Category Archives: Close Reading

Close Reading, Spring 2019

Japanese Media Mix

In a Tortoiseshell: In this excerpt from his Junior Paper on the Japanese film Perfect Blue, Jacob Williams analyzes the motif of glass surfaces and their relation to Mima’s flattening: the process by which the original character’s “existence in its show is crushed into a singular image, one whose use of limited animation emphasizes the fact that it does not pretend to be alive in the same way that a fully animated character does.” Jacob performs insightful close analysis and more importantly, demonstrates how this kind of analysis can be used to support the paper’s broader argument.

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