Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ Finally Gets Anime Adaptation
May 5, 2015 - News, Short - Tagged: lolicon - 3 comments
According to the June 2015 issue of Ichijinsha’s Monthly Comic Rex, an upcoming TV anime adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 classic Lolita is scheduled for fall of this year. Lolita ~ Onnanoko no Kifu ga Narimashitaka!? is expected to be a one-cour show produced by Silver Link.
The story, inspired by the plot of the original novel, centers around a otaku named Hanbo who has become a hikkikomori lolicon. One day, though a series of comically inadvertent events, he finds himself living alone with a violently tsundere 12-year-old girl. There’s one more catch: he finds out she’s his daughter-in-law!
Though some critics have voiced concern and skepticism over the subject matter, many observers predict that Nogaka‘s groundbreaking premise has the potential to change the anime industry forever. “I don’t want to overhype something so far off, but the fans will finally get what have been waiting for all this time,” one comment on Japanese anime blog Yaron reads. “Finally, a breath of fresh air in the anime industry.”
The official Nogaka website confirms that Kugimiya Rie will be voicing a loli with twintails. http://www.animemaru.com/vladimir-nabokovs-lolita-finally-gets-anime-adaptation/
………………………………………………………………………
Last year’s comments related to the Lolicon theme:
By Tom Barnes October 17, 2014
LIKE MIC ON FACEBOOK: “Pharrell Williams unveiled his music video for "It Girl" on Sept. 30 and somehow nobody noticed that it was insanely creepy. Nobody, that is, until this Wednesday when the New Yorker pointed out that the video, a cartoon featuring overtly sexualized young girls, is actually a form of Japanese anime most commonly known as cartoons for a very specific audience: pedophiles.” [ ] http://mic.com/articles/101722/pharrell-released-an-insanely-pedophillic-video-and-nobody-talked-about-it
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
THE NEW YORKER: OCTOBER 15, 2014 Pharrell William’s Lolicon Video, by Matt Alt
What are we to make of Pharrell Williams’s latest video for “It Girl,” which features the hip-hop star singing, “Hold my hand, and moan again, I’ma hold that ass” to images of what appears to be a prepubescent cartoon girl? [ ]
A Japanese term derived from the English phrase “Lolita complex,” lolicon describes a fascination with cartoons of very young-looking girls engaged in varying degrees of erotic behavior. (The word can be used to describe both the genre and its aficionados.) What can really confuse non-Japanese is that lolicons, who exist in large numbers in Japan, actually prefer illustrated art over real or photographic portrayals of girls, a predilection that’s known as a “2D complex.” This one-step removal from reality is the genre’s key feature, and it’s what keeps lolicon legal—if still, as non-fans note, “creepy.” Almost all of Mr.’s work is related to lolicon; in a 2007 interview, he described his efforts as a sort of safety valve, “releasing my fantasy world through my work instead of acting it out in real life.”
Lolicon is the dark matter of Japanese pop culture, infusing everything from best-selling comics and animation to the nation’s ever popular girl groups. Yet it’s almost never discussed in polite society. Indeed, the very term is something of a four-letter word in Japanese, virtually synonymous with pedophilia. When I recently spoke about lolicon to a comic-book-artist friend—an industry veteran who dabbles in erotica herself—she lowered her voice to a whisper whenever she uttered the term.
Lolicon emerged in Japan in the late nineteen-seventies as self-published fan parodies of popular female manga characters. Something like the Tijuana bibles of the manga world, they exposed the eroticism hinted at in the curvaceous young cartoon beauties of the mainstream. Lolicon’s arrival, perhaps not coincidentally, accompanied the coming of age of the first generation of boys who had been raised on manga and anime, and the runaway popularity of these amateur pornographic productions triggered a flood of similar content in Japan’s vibrant professional comic industry. For a time, lolicon seemed poised to go mainstream. But in the end it remained a skeleton in the closet, reaching only domestic audiences as more palatable sci-fi and fantasy fare, such as the apocalyptic cyberpunk epic “Akira” and the early films of the director Hayao Miyazaki, built the foundations of “Cool Japan” abroad in the nineteen-eighties.
The shadow culture of lolicon triggered a great deal of soul searching in 1989, when a young man by the name of Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested and convicted for the serial killings of four elementary-school girls in a Tokyo suburb. The Japanese press, desperate for a way to explain the inexplicable horror of these crimes, seized on the presence of anime and manga in Miyazaki’s cluttered bedroom to label him an “otaku murderer.” Given the immense popularity of all sorts of illustrated entertainment among young Japanese, many critics felt the connection was a stretch. Despite lolicon’s inherent ickiness to outsiders, it has never been definitively linked to Miyazaki’s case or to other instances of criminal behavior.
Still, the headlines sent lolicon underground for many years, and in the nineteen-nineties creators reared on the genre absorbed, defanged, and desexualized it for the mainstream. Today, it has morphed into an animation style called moé, after a kanji character meaning both “burning” and “bursting into bud.” In moé, sexuality is treated indirectly; rather than showing overtly pornographic images, it focusses on “slice of life” dramas that allow consumers—mainly adult men—to observe the budding sexuality of pre-teen and teen-age girls from a discreet remove.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/pharrell-williamss-lolicon-girl
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
http://www.bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2015/01/150107_japao_manga_erotico_fn