Cinema Anime (Hardcover)

by Steven T. Brown (Author)
Key Phrases: anime screen, live action trilogy, analog cinema, The Animatrix, New York, Final Fantasy (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Both cinema and animation have served simultaneously as transnational cultural forms as well as national forums, formed by specific discourses on nationalism and modernization. In fact, in the 1910s-20s Japan, animation was not defined as distinct from cinema in terms of social regulations or production concerns. Animation, together with cinema, came under the scrutiny of public educators, censors and national ideologues. The point of intersection for these diverse concerns was the construction of national cinema for international dissemination. The attempt of Cinema Anime to dismantle the distinction between cinema and animation, national cinema and transnational visual culture, is genuinely challenging, but definitely necessary in the tension-ridden period of media globalization."--Daisuke Miyao, University of Oregon “Cinema Anime is an important and thought-provoking collection of essays by a number of the leading figures in the field. It includes some of the first scholarly work on several challenging and noteworthy anime that have not received enough academic attention up to now.  With chapters that range from cross-cultural overviews to ambitious critical interventions, this volume will be of interest to a wide audience, from students to experienced scholars. Indeed, Cinema Anime should be required reading for anyone committed to anime criticism.”  
 --Christopher Bolton, Senior Editorial Board, Mechademia
 
"The brain is the screen," as quoted in the introduction, is an apt expression of Cinema Anime's aim—to keep thinking in new ways about anime even as it gains its mindshare, to take new positions towards it even as it finds its place. Its academics know where to look within—LAIN, the one show that best learned the liberating message of EVANGELION; Satoshi Kon, the most important anime director to emerge in the past decade—and without, showing how film technology itself informs the narrative of anime and how contemporary installation artists draw it forth from flatland to examine our real space. Cinema Anime rephrases the question: where anime is, rather than what it is to be defined.
 --Carl Gustav Horn, author of Strange Colors: The Power of Japanese Animation

Product Description

This collection charts the terrain of contemporary Japanese animation, one of the most explosive forms of visual culture to emerge at the crossroads of transnational cultural production in the last twenty-five years. The essays offer bold and insightful engagement with anime's concerns with gender identity, anxieties about body mutation and technological monstrosity, and apocalyptic fantasies. The contributors dismantle the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and offer compelling arguments for the value and importance of the study of anime and popular culture as a key link in the translation from the local to the global.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st edition (March 16, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403970602
• ISBN-13: 978-1403970602
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,021,530 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book for the Future. Even with a 2006 Copyright Date., March 22, 2009

By	Sniff Code "www.sniffcode.com" (Somewhere out there) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cinema Anime (Paperback)

While not light reading, this three part book is comprised of extended essays by a group of writers who given a great deal of academic consideration to animé art and history. This is a good thing since I have found it difficult to convince older academia on the intellectual merit of some animé. Susan Napier does this right from the start with her 20 page contribution on spectatorship and the feminine form, specifically in the work of Kon Satoshi. I was delighted to see his work put in such a perspective, since to my knowledge, a monograph on his works has yet to surface. Brian Ruh was also a noticeable name, since he has written an excellent book on the works of Mamoru Oshii. He weighs in on issues of adolescence and maturity in the cyborg culture, a position he asserts as relevant since, as he states in his first paragraph, "modern humans have become cyborgs." Although I believe this assertion is driven more by an eagerness for the future than a reality of the present, the article is still engrossing. Anyone who has read Hughes' "Citizen Cyborg" would enjoy this book, since the over zealous writers often seek to prematurely fit future politics into a society still working out past politics. But in this case, it works, since they take their cue from an art form that is very convincing in its dichotomous worship and angst of the future.