Inter-generational Analysis Of Animation Consumption And Self-identity

American and Japanese animation culture swarmed into China in the 80's of 20th century, then occupied the market of China's culture and entertainment rapidly. In recent years, there are filled with television, books, newspapers and periodicals as well as advertisements, toys, daily necessities and a variety of game software and become the pet of youth and even many of adults. The consumption of cartoon has reached a huge scale and this rate is still rising.Animation has always been considered the exclusive things of children. It do not worth mentioning to adults. In the academic community, the research perspective, from the economics, communications, art multi-perspective study are more then from the sociological perspective.In this paper, the characteristics of consumer behavior of animation were described. It point out that the behavior of animation consumption has the characteristic of collection. Interesting and conformity are also the characteristics of animation consumption. Animation consumption is a kind of spirit consumption. In this paper consumer groups will be divided into three from the perspective of inter-generation. There are "after 70", "after 80" and "after 90". Different generations live in different social environments have different life experiences, so their behavior in the animation consumption also has a lot of difference. People's animation consumption is constraint by certain recognition framework. The degree of people's constrain by recognition framework are different if they are born in different times. On the one hand, consumption express self-identity, and animation consumption as a kind of spirit consumption reflected the identity crisis of people to some extent. People born in different times have different manifestations on identity crisis. On the other hand, to some extent, the consumption constructs self-identity. The roles of animation consumption on the construction of self-identity manifested are in two aspects. From the social perspective, animation consumption builds people's sense of belonging to consumer groups. From the personal perspective, animation consumption builds people's sense of oneself. And in this process there are still some alienation Phenomenon, which have negative effect to self-identity.