| Category | Difficulty |
|---|---|
| Homeworks | 3/10 |
| Exams | 3/10 |
Anime - Visual Interplay between Japan and the World is one of the most popular electives that CMU undergraduate students choose to fulfill their general education requirements. As a course in the modern language department that focuses on anime and its relationship to Japan post-WWII culture, the course covers the most popular anime like Astro Boy, Doraemon, Attack on Titan along with many other animes in contemporary Japan and discusses their implications to Japanese society at that time. The course does not require any prior knowledge/course in Japanese or art and is taught in 100% English.
Although lectures are held twice a week, most parts of lectures are student presentations and in-class writing activities. The Professor's lecture slides are posted on Canvas and are discussed after the presentations where more terms about anime creation, anime social implications, and anime art style are introduced.
Homeworks are the most important part of this course which are composed of two types: Anime viewing and Readings. Students are required to watch approxmiately 1-2 hour long anime before the start of each class and will be asked to demonstrate their thoughts of the anime by completing the IWA(in class writing activity) at the start of each class. IWA typically is a short answer question which questions about the theme of the anime and asks you explain your thought with detailed scenes from the anime. Another type of homework assignment that a student could have is reading which asks students to read an academic paper about the anime and write a formatted reading summary + personal thoughts paragraph on Canvas.
Students are required to make 2 team presentations throughout the whole semester on the anime/reading that they choose. Following the presentation format given by the professor, each presentation should summarize the anime/reading, covers background of the anime/reading, discusses about social/political/philosophical questions that the anime wants to present, presents personal thoughts, and ask three questions to the class for class discussion. Students are required to do some research on their pieces before their presentations.
Midterm Exam is a 50 minute long exam where students answer short answer questions about the terms they learned in lectures using specific anime scenes they had watched. The questions generally require deep thinking where students need to come up with their own opinions about a topic and need to find example scenes from animes to support their reasonings.
Final Project is a very open-ended project where students may choose the form of project they would like to pursue and can discuss with professor about what they want to do in order to get suggestions and expectations.
Complete anime watching and readings is necessary for a student to do well in this course. Reviewing professor's slides and researching about the anime you present will help you do better in your assignments.
There is no textbook in this course.