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Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14

Posted by Joey Bishop on 2010-August-20 18:37:53 EDT, Friday
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I just saw this BBC documentary titled Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14, and it's probably one of the best documentaries I've seen in a while. It's an interesting chronicle of culture clash and instant internet fame. It all starts when a cute British girl named Beckii who's a fan of Japanese anime, and oddly enough sort of resembles an anime character herself, posts a video online of herself dancing along to an anime inspired J-Pop hip hop song called Danjo, Danjo.

Almost overnight, she becomes a sensation in Japan with her cute looks that resemble an anime character, which satisfies Japan's cultural fascination with both incredibly cute things, known as kawaii culture, and anime characters. Eventually, she ends up landing in the top 20 on the Japanese pop charts and having entire magazines filled up with photos of her. There are even aspirations to stardom back in her native Britain, as well as worldwide, and whether that possibility will prevail is left open ended, but looks at least somewhat promising. Things seem to be on the up and up for this pretty young girl.

And yet, there is a culture clash and a moral dilemma in place. As Beckii herself admits, despite her appreciation of some aspects of the Japanese culture, she still thinks with a British mentality, and the sexual undertones of her appeal, and the age and gender of much of her fan base troubles her and her family, which includes her policeman father. She's happy to receive expensive gifts from her biggest fan, a ostensibly wealthy middle aged Japanese man, yet is a bit ambivalent about her relationship with him and whether it should continue despite the gifts he sends which please her.

Here are a few links:

The entire documentary is available on YouTube, part 1 is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGsUykdNtAA

If you're in the UK, you can watch it online at the BBC three website here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tf20x

You can also download the documentary from the Ice Films website. You have to download a special program in order to download from that site, but once you do so, a wide variety of TV shows and movies become available to you. The program appears to be totally safe in my experience with it so far. If this is too complicated or you're concerned about the security of this site for some reason, then the first two options may be best for you. However, I downloaded this documentary from Ice Films, and I believe they have the best quality version available.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did...:)

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