Las bandas sonoras del anime y la animación japonesarecursos y funciones "musivisuales", compositores, sonoridades y evolución musical, 1917-2000

Abstract

Anime has become, in recent years, one of the most popular audiovisual genres, with a large audience worldwide. As an animation medium with cinematographic connotations, anime is constituted by multiple elements, among which, the soundtrack, is one of the most important components when characterizing the anime particularities. Moreover, music is one of the ingredients that give value to anime as a distinctive narrative genre of popular culture. However, despite the significant presence of music in anime, the development, characteristics, and elements of this music have been barely treated in the academic and historiographic works about this genre. Our main purpose in this doctoral thesis is to approach the music history of anime and Japanese animation and to analyze how music has evolved historically in this prolific genre, since the firsts experimentations in the union of music and picture in the 1910s and 1920s, and the later but definitive incorporation of music in the 1930s. We will use two principal methodological tools: first, a bibliographic revision of anime history and, second, a systematic observation protocol. Whit these tools we have built an analysis card exclusive to this research, which considers the particularities of soundtrack language (or musiviual language). Using this analysis card, we study a representative sample of Japanese animated works throughout the XX century. In this way, we have identified Japanese anime’s music history, its most representative composers, the different musical resources, styles, techniques, sonorities, and the various uses of music to narrating and characterizing the plots and characters. Thus, we have distinguished three distinct periods identifying the common characteristics of their corresponding musical practices: 1930-1963, the music of Japanese animation; 1963-1990, the music of the anime genre; 1990-first years of the XXI century, one of the periods of greatest development and growth of soundtracks. Thereby, we can understand the recent sonorities and composers from the traditions that precede them. Moreover, we ascertain that music and its forms are an essential and inseparable part of the genre. Music is one of the constituents of anime and Japanese animation. As a way to underlie the significance of music for this genre, in the last part of this research, we have used anime music as a tool in educational practice within secondary school music classrooms. The goal is to check the potential application of this type of music in the school and its contribution to the teaching-learning process improvement. For this we take as a basis the studies on the use of cinema music in educational settings and start from the principles of meaningful learning. Through mixed methodologies, with self-design exercises and questionaries, we prove the increase in student motivation and the acquisition of new musical concepts. With this, we verified the usefulness of anime both for its proximity to the cultural universe of the student and for its musical characteristics. Therefore, we ascertain the possible use of anime for different purposes such as music education.