Kawaii aesthetics and the exchange between anime and music

While many composers find inspiration in the musical works of others, a recent perio of my compositional work has been interested not in the musical but in rendering the visual as musical. Going against the dominant musical pedagogy of studying composers and musical techniques, I have looked to Japanese anime, animated cartoons, as my source of artistic influence and found in the shapes, colours, tones and contours of animation everything I need to compose music. Ad added benefit of this is that it forces a correlation and consideration between the boundaries of artistic languages and sensory media. For a period in 2010 I was specifically interested in the way anime portrayed the Japanese aesthetic known as kawaii, which translates approximately as cuteness or cute.