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Journal Articles by Daniel Johnson

Television and New Media, 2024

NIGHT HEAD was a science fiction drama that aired on Japan’s Fuji TV between 1992 and 1993. The s... more NIGHT HEAD was a science fiction drama that aired on Japan’s Fuji TV between 1992 and 1993. The series arrived during a wave of interest in the paranormal, a trend that was embraced by commercial television in both dramatic programs and variety/infotainment talk shows. This boom of interest in the paranormal happened within the thriving economic and cultural environment of Japan’s Bubble Era, a period that saw a rapid expansion of television in addition to the prosperity of markets in real estate and industry. NIGHT HEAD portrays a darker vision of 90s Japan, using visual effects and moody, intense images and sounds to conjure a desperate sensibility. This article will offer an analysis of the “attractive” paranormal turn in Japan during the 1990s, using NIGHT HEAD as a case for considering the intersection of youth, visual effects, and the desire for an alternative way of understanding the world beyond rationality.

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2021

How does the tendency toward series reboots, sequels, and remakes in contemporary Hollywood inter... more How does the tendency toward series reboots, sequels, and remakes in contemporary Hollywood intersect with television's capacity for serialization? How does the logic of promotion in transmedia entertainment connect to television's ability to perform simultaneity in relation to other forms of screen media? This article will describe and analyze how the Resident Evil films have been broadcast on Japan's Asahi TV network throughout the 2010s, focusing on how the week-afterweek programming of the films acts as a case for demonstrating how transmedia serialization brings into relief qualities of narration and aesthetics within the context of convergent screen industries and global media production. Focusing on the concept of accumulation, this article will argue how the mode of viewing invited by Asahi TV's mode of presentation is one that can be addressed both in terms of how viewers make sense of complicated networks of meta-textual continuity and of how convergent media forms rely on practices of simultaneity in media consumption.

Journal of Film and Video, 2020

What is the role of dubbing in mediating screen celebrity? Dubbing is often thought of as a matte... more What is the role of dubbing in mediating screen celebrity? Dubbing is often thought of as a matter of translation and of sound recording. However, recent work on playback singers and post-synchronization in transnational cinema production has brought new attention to the forms of stardom that emerge within cinematic voice work. In keeping with that development, this paper will offer an analysis of the dubbing of Hollywood films for TV and video formats in Japan, focusing on the practice of what is known as “fixing.” Fixing describes the casting the same voice actor (seiyū) for a Hollywood star across a large filmography, which in turn blends their individual qualities of celebrity and screen personality. As a way of attending to both the transnational and transmedia dimensions of dubbing, “fixing” will be approached as a matter of adaptation.

Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2020

Tragedy of W (1984) is a film adaptation of a mystery novel by the author Natsuki Shizuko. Howeve... more Tragedy of W (1984) is a film adaptation of a mystery novel by the
author Natsuki Shizuko. However, rather than producing a
straightforward, ‘page to screen’ style adaptation, the filmmakers
opted to change the source material into a story-within-story,
shifting the whodunnit into a stage play being performed by a
theatre company. This transformation shifts the film’s narrative
and aesthetic priorities away from the original story and onto its
star, Yakushimaru Hiroko, which in turn requalifies the stakes of
adaptation toward the goals of commercial media production in
1980s Japan. This emphasis on stardom within the mise-en-abyme
mode of adaptation also generates new aesthetic concerns, such
as the use of objects to crowd the edge of the frame, the
treatment of stages before the camera, and the mode of
performing within a performance. What emerges is an intersection
of adaptation with qualities of bracketing and citation, which
continuously put the film, its star, and its narrative in ‘quotation
marks’ by relying on antecedent forms of meaning that connect
the film to its source material, Yakushimaru’s own screen celebrity,
and the wider climate of transmedia production and consumption
of popular culture in 1980s Japan.

Critical Studies in Television, 2018

Amachan was shown as a serialised morning drama on Japan’s Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) network betwe... more Amachan was shown as a serialised morning drama on Japan’s Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) network between April and September 2013. New episodes played 6 days a week, with each instalment running 15 minutes. The combination of the long-form presentation and nearly day-to-day presence helped to integrate the drama into the daily lives of its viewers, and its narrative emphasis on family relationships, experiences shared across generations and nostalgic representation of 1980s popular culture imbued Amachan with a heavy dose of intimate sentimentality. This article will analyse the myriad of ways that Amachan entertains the possibility for public and private forms of media intimacy, focusing on questions of the temporality of broadcast formats, nostalgic representation of ‘old’ media and personal copies and celebration of television-centric models of celebrity.

Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, 2017

What is the relationship between player-controlled movement and animation in game media? How do g... more What is the relationship between player-controlled movement and animation in game media? How do game worlds respond to the movement of characters through different types of space? This article will draw on concepts such as animation, figuration and vitality to analyse some of the ways that in-game animations and graphical rendering activity are activated by player-controlled movement through three-dimensional game environments. The sudden ‘blinking in’ of environmental features in the distant horizon as the player approaches and more gradual ‘filling in’ of graphical detail in objects such as plants, rocks and shadows close to the player character/camera in games such as Red Dead Redemption and Shadow of the Colossus provide materials for considering how animation might be developed as a concept for describing the connection between player agency and game-world visual activity in the said media. Graphical rendering properties such as draw distance and texture pop-in that are tied to the spatial relationship between a player character/camera and game-world objects will be some of the primary ways this dynamic of movement and animation will be analysed.

Games and Culture, 2015

Frustration is an everyday experience for many users of game media. Distinct from related sensat... more Frustration is an everyday experience for many users of game media. Distinct from related sensations such as difficulty, frustration is perhaps best characterized as when the agency of the player becomes obstructed by the faulty controls or restrictive game design, leading to the feeling of an uncooperative relationship with the game-machine. This article will focus on two examples to demonstrate some of the possible manifestations of frustration in game media. The first, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, will deal with motion control gestures that are misinterpreted by the game in a way that obstructs the player’s ability to interact with the game. The second, Papers, Please, will consider repetitive gameplay that limits the player’s actions. Drawing on recent scholarship in animation studies, both cases will be approached as a form of what Sianne Ngai describes as “animatedness,” the feeling of becoming an automaton and of having one’s agency frustrated by technology.

Japanese Studies, 2013

Nicovideo is a popular video-sharing site in Japan that incorporates several aspects of social me... more Nicovideo is a popular video-sharing site in Japan that incorporates several aspects of social media into its design. Key among these is the projection of user-made comments into the video display by having text scroll across the screen like an animated subtitle-track. The movement of comments across the screen and the ‘pseudo-synchronicity’ created by the way they are projected produces a feeling of ‘live’ viewing via a sense of virtual time shared between users. In this article I argue that the feeling of movement and time on the site directs users toward a certain kind of vision that, when considered alongside the modes of counter-transparent communication taken up by its user base through things like orthographic ‘mistypes’, is part of a shift between denotational and pictorial forms of text production that troubles the distinction between reading and other modes of vision. The article conceptualizes what kind of vision Nicovideo’s interface suggests and its relationship to a distinct kind of polyphonic, anonymous communication that intersects with ideas of animation and performance. It is particularly through the intensity of textual representation that I will pursue these questions.

Book Chapters by Daniel Johnson

Japanese Role-Playing Games Genre, Representation, and Liminality in the JRPG, 2022

Japanese role-playing games depict worlds of population, filled with characters who provide human... more Japanese role-playing games depict worlds of population, filled with characters who provide human and social meaning to the fantastic locations we explore. As players we control parties of companions who join us as we work to complete the mission-quest, but we also converse with the residents of the towns and cities we pass through. Beyond actionable moments of gameplay, we discover political conflicts between individuals and factions through cutscenes and text-crawl backstories, providing an additional sense of world population. These elements help to contextualize the mythical settings and events within the scale of human relationships and agency, providing a grounded, relatable horizon for play. However, the addition of online play to such games has introduced new dimensions to how players experience and perceive the population of game worlds and the types of association they feel with other characters. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as Phantasy Star Online (Sega, 2000) and Final Fantasy XI (Square, 2002) provide one instance of this shift. These games offer huge worlds for exploration, but largely replace the player-controlled party with a group of characters each being operated by a separate player. This style of online play typically also requires text or voice applications for player-to-player communication, which has frequently proved difficult for console-based gaming, the home for many JRPGs since the mid-1980s. 1 Since the 2010s some titles have combined player and non-player controlled characters for party-based adventuring, such as Dragon's Dogma (Capcom, 2012), a single-player action role-playing game, and Dragon Quest X (Square Enix, 2012), an MMORPG. These games mix aspects of online gaming with traditional JRPG party composition through the use of non-player character (NPC) companions that are based on data taken from other players' accounts via the games' respective

Media Convergence in Japan, 2016

included in edited volume "Media Convergence in Japan" (2016)

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, 2020