CULTURE GIOVANILI E NARRAZIONI ESPANSE: Il contesto transmediale giapponese del nuovo millennio

The PhD thesis “Youth Cultures and Expanded Storytelling: The Japanese Transmedia Context in the New Millennium” presents Japan's transmedia context of the new millennium and the position of live-action cinema within it. At the core of the analysis lies the nexus that has been established between (1) media convergence, (2) development of transmedia and media mix practices, (3) the content consumption model according to the logic of the database, that in Japan focuses specifically on the centrality of fictional characters above settings and stories, (4) the representation of young people and youth subcultures – at the same time both protagonists and consumers of the transmedia texts examined here – as metaphors of the entire Japanese society. After an historical overview that spans from the post-war years to the end of the bubble economy in the early nineties of the last century – which is meant to show the peculiarities of the Japanese mass media environment between seriality, intermediality and transmedia – some theoretical aspects are introduced. Up to now they were developed and applied mainly in the context of animation, comics and videogames: this research shows that it is possible to widen the scope of their application to live-action films and television shows, opening to an analysis of the Japanese transmedia content industry as a whole. The most important theoretical aspects covered include: (1) the rise of the seisaku iinkai (production committees) model an2d what this has meant for the production of films that are part of complex franchises; (2) the process of “animalization” of cultural consumption, linked to the entrance into postmodernism and the crisis of the great narratives, which favors the breakdown of fictional works into items of a database through which to surf the narratives themselves; (3) the preeminence of fictional characters, favored by the feeling of attraction (moe) for them, who become the conduit for the proliferation of stories in different media; (4) the narrative devices of parallel worlds and time loops featured in many recent works as a metaphor of the multiplication of stories on different media and the demise of boundaries between media. This theoretical frame is used to analyze some significant cases of study of live-action films part of larger media mixes that see youth subcultures at their core. The cases are fresh or analyzed from an alternative perspective in comparison to existing academic investigations. In particular, it is stressed their adherence to successful narratives tropes emerged since the second half of the nineties, as the “world type” (sekai kei) apocalyptic narratives, the “survival type” (sabaibu kei) presenting a dystopic present of social struggle, and the “everyday type” (nichijō kei) set in a present without end. Regarding the relationship established with other media and the increasingly frequent interweaving between reality and fiction, Japanese live-action cinema is proposed as an hybrid medium interdependent with/from other media systems.