📅Date and time: January 7, 2026, 13:20-15:00
📍Location: Central 2, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan
The 1st Animāre Mini Talk invites Mr. Matteo Watzky to give an invited talk on how anime magazines and reader letters shaped fan "expertise" and audience discourse during Japan's anime boom, using Mobile Suit Gundam as a case study. Learn more about Animāre here.
The "anime boom" (1974-1984) reshaped Japanese animation through new genres, formats, and the rise of older audiences. This talk draws on a PhD thesis examining how specialized magazines helped form an autonomous and visible "animation culture" by fostering critical discourse and new channels of communication between audiences and producers. Focusing on Mobile Suit Gundam (1979-1982), it analyzes how magazines shaped viewers' experience of animation, contributed to new cultural identities, and enabled—while also constraining—forms of fan expression.
Matteo Watzky is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Lorraine, within the CREAT laboratory (Research Center on Expertise, Arts, and Transitions). His dissertation, supervised by Fabrice Montebello and Julien Bouvard, is titled "Experiencing Mobile Suit Gundam: magazines and the emergence of an animation culture during the 'anime boom' (1979-1982)," and examines the development of fan and spectator cultures around animation in Japan. His research focuses on the history of Japanese animation from both production and reception perspectives.
