On Opera and Anime

In America, when people see something of foreign origin, they tend to throw it to the wayside for more local pleasures. If a European opera, for example a production of Guiseppe Verdi's La Traviata, is being played on Broadway, chances are that the masses would instead go see Hamilton, or any other musical that they can understand. If a Japanese cartoon, otherwise known as anime, were being broadcasted on television, chances are that people would turn over to western animation, or reality programs airing on television. Though one of the two is more praised as an art form than the other, and that would be opera. Opera is seen by many as a high end, aristocratic form of entertainment which is also adored and studied by music students, while anime is deemed to be not suitable for audiences because of a difference in culture and how animation is perceived as being for children because of the perception that since it is a cartoon, it is not for young adults. However, many young people adore and appreciate this art form and this paper will prove that anime is just as worthy of praise as opera. The argument will include the stylized drama of both of these forms, the cultural difference, the foreign language, the source material of the two, and the cultural impact both had in today's society.

To understand both art forms, one must go back into the roots of both styles. Opera is a musical art form that is mostly dramas where the actors sing his or her lines instead of speaking the dialogue dialogue. Opera was formed under the Florentine Camerata in the 1600s, the common starting point of the Baroque period of music history. Composers like Henry Purcell and Monteverdi were the first to adapt Greek and Roman dramas into their operas, Others like George Fredrich Handel would follow suit, and for audiences of these works, it stuck on well. As time progressed into the Classical period of the 1700s, composers like Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart would go on to adapt literature of more contemporary origins into opera, rather than Greek and Roman works. By the Romantic period of the 1800s, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner dominated the opera scene, with Wagner often writing his own libretto. By the early twentieth century, lighter operettas of Offenbach, Sousa, and Gilbert and Sulivan were popular along with operas. But with musicals transforming the scene in the late twentieth century, only a handful of late twentieth century operas were composed including works by British composer Benjamin Britten (Peter Grimes), American musical composer Leonard Bernstien (Candide), and American composer John Adams (Dr. Atomic).

While opera dates back to the 1600s, Japanese anime dates back to the 1930s. But this is not just only in anime, but with early cartoons of America. With early success of the Walt Disney company, studios began to spring up in Japan, which early on procured Japanese propaganda for its military state. After World War II, during economic and societal reconstruction, Japan had artists take inspiration from Disney and began producing their own comics referred to as manga which subsequently was adapted to television. Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion were hits in Japan in the 1960s, and it eventually made its way to the international markets and into America introducing Americans to the artform. By the 1980s, a little show produced in 1986 called Dragonball was gaining traction not just in Japan, but in America. By the 1990s, it had grown to the robot fights of Gundam and to high school girls fighting forces of evil in Sailor Moon. By the 2000s, Studio Ghibli began producing animated masterpieces like Spirited Away and Princess Monoke just to name a few, and entire studios dedicated to the English dubbing of these animes began to pop up, including Funimation and Viz Media. The industry has gained traction in America, but it has not gained the traction that opera had. The only thing they have in common is that they are mere pop cultural references in modern television and theatre.

Going off of that, what makes these two similar is that the stylized dramas that these two create. Both have different and unique ways to create drama which is not easy to understand at first glance. The complexity of a world built upon the ideas of wizards and magic is similar to the complexity of the world of Paris' Latin Quarter at the turn of the twentieth century. The difference here is how it is being portrayed. While opera uses the theories and skills of music composition to explain the plot, anime uses its unique art style and unconventional acting techniques. In an article by The Guardian on why opera is important, they explain that "The combination of dramatic narrative, stagecraft and music, and especially the range and vulnerability of the human voice, make opera the art form that comes closest to expressing pure emotion"(https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/09/inside-opera-live-why-opera-matters-uk-opera-chiefs). The emotions poured into the music of these grand and large productions is something to behold. It makes one think of how Verdi came up with the music for La Traviata or the techniques implemented by Wagner in Die Walküre. The same thing can be said about anime. The art of anime creates the same emotions that operas do, unlike its western cartoon counterpart, and it shows.