Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended for ALL anime fans, September 11, 1999
By A Customer
I know a lot of anime fans who have avoided this book because of the subject matter, but they are really losing out. This book told me more about anime than any other book on the subject. Sure, there's a lot of stuff in here about erotic anime, but there's even more about the business as a whole. The authors include "cut-scenes" of material that was removed both here and in Japan during production of the originals, they go through the material that's been lost in translation (explaining why people often think that anime is trash, when they're just missing out on the background details), and there's an awesome chapter on journalism that every fan of anime should read and memorise. My favorite chapter of all is about archetypes in anime. If an anime has been written in a hurry (too true, too often), the scenarist will follow certain set patterns of "ideal women" to meet the requirements of marketing and authorship. The "inside information" on how anime are written and translated is worth its weight in gold. And there's no denying it, but the best-selling anime are the ones that the fans DON'T buy. They sell to the public at large, and this book tells you what they think. It should be part of every thinking anime fan's collection.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Good Read - Informative, even scholarly., August 12, 1999
By A Customer
If you've tried a couple hentai anime films and liked what you saw, this book is a MUST-HAVE! Gives a great overview of the history of anime, all the different subgenres, and delves into the culture, industry, and marketplace that creates them. The chapter on the Overfiend series is terrific and provides great insights into the themes behind the series (including plot points that got mangled by western editing).
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
No Sex Please, We're British (Says the BBFC), December 30, 2003
Anime fans frequently praise this book as an explanation of the sexuality in anime. This is a COMPLETE AND TOTAL misunderstanding of what this book is. In truth, this book is a work of apologetics against the "sex and tentacles" reputation that anime has in Great Britain-- the residence of the authors.
The key to understanding this book is the chapter on the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) which must rate and evaluate every movie that is released in the UK. If the film contains content that is deemed too explicit, the film must either accept cuts or be banned from being shown in the UK. Anime, particularly the adult titles that came out in the early days of the anime explosion, tended to require frequent cuts (Johnathan Clements translated some anime titles for the UK, which the BBFC cut or banned. This may explain his venom in the chapters he wrote).
All the other chapters center around the fact that anime has a bad reputation in the UK. This history (which gets some facts wrong) is meant to say to the British reader: The Japanese are not a nation of sexual perverts. The discussion of certain series (notably Urutsukidoji) are meant to inform the British reader what actually happened in the stories as opposed to the distorted rumors that were going around the country. The movie section gives a selection of titles (which is NOT intended by them to be exhaustive) meant to show the British reader that not all anime is porn.
The book has problems. First, is their ludicrous attempt to explain away the fact that some anime sexualizes minors. They claim that these people wearing school uniforms are actually junior college students and all females that are sexual objects are adults. This is a statement that is irresponsibly false. If they knew it, it is a complete lie. if not, it reflects poorly on their knowledge of Japan. College students don't wear uniforms, and in Japan, up until 1999 (after the time the book was written) the age of consent in Nagoya and Tokyo was 13 and girls could get married at 16. Moreover, the concept of enjo kosai (compensated dating-- a sort of informal prostitution by high school girls) was a factor at the time of their writing, but it goes unmentioned by the authors-- a point that puts a big hole in their argument and hence omitted.
The second major problem is this book was written by some angry people. In fairness, I would not care to live under the BBFC determining what I can watch. However, with anger, clarity and rationality suffers. The book seems vitrolic and frequently fails to come to a point. There are distortions (They imply that two episodes of "Crying Freeman" had so much censored by the BBFC, that the distributor had to put them together on one tape. In actuality, less than one minute was cut from both episodes combined. As a result, their credibility suffers. Also, they seem to operate under a belief that a high quality story that is sexually explicit ought not to be put in the same category as a sleazy porn story. So they classify anime as being mainstream, erotic or porn. The problem is this makes everything relative: Only stuff I *don't* like can be considered porn.
So essentially, the book does not deliver as a rational discussion of erotic anime. It comes off looking more like a 191 page rant against the BBFC.
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