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By Adriana Aumen, College of Arts and Sciences
Courageous, conflicted, cantankerous or just plain cute, the colorful characters brought to life in Japanese anime film and television can teach a great deal about the country’s culture, says Michael Arnold, incoming Japanese studies instructor at Washington State University.
Featuring vibrant, hand-drawn and computer-animated graphics, anime productions provide glimpses of Japanese life, values and social norms as well as everyday language and idiomatic expressions used in context, Arnold said.
Recognizing the great potential of anime as an educational tool, the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race (SLCR) at WSU invited Arnold to teach “Transnational Anime: Japanese Animation History and Theory” in the spring 2019 semester. It is among three new or returning courses added this academic year to the broader suite of Japanese language and culture study options.
