Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Statuesque!

Statues of anime characters are a big deal in Japan! This summer saw the rise of a giant Gundam statue, and soon a long-planned Tetsujin 28 statue will be completed.


Not to be outdone, a 10 foot tall Astro Boy statue will be appearing at the "Mighty Atom Exhibition in Lagunasia" in the Japanese prefecture of Aichi on September 19th. This special exhibition will also include a recreation of Osamu Tezuka's desk and is a part of the year-long celebration for what would have been Tezuka's 80th birthday.

But that's not all. Elsewhere, another famous Tezuka character will be getting the statue treatment. On September 22nd, the Kyoto International Manga Museum will unveil an incredible statue of The Phoenix, carved out of red pine and detailed with gold foil.


See the story on Anime News Network for more info!
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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 15, 2009 at 7:48 PM

    I love how prevalent characters from pop culture are in real life Japan (in the form of statues, but still) and wish we were as open to that here.

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  2. NinjatronSeptember 15, 2009 at 9:13 PM

    There's a Superman statue in the actual town of Metropolis, which is in Illinois. A Superman museum is there too. That's about it as far as I know. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis,_Illinois

    Canada should have a Wolverine statue!

    Sayonara.

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  3. AnonymousSeptember 15, 2009 at 10:37 PM

    Yep, I actually knew about the Superman statue. And we actually do have something like that in Canada. It's in Vulcan, Aberta, where they have a large replica of the Starship Enterprise. It's a way of leveraging the popularity of a pop culture phenomenon for tourism dollars simply because of the similarity in place name, which I am sure is the reasoning behind what they did in Metropolis Illinois with Superman.

    The only problem is that in Canada we don't have many genre based icons of our own. Star Trek was not created by a Canadian for instance (nor Wolverine, even though yeah he is Canadian in the story). I think the closest we have to a home-grown tourist attraction based on something from Canadian pop culture is the Anne of Green Gables farmhouse in Cavendish, P.E.I.

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  4. AnonymousSeptember 15, 2009 at 10:39 PM

    Oh! I just want to add that since Superman was actually co-created by a Canadian (Joe Shuster was from Toronto) we can therefore count him as our own... So, let's start raising funds for a Superman statue now. :p

    ReplyDelete

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