Coloration Strategies of (Non)Place in Anime: Globalization, Hybridity, and Mediating Japan

| Abstract |

Examining some of the ways color operates in anime allows for an exploration of place production in anime as it mediates Japan in a global context. Specific strategies of utilizing color to depict place will be revealed through a comparison of two anime: Bakemonogatari and Non Non Biyori. Employing large blocks of segmented solid colors, the former anime tends toward the production of what Marc Augé calls “non-places,” but ones that do not exist in the real world; the latter tends toward a painterly pastoral image, producing the impression of a locality in Japan through a textured merging of various colors. Both can be read as depicting places engaged with globalization in distinct ways. Bakemonogatari echoes the tensions of the breakdown of classically considered localities, presenting non-places of “passing through” (like airports) prevalent in contemporary globalization. Based on disparate parts of rural areas of Japan (but with some backgrounds painted in Vietnam), Non Non Biyori presents the sense of a local place, but one of hybridity and interlinking of dispersed places to produce that locality.

Through the specific strategies of coloration, both tendencies—segmented solid colors and non-place, and painterly pastoral imagery and place—are never fully subsumed by the other and appear in varying degrees in these and other anime. Such methods of analysis open a means to explore mediation, hybridity, and the various forms they may take to better navigate notions of place in relation to Japan and beyond.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s11e12
Thursday 2026-01-15, 18:00~19:30 (CET, UTC +1h)

| Place | 

| Platform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s11/#e12.