As the name suggests, “cosplay” is a simple writing for “costume play”. Its verb is cos, and cosplayers are generally called cosplayer. As the name suggests, “cosplay” is a simple writing for “costume play”. Its verb is cos, and people who play cosplay are called cosplayer. In today’s cosplay, its form and content generally refer to the use of costumes, trinkets, props, and costumes to play ACG(anime, comic, game) characters or some Japanese visual department bands and certain characters in movies. From here, it can be seen that cosplay contains a fairly wide space for play in positioning, and it can even be said that as long as if the place where there are cosplayers, this area is definitely the mainstream of today’s youth pop culture.
Where Cosplay Originated In?
Speaking of the origin of cosplay, we now generally agree that the origin of cosplay is in Japan. Of course, if this is based on the cosplay concept of the current era, it can be said that. But if you think of it in a broad sense, the real birthplace of animation cosplay is the United States. This is because whether the costumes of Greek sacrifices around 1000 BC or the group of great poets of co-producing the two great Greek epic “Iliad” and “Odyssey” in the Eighth Century B.C. They are actually all playing the roles of others.
How Is The Cosplay Of The United States Formed?
Since the 17th century, after the magical slideshow was invented by the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, the emergence of animation became a necessity. In the following century, Europe began to popularize this magic slide. Until the appearance of Walt Disney small mice in the late 1930s, the American animation style had a definite positive definition. It is precisely from this period that the real first cosplay taking animated characters as the object appears. Walt Disney established the world’s first Disneyland in 1955. At the same time, in order to promote the product itself and to better attract tourists, Walt Disney also invite employees to wear Mickey Mouse costumes for visitors to play or take pictures. Therefore, this group of unknown to the public Mickey Mouse cosplayers was the true ancestor of the cosplayers of all the world at present age. At first, it was Walt Disney earlier prop department that made cosplay costumes for Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other Disney characters at Disney at the time. Of course, these so-called cosplay costumes in the early days were just large paper bags with a fixed shape. There was no aesthetic feeling, and the finished products were relatively rough. It was for wearers to wear such clothes and they were prone to breathlessness.
After experiencing the naiveties of the sixties and seventies and the creation of the eighties, the cosplay of the nineties began to follow the rapid maturation of the game industry in the Japanese ACG industry and the endless emergence of the visual department band. Began to enter the right track and become a large scale ACG industry’s ancillary culture. In the 1990s, the Japanese ACG industry successfully hosted a large number of comic exhibitions and game exhibitions. Japanese comic traders and video game companies in order to promote their products, find some men and women cosplay into ACG roles in these game shows and comic festivals to attract the crowd of visitors to the exhibition. It can be seen that the key to the formation and development of cosplay is based on the degree of commercialization of ACG itself. It can be said that cosplay as a commercial promotion means, cosplay will be able to get long-term development and understanding.
Leave a Reply