Strawberry Shortcakes

The really insane part of me--the part which mostly governs my life it would seem--thought it would be an excellent idea to write an 80,000 word children's story in less than 2 1/2 months for a competition. If anyone was wondering why my blog is massively out of date and why, apart from to lose at endless games of Scrabulous, I have been otherwise unavailable and aloof--that's why!

Fortunately for me the madness has passed, and now I can go back to some degree of normality. But as I'm apparently still incapable of coherent thought beyond solving the problems of what to do about characters I suddenly need in chapter 20 having killed them off in chapter 9, and how it is I failed to notice that one of my characters had a sex change in chapter 2, I'm going to have to post some 'fillers' here just to make it look like I'm at least partially on the ball again... however slippery the ball is...!!

So here's some waffle and pretty pics from 'Strawberry Shortcakes':




...a Japanese film we saw at the Hyde Park Picture House as part of the Leeds International Film Festival.



The film follows the lives of four young Japanese women in Tokyo and is meant to be based upon an anime/manga series called 'Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries':



The blurb in the festival booklet suggested that it's supposed to be a part of the re-addressing of the repetitive function women play in this genre--which is often extremely voyeuristic, exploitative and infantilising. Apart from being about 40 minutes too long it was a really visually rewarding film to watch. But I don't feel it was particularly successful at rewriting manga roles for women. In its favour, the women's lives were really complex and multi-dimensional, but the film over all was just as voyeuristic as any anime.

The problem any film faces with drawing attention to the way certain film and graphic fiction genres exploit, commodify and detach women's bodies from the woman is that it's almost impossible without them actually doing it all over again themselves! So there was a lot of stylized nudity and intrusive shots of private moments to demonstrate how this genre stylizes nudity and intrudes on privacy!!! Oh, and there was some definite infantilising going on too! Yes, quite, well, what can you do??





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hyde park picture house, leeds international film festival, strawberry shortcakes, sweet cream and red strawberries, manga, anime

Animaids

I’ve been collecting news stories for an article competition, so I don’t want to blow all my good ideas on my blog (although I have a feeling I’m not going to be able to resist it…) but this one I had to mention:



I can’t even remember how, but during some aimless internet moseying, I picked up on the ‘cosplay’ based phenomenon of ‘maid cafés’. Well established now for a long time in the living-cartoon world of Tokyo, and now having just set up a year ago in Toronto, Canada, these are cafés where the emphasis is much more on the service than on gastronomy. There are, I’ve read, equivalents of the concept with male waiters, but there’s certainly a great deal less information on them than on the female version, which requires that all the waitresses dress up in faux-traditional French maid outfits, with knicker-flashingly short skirts and garters, accessorised with the extra infantilised touches of pig-tails and general ‘cuteness’! The waitresses are supposed to look prepubescent, they call their customers ‘Master’, they kneel when pouring drinks, and noodles can be accompanied with a side-dish of hand and foot massages. If you’re not a compliant, submissive, obedient, sweet-voiced, underdeveloped female, you’re not going to get the job!



The cultural basis for this is a particular niche in anime fandom, with many cartoon versions of the master and maid set-up running on Japanese TV, and many of which have been dubbed or subtitled for English audiences. And of course these waitresses take up their jobs freely, many of whom are fulfilling their own desires to live out their fantasies. But anime has, in many of its diverse forms, been frequently criticised by Japanese pop culture analysts for its sexualisation of girls and its infantilisation of women. It would appear then that their concerns had some grounding, since maid cafés act as living proof that cultures created in fiction on television can have very real impact on daily lives within society.






anime, maids, maid cafe, manga, toronto, tokyo, cosplay