Phoenix Comic Con 2014
I’ll be presenting 3 of my Animation Mythology Panels at Phoenix Comic Con over the June 6th-7th weekend.
Here’s my schedule:
Friday, June 6th: 2:30pm-4:30pm – Giant Robots and Superheroes
Friday, June 6th: 4:30pm-6:30pm – Mystics, Priestesses and Warrior Women
Saturday, June 7th: 6pm-8pm – Knights and Dragons
You can also find this schedule on my guest page at the Phoenix Comic Con website.
All the panels will take place in the North Building in Room 221.
I’ve never done 3 presentations at one convention before! It should be an amazing experience!
In my Giant Robots and Superheroes presentation, I explore why Americans tend to write about Superheroes while the Japanese tend to write about Giant Robots. By looking at the mythological roots of these two archetypal heroes, I explain how the religious traditions of each culture percolate up into their animated storytelling and create different heroes East and West. I also catalogue the spiritual evolution of the Giant Robot from his manifestation in anime in the 60′s up until the present.
In my Mystics, Priestesses and Warrior Women presentation, I explore the hero journey from a woman’s perspective. Specifically, I look at the different types of female hero journeys in American and Japanese animation and how there are avenues for exploring the female hero journey in the East that are unavailable in the West. These different types of female hero journeys have their basis in the different mystical religious traditions of each country. These different concepts of mysticism East and West give rise either to Magical Girl or the Princess archetypes in animation. To wrap it all up, I explore how these different archetypes manifest and are subverted in the anime, “Revolutionary Girl Utena”.
In my Knights and Dragons presentation, I look at the differences between Asian and European Dragons and how the Knight’s journey changes because of those differences. I also explore the psychological implications of Dragon and Knight imagery and how this seemingly external battle is actually occurring inside each one of us. The end of the presentation focuses on how these different archetypes manifest and are subverted in the anime, “The Vision of Escaflowne”.
Below is a trailer for my Anime Mythology presentations describing each one of them! Enjoy!
3 Comments
So … how’d it go? The three presentations, I mean. You said you’d never done that before, so I was curious how it went.
It went very well! Thanks for asking! I wasn’t sure I could do all three in one weekend, but it actually was quite cathartic. I may need to try it again sometime.
It´s a shame I live on the other side of the planet. I assume it was cool to be there. I wish been there. I envy all who were present. It was cool, right?