Anime: A Qualitative Study Exploring Miyazaki’s Influence on Fans and Fan Art Through the Perspective of Visual Communication Within the Sociocultural and Cybernetic Traditions

Visual communication has been an acknowledged form of human communication for millennia, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings. Aristotle noted its importance, although it lost its prominence as a recognized communicative form until the 20th century, when scholars such as Innis, McLuhan, Postman, and Foss expanded upon its importance. This identification was a crucial point in visual communication, heralding the birth of comics, film, television, animation, and Japanese anime. Lamarre, McCloud, and McLuhan were a few theorists who grasped the significance of animation and visual communication, although this recognition did not extend to fan art and the visual communication possibilities represented. Furthermore, McLuhan and Postman focused on how messages were shared and received via various mediums, including the global village, an early term that now aptly describes instant and mass communication. The purpose of this study is to cultivate a greater understanding of the complexities of visual messages created and sent via fan art through social media platforms. Using visual communication theories, the sociocultural tradition, the cybernetic tradition, and the constructivist worldview, this study explores messages created by fan art inspired by Miyazaki’s anime films through two social media groups, explicitly focusing on storyline expansion and cultural theme exploration.