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This book offers new insight and perspective of the medium-genre. In contemporary terms, anime is Japanese animation with distinctive recognizable representations and often with close-knit links to the graphic literary world of manga. From a broader perspective, anime means more and the Western-sounding term speaks of a different Eastern language and culture from which it originates. The “flip-flop” use of the name-terms in the book—“Japanese animation,” “anime,” and “manga-anime”—is driven and guided not only by a specific culture of what this book is about, but also by the different periods in history from which it charts the visual medium's growth and the socio-cultural context of its development.

This chapter considers the superhero in transnational Japanese-Korean animation, focusing on the feature film Blade of the Phantom Master (2004). A Japanese-South Korean co-production, this animated film offers a fantasy-action retelling of the iconic Korean folktale Chunhyang. Thus, this film is a revealing case of the cultural translation and transnational re-imagining of Korean literature and myth. This chapter covers the adaptation process, and examines the ways in which the specifically Korean aspects of the narrative and characters have been modified and adapted to reach a wider international audience. In particular, the recasting of the virtuous maiden Chunhyang as a fetishized super-ninja is shown to be particularly problematic. Rather than representing a step forward for Korean animation abroad, the film rewrites a Korean folktale for an international audience, drawing on the conventions of Japanese anime to create a new hybrid media for a global market.

This chapter concentrates on unofficial music videos (UMVs): anime music videos (AMVs), which limit their video footage to anime-related media. It also covers the aesthetic traits that characterise such videos and highlights how the impact of AMVs is now seeping into other forms of anime-related media. UMVs are developed by ‘ultimate fans’. The Internet has become home to many types of UMVers. The majority of AMVs look to incline toward retelling the anime's narrative or character profiling, while a few others focus on one-upping their own technical feats. The AMV may be an emerging and unaffordable art for Japanese fans, but music from and as an offshoot of anime remains quite popular. Creators of AMVs, by producing self-referential works, become the ultimate fanime champions. AMV culture is ‘an exciting alternative to [an entertainment] climate controlled by idiot-savants and overpaid wannabes’.

This chapter discusses the wide array of art forms available in Japan and stresses their continuity over the years. It introduces the “visualness” of Japanese art forms including anime and attempts to locate and conceive the twentieth-century medium-genre in a visual awareness tradition that exists within the mental make-up of an assimilating subject. The classic Japanese two-dimensional art forms, namely paintings and wood-prints, first appeared during the Asuka period (AD 593–710). One distinctive type is the emakimono or picture-scroll, a form of painting where happenings and events are spoken through the act of illustrating. Today, emakimono is embodied in countless manga works and their co-animated creations. Zen portrait painting is another example of two-dimensional art that displays the realist tradition. Although Zen portrait paintings were meant as contemplative wall paintings, anime characters were created for popular consumption in the late twentieth century.

This chapter investigates and hypothesizes the productive spirit of anime as a whole in relation to the underlying native philosophical inclinations and cultural thought. It examines the country's depth of thinking in relation to its expressive visual self, natural or constructed, and in response to a larger long-running project—dialogue with the industrialized West. First, it discusses the primary aspects of Shintoism. It also analyzes the anti-Confucianist thought of a Tokugawa shintō advocate, Motoori Norinaga, in comparison to a similar trend of thinking that already existed in China and Korea at the time. It also considers the philosophical works of Nishida Kitarō in order to show that anime lies at the heart of an extensive prolonged communication project.

This chapter discusses the creative worlds of master animator Miyazaki Hayao and his colleague, animation director Takahata Isao, focusing on the collective yet individualistic components of their animated works. Miyazaki and Takahata founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, aimed primarily to produce animated feature films. Since the mid-1980s, Studio Ghibli's films have become well-known in Japan and abroad. Using the auteur model, the chapter also seeks to provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the anime cinema of Miyazaki and Takahata. It attempts to show how Miyazaki and Takahata have utilized the expressive medium of animation in responding to the changing socio-cultural environment of post-Second World War Japan.

This book examines anime, the popular Japanese form of animation. It analyzes in detail the historical growth of the medium-genre, its essential ties with an innate socio-cultural environment from which it originates, and the internal and external agencies which participate in advancing its popularity. It also focuses on the modernization experience of the Japanese which provides centrifugal force in nurturing the emergent strength of the medium-genre and its widespread acceptance and communicative usage within the Japanese society. Anime is considered as a “medium-genre” because it has acquired unique recognizable characteristics, such as character design, background presentation, origins of storylines, production work practices, channels of distribution, and kinds of audienceship.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book and offers suggestions for future study. The book shows that the religious aspects of manga and anime culture are visible in the ways in which people visualize religious worlds, entertain religious ideas, and appropriate religious sites and concepts for novel purposes. Audiences re-create religion in the interpretation and exegesis that accompany narrative and visual reception. In some cases, the verisimilitude of fictive worlds—regardless of their fidelity to formal religious cosmologies—is so entirely convincing that figments become facts and chimera incarnate. Future studies can focus on products marketed primarily to girls and women as well include more emphasis on the material aspects of religious manga and anime culture, including the technical apparatuses used in the production of these products, the anime- and manga-derived paraphernalia such as ema and amulets (omamori) that are currently proliferating at formally religious institutions, and the toys that help fans get in touch with their favorite characters.

This chapter shows how important alternative media is to the formation of queer cultural scenarios that speak to the sexual subjectivities of the youth of Spectrum. While acknowledging that there are now far more representations of queerness in mainstream media, I challenge the assumption that mainstream media has handily embraced homoeroticism and genderqueerness. The chapter shows how queer media, like erotic fan fiction and anime, have an established history of providing alternatives to the heteronormative mainstream, alternatives that, thanks to the internet, are more and more accessible to young people of all walks of life. In this way, queer media that resists heteronormativity has the power to influence the sexual subjectivity and gender identity formation of young people. Therefore it’s not that mainstream media are becoming less homophobic and shifting cultural norms in the United States but, rather, that young people have access to so much more media outside the mainstream—including self-produced media like fan fiction—which then influences their understanding of themselves and the world they live in.

This chapter examines the rewriting of the Pacific War in Japanese films and animation. Films such as Men of the Yamato (2005) and Admiral Yamamoto (2011) evince an uneasy balance between lamentation for the destruction of the Pacific War, evasion of Japanese responsibility for the conflict, and celebration of self-sacrifice in the creation of Japan’s future peace and prosperity. The vexed status of Japan’s history renders the past a contestable and re-interpretable space. Where putatively historical films proffer problematic depictions of the conflict, Japanese science fiction films (like Space Battleship Yamato) and animated series such as Zipang engage in active re-writings of history to posit alternative visions of the Pacific War. In contrast to the equivocation of mainstream cinema, these texts contain controversial re-imaginings of the country’s past, reflecting continuing controversies in the interpretations of Japan’s war.

This book is about city films, a genre of sorts that involves a reconsideration of both urban environment and cinema. It proposes several redefinitions of the terms “cinema” and the “city” while focusing on the relationship between the media and the increasingly urbanized life throughout East Asia. It traces the developments in the urban cinema of East Asia and is concerned with not only film per se, but also with experimental documentaries, avant-garde videos, anime, and other emerging media or genres.

This chapter examines sexual motifs in the mass culture of manga (comics) and anime (animation), looking at a form of male gazing targeted at children. The look is fashioned as coming from male watchers, and its objects are females who are either naked or eroticized at particular erotogenic zones (breasts, genitals, buttocks). Mothers spoken to find this form of presentation relatively harmless and view it as an acceptable forum for escapist leisure that takes children away from the hard work which otherwise consumes their lives. The chapter examines two aspects of this image: its location within a genre explicitly intended for children and its structure of a look at fetishized female bodies by male viewers whose gaze is illicit, coercive, and voyeuristic.

This chapter plots manga and anime along a continuum ranging from casual diversion to explicitly religious recreation. One the one hand, it provides a typology of religious manga and anime based on criteria related to the attitudes that characterize their production, allowing for differences in intentionality while examining the rhetorical techniques ranging from satire to sententiousness that manga artists and anime directors use in the service of amusing, educating, and persuading their audiences. On the other hand, it examines the side of reception, highlighting the different ways in which audiences interpret products with apparently religious content and plotting those responses on a continuum from apathy to reverence. It looks at the exegetical commentary of fan groups, ritualized activity derived from fictive manga and anime worlds, and the emergence of formal religions (groups that are legally incorporated as religious juridical persons, with clearly delineated hierarchies and doctrines) out of fan groups.

The idea of developing relationships or falling in love with characters is not new in the virtual world and in the world of anime. However the debates surrounding Japan’s obsessive fans or otaku, and their self-involved attachments are interesting for the ways they constitute a particular kind of argument on masculinity and love. Part of what gives the debate about Japanese men and anime cultural specificity aside from otaku is the notion of moe, or the affection for 2D characters or the internalized emotional response to something with no hope for reciprocal emotional response. This idea of moe is also associated with the larger questions on the ways fans relate to virtual characters and worlds, and on the power of media producers vis-à-vis consumers. This chapter is particularly interested in the ways these debates revolve around a question of the value of private, inconspicuous consumption as a legitimate expression of manhood. It maps some of the ways the value of internalized consumption is described as a means to think about whether it might point toward a new kind of politics. It offers an intriguing alternative to the focus on productivity as a measure of man. Otaku posits a question about what kind of value arises from consumption, particularly if that consumption is immaterial.