Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (Paperback)

~ Susan J. Napier (Author) "THERE ARE MANY ANSWERS to the question that titles this chapter, as the rest of this introduction will demonstrate, but for now it is worth..." (more)
Key Phrases: naru boso, anime texts, shojo characters, Princess Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies, Urusei Yatsura (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although packaged as a book for general readers, Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke is a dreary academic study that showcases the clichés of "higher" criticism but tells the reader little about the art form. The potentially interesting points that Susan Napier raises (e.g., Are characters with blond, pink, or purple hair really perceived as Japanese?) are ignominiously buried in arcane jargon. And she too often discusses other authors' theories instead of anime itself. In a section on Ranma 1/2, she refers to various books, but in a footnote she cites only a single published interview with series creator Rumiko Takahashi. If Napier regards the Ranma series as significant, why didn't she interview the artist?

The text is riddled with errors, which suggests that the author hasn't watched the films carefully. For example, she cites a "brilliant" essay referring to the loss of all electrical power in Japan (a symbol of "modernization under the patriarchal system") in episode 3 of Neon Genesis Evangelion. No blackout occurs in this episode. In episode 6, however, all the electricity in Japan is requisitioned to power a superweapon. From Akira to Princess Mononoke is the sort of book churned out by professors to satisfy publish-or-perish rules. --Charles Solomon

Review

A thoughtful and carefully researched account... -- The New York Times

Informative, well-written, and yet entertaining...both generous and critically insightful. -- Sharalyn Orbaugh, University of British Columbia

This worthy addition to the burgeoning literature on Japanese popular culture will stand the test of time. -- Choice

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Product Details

• Paperback: 311 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (April 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312238630
• ISBN-13: 978-0312238636
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #590,364 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for students, maybe puzzling for others, May 19, 2003

By	"jubilis" (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews

As the divided reviews of this book suggest, Napier's book seems to have a positioning problem: many general readers find the writing too abstract, dislike Napier's practice of "reading meaning into things," and are justifiably upset about the scattered factual inaccuracies in the writing.

In my opinion, this is actually a very good book; it works best, however, for a broad but specific audience. Napier is a professor of the humanities -- she started out specializing in Japanese literature -- and she writes like one. As some critics have pointed out, Napier is not an anime "fan" in a conventional sense, and it's clear that she isn't up to date on every aspect of fan culture, including the encyclopedic desire for detail and accuracy which many fans demand.

However, despite some angry reader comments, Napier is not an "intruder" from the distant world of academia who has swept down on anime to fulfill someone's hypothetical publication requirement. Although anime is not her home territory, she treats it with enormous respect, choosing her representative texts carefully. Her experience and perspective allow her to discuss patterns and consider trends and themes in ways which much popular writing about anime can't do. At the same time, her writing style -- while actually very accessible for an academic book -- seems to put off many casual readers who weren't expecting the whiff of theoretical abstraction. (Suggestion: if you hate the very idea of an anime book that uses terms like "the feminine," "physical fragmentation" or "apocalyptic identity," this probably is not a book for you.)

Anime is becoming more and more a subject for academic, "high-culture" consideration in both Japan and the U.S., and that seems like a good thing. Fans and academics don't need to be at each other's throats -- everyone can coexist happily. After all, look at the way film culture works! As advice to readers, I think Napier's book will probably be most interesting to anime fans who already spend a lot of time with literary abstractions, or students and fans who are interested in writing and thinking critically about anime -- it's been well received by students at a couple of universities I know who found it very valuable when writing papers on anime subjects for their classes. It's especially useful on subjects like feminist thinking, sexuality, and ecological attitudes: the kind of seriously hard-core issues that American animation never seems to address, and that much writing on anime fails to dig into deeply enough.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Who is the target audience?, April 27, 2001

By A Customer

Napier presents an in-depth analysis of anime works that are popular in the US. The book seems to try to meet demands from both non-academic anime fans and academics who need information about pop culture of contemporary Japan. Unfortunately, this book does not meet either demands to the level of satisfaction. If you are a hard-core anime fan, you must simply wonder why the golden age of anime, which is from the late 70s to the 80s, are largely ignored. You might also wonder why only the anime titles that are popular in the West are treated in the book. For example, among Miyazaki Hayao's works, the most important (for both fans and creators of anime in Japan) are Lupin, Nausicaa and Laputa: Mononoke Hime's importance is a very recent idea marketed by Disney to American audience. Furthermore, Napier does not care about the important anime titles (in terms of both anime history and Japanese culture) like Gundam and Macross. Her anime collection seems to be limited to US official releases (I guess she doesn't watch fansubs...) If you are an academic who is looking for an overview and some concrete information about Japanese anime, then this book will not help you much. For example, she regards Akira as a representative anime work, but the truth is that Akira is important because it was the first international release. The same can be said about Ghost in the Shell. In short, Napier only discusses anime titles that are visible to American or Western audience and discuss them as if Japan has had the same perception of anime as America. There are many important anime works before Akira. Actually, compared to those, Akira is not so important at all. What if you see a book that tries to explain what American literature is, without mentioning Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville? As a reader who is both an academic and an anime fan, I don't see who this book is trying to target as its legitimate reader. Overall, Napier's discussions in this book are organized and solid as a scholarly work, but her approach and presumed frame of logic should be seriously questioned.

25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Woman Who Ate the Metanarrative, February 12, 2003

By	Marc Ruby™ "The Noh Hare™" (Warren, MI USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

I am not a fan of Post-Modern literary analysis. I cannot get enthused about any method of viewing artistic creation that has a paradigm or 'method' to its madness, but Post-Modernism is a pet peeve. By the end of a Post-Modernist study, I know considerably more about the writer's ideas about method than I do about the ostensible subject. Napier is by no means the worst example of this I have seen, but she still falls for the substitution of terminology for content that is so rife in this school. And the same willingness to renegotiate narrative paradigms without any allegiance to the source context.

The title is somewhat misleading. I picked up 'Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke' because the title seems to promise a survey of a range of anime. Actually, the organization of the book, and the basis for the inclusion of a particular title, is primarily driven by a set of theories about anime. 'From' and 'to' are inapplicable. The primary sections of the book are essays, one group about 'Body, Metamorphosis, Identity', another about 'Magical Girls and Fantasy Worlds', and a last on 'Anime Confronts History.' The productions selected for inclusion were chosen by the author's need to make a point. While Napier does cover some important anime (Evangelion, Mononoke, Akira, Miyazaki Hayao, etc.) there are many others that might contradict her theses that are simply glossed over.

In the section on 'Body', there are many cases where she seems completely unaware of focusing on a factor and interpreting it in an American way, divorcing the material from its Japanese root. In other words, the effect of 2,000 years of Japanese culture is minimized, and perspectives common to many cultures are presented as if they were uniquely Japanese. Anyone who watches anime knows that the physical is an important part of the art form. But American film is just as exploitative if not more so. The shame is that films like 'Akira' and the 'Ghost in the Machine' have much more to them than this, and all that is missed. Napier is quick to use American definitions of pornography as well, rather than use cultural divergence as a way to gain insight into what the Japanese consider intimate or prurient.

Another example of this is in a longer discussion of Evangelion as an apocalyptic film. Keep in mind that there are two different endings to Evangelion, and that the series ending really is not about apocalypse at all. The second ending, of course, definitely appears to be an apocalyptic vision. Napier takes the repetitive presence of some arcane Judeo-Christian symbolism as evidence that the director really intended a Christian 'Revelations' context and pursues that to excess. In doing so, she completely missed the fact that the film is also an enactment of the Kojiki, an important Japanese creation legend. My personal belief is that the misleading Christian symbolism is used to create a mysterious atmosphere, but in no way is intended to become the 'meaning' of the film or the series. By failing to note the Japanese facets of Evangelion, Napier tries to recreate it in an American context. To me, this is a narrow vision.

I find the use of Post-Modern terminology when plain English will do tedious. I don't think that 'problematize,' defamiliarize,' and 'deassurance' are value added. At best, they are a short hand, and at worst, they mislead the reader into thinking that they stand for the creator's actual purpose.

So read this with the warning that it is not an unbiased attempted to expand upon our knowledge of anime as an art form. Susan Napier has a several theses that she wishes to propound. Her choices are based on their ability to promote her opinions. Had the book been represented as what it actually is, I would have far less to quibble about, although I would still have disagreed with several of her ideas. Alas, this is decidedly not a study of anime as a Japanese phenomenon, and that is what I was looking for.