Craig Norris

Madman Entertainment: a case study in 'by fans for fans' media distribution

This article is part of a larger research project looking at the role of Australian media companies in sustaining fan and Australian investment in global popular culture. This article focuses on Madman Entertainment – one of the most successful DVD and merchandise distribution companies in Australia and the leading distributor of anime, with over 90 per cent of the market share. The article explores the ways in which Madman has become a part of the simultaneous globalisation and localisation of Japanese cultural products, and sets out to show how profiling such a company can also provide some insight into the changing role of fans in driving innovation and investment in popular culture.

Perfect Blue and the negative representation of fans

ABSTRACT Among the various representations of fans in film, the image of the psychologically troubled and socially awkward individual is amongst the most common. In this article, I discuss the anime Perfect Blue (Kon, 1997) as a text that directly engages with the negative portrayal of fans by depicting a deranged stalker and his obsession with a young female singer-turned-actress. Perfect Blue is an anime that is concerned with the violent fantasies that underlie both fan identifications with media products and the manufacture of these products by an exploitative entertainment industry. Central to Perfect Blues criticism of fandom and popular culture is its use of the thriller genre to problematize the issue of identification. Here, I use Perfect Blues criticism of fandom and the construction of media commodities to focus on the problem of identity as a central issue in the construction of an ideal anime text by fans.