Our presentation slides are below available to download:

By James Zhara, Ella Russell, Ben Floyd and Verity Morley

This week our film to watch was Hi Score Girl, a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Rensuke Oshikiri. This film had a separation of sorts to the recent films we have watched in class, most likely it was the unique animation style and strange voice overs I haven’t experienced before that made it different. In saying this though, I enjoyed this series – it had stunning animation, a cute story line and many interesting cultural references I picked up on. The main theme I will be focusing on in this post is arcade culture in Japan – something I have witnessed and experienced before in my travels to Japan, but after seeing this film I want to dive deeper in my understanding. I want answers to the following questions; why are arcade gaming centres still so popular in Japan? Is there some kind of cultural significance arcade…

In my opinion, humans are hardwired to respond to music emotionally. Music is a form of art that conveys emotion, sentiment and perception without using language. Music is very important to me – it helps me relax, it lets me be sad, and sometimes a really good song will even give me butterflies. It’s all my own personal experience when I listen to music (e.g. when I’m working out, home alone, in the car, or going to sleep). It must be important for others all around the world too, from my understanding, music has extreme cultural value for most countries. As I was watching Asim Abbasi’s Pakistani film Cake, there were a few scenes where music was used as a tool to ease pain, and as a form of dedication/devotion. The first example of where this occurred was when Abba (the father) was making a speech at his wedding anniversary…

At the beginning of this year I was fortunate enough to travel to Vietnam for the second time – a definite favourite country of mine. During my travels through this stunning country, I saw jutting green mountains, to rice fields, to bustling cities. I have ridden a motorbike through half of the country and just tried to make it out alive riding through the insanely congested city roads. A lot was different – the traffic, the food, the smells, the scenery, the simple way of living. One thing though, that made me wonder during my travels and also through watching Le-Van Kiet’s Furie (2018) – was the housing arrangements. It seems that families live in such close proximity to others, and there are so many people living under the same roof. A few scenes in Furie showed grown men still living with their mothers (see fig. 2), and children and…