Cosplay Adds Interest to Our Lives
COSPLAY is shorthand for the English Costume Play, Generally refers to the use of clothing, accessories, props and make-up to play roles in anime, games and so on. There are various kinds of celebrity dresses which could be image in the virtual world. People who are playing COSPLAY generally be known as COSPLAYERS.
About the original place of cosplay now is generally accepted that the birthplace is Japan. However, if broadly speaking, the United States is definitely the real birthplace of cosplay. During the 17th century, Jesuit Athanasius Kircher invented the Magic lantern after the success of animation popular in Europe, to the late 1930s the Mickey Mouse appeared, then the U.S. animation style have a clear positive definition, and in the history that the first beloved animated character to play was also for this period.
Trace back to old times, the Greek worship of their dresses, and then there were two great Greek epics The Iliad and Odyssey, the groups active in the 8th century BC who played the roles in celebrity dresses to present the characters in the epic and become the first visual impact.
Gypsies, known as European nomads also could be the first cosplay performers. Whenever they travelling to, they would make shows through myth and legend, folk anecdote, or as bard to get their bread and water in order to survive. It is also a kind of performance with the clothing and props which are indispensable equipment, it could be called the rudiment of cosplay.
The ancestors of ancient China also have a long history of the dress-up culture. With one thousand years of traditional, dragon ceremony can be one of the representative activities. First to select well-built, postured young men, and let them wear red and yellow, the representative colors for the festive costumes. And then they will perform a dragon dance around a square with drums and gongs accompaniment. To the 17 th century or so, the dragon dance reproduced various activities like the lion dance, phoenix flying and so on, these are have intimate relations to show some roles by dress-up and we could also called these activities cosplay.
At present the most popular place for cosplay is in Japan. In Japan, the earliest Cosplay appeared in 1955 or so, so-called Cosplay was just a kind of dress up among children, but the dress was still very cultured. In the 1990 s, Japan ACG (Animation?Comic?Game) industry held a large number of anime exhibition and game shows successfully, in these games exhibition most companies found some men and women to dress into celebrity dresses which had shown in the anime to attract the crowd, therefore, Cosplay culture has been carried forward in the world as well as the popularity of Japan ACG.