours of research that I will need to conduct, but most likely I will be conducting somewhere around 80-100 hours of research.

Spirited Away is the only Japanese animated film to win an Oscar.
In order to space it out, I will start collecting data on December 23rd. Starting from December 23rd to January 7th, I will be spending at least 2 hours every day on my research, including the weekends. Starting from January 8th to February 3rd, I will step up my game and start spending 3 hours every day. This should give me enough time to finish my data collection. From this, I will accumulate 30 hours from the first period (Dec. 23rd-Jan. 7th), and another 81 hours from the second period (Jan. 8th-Feb. 3rd). This gives me a total of 111 hours of research time, enough time to collect my data. From February 4th to the end of February 28th, I will analyze my data. 

To analyze my data, I will follow the guidelines of a thematic analysis laid out by Professor Virginia Braun of the University of Auckland and Professor Victoria Clarke of the University of West England. The five basic steps are: 1) collect the data, 2) generate initial codes from the data, 3) separate the codes into different general themes and sub themes, 4) evaluate the validity of the general themes, and refine the themes, 5) name the themes and sub themes. There are a lot of smaller steps along the process, but this is the basic outline of the process when I evaluate my data.


Once I finish, I envision my results to be a list of themes. Hopefully, I will be able to take the changes I find and make two different lists of themes. One list will represent the Japanese version of the anime, and the other list will represent the American version of the anime. I will aim to make two contradicting themes between each list, so say if the Japanese list has a theme of collectivism, then the American list will have a theme of individualism. This way I can show what themes are being changed as the anime shows are Americanized. 

 Word Count: Enough

Sunday, December 4, 2016

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