Event

Classroom Visit with Prof. Mihaela M. Mihailova Sponsored by CEAS

Prof. Thomas Lamarre’s Class: Japanese Animation: The Making of a Global Media

May 9, 2024, 12:30 pm

Logan Center for the Arts, Room 201, 915 E. 60^th St.

Please Join to hear Prof. Mihaela M. Mihailova speak about “Generative AI and Anime Production “ Thursday, May 9, at 12:3 pm US CT.

This class lecture will reflect on emerging applications of generative AI tools in the anime and manga industries. It will examine the aesthetic and production approaches seen in (in)famous recent examples, such as the short film The Dog and the Boy (Ryotaro Makihara, 2023), which features partially AI-generated backgrounds, and the manga Cyberpunk Momotaro (Rootport, 2023), which was produced with the Midjourney software. The talk will discuss the public reception of such works and the debates they have inspired in their respective industries, with a particular emphasis on questions of authorship, creativity, and creative workers’ rights. AI’s entry into Japanese media spaces will not be treated as an isolated phenomenon; instead, it will be discussed in the broader context of an ongoing global push towards the automation of skilled animation labor.

Mihaela Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap,Convergence: TheInternational Journal ofResearch into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, [in]Transition,Flow, and Kino Kultura. Dr. Mihailova is the co-editor of the open-access journal Animation Studies and the co-president of the Society for Animation Studies. Her current book project, Synthetic Creativity: Deepfakes in Contemporary Media, was recently awarded an NEH grant.

This classroom visit is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education.