Interpreting Anime by Christopher Bolton, and: The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media by Thomas Lamarre

Abstract

Reviewed by: Interpreting Anime by Christopher Bolton, and: The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media by Thomas Lamarre Deborah Shamoon Interpreting Anime. By Christopher Bolton. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 328 pages. Hardcover, $96.00; softcover, $24.00. The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. By Thomas Lamarre. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 448 pages. Hardcover, $108.00; softcover, $27.00. Anime studies has emerged as a discrete field of inquiry in the last twenty years, with the publication of theoretically informed scholarship first in Japanese, then in English. The first to push the study of anime and its fandom in a more theoretical direction was Azuma Hiroki in 2001, in a monograph (later published in English) that expanded on Ōtsuka Eiji's theory of narrative consumption from the 1980s. English-language study of anime has also steadily evolved from fan oriented to theoretically informed. The first book-length academic study of anime in English, by Susan Napier, appeared in 2001, followed by the founding of the Mechademia journal in 2006. At first intended to be a bridge between fans and scholars, Mechademia has since moved in a more decidedly academic direction. In The Anime Machine (2009) Thomas Lamarre explored the relationship between form and content in limited animation, bringing formal analysis to the English-language discourse on anime, which had tended to focus only on theme and plot. Anime's Media Mix (2012), by Marc Steinberg, elaborated on the work of Ōtsuka and Azuma in theorizing anime franchises and cross-platform marketing.1 The publication of the two new books under review here, one by Lamarre and the other by Christopher Bolton, suggest still newer directions in anime studies. Bolton's Interpreting Anime contains seven chapters, each covering thematic readings of film and television anime as informed by film theory. Bolton offers several strategies for closely reading anime by examining visual and narrative structure as well as context. He states of his goal, "looking at a range of films and critical work is not just an end in itself but a way to help readers of this book develop their own original ways of reading and interpreting anime, in order to make these works even more interesting, compelling, and relevant for individual viewers" (p. 17). Bolton's selection includes several canonical films, with chapters on Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Millennium Actress (2001), and Howl's Moving Castle (2004), respectively. His comparison of the anime and manga versions of Akira, both by Ōtomo Katsuhiro, yields an interesting formal analysis of the narrative capacities of the two media. Bolton writes that "anime's visual language or grammar is effective for expressing confusion but not as good for portraying solutions or resolutions. In other words, I will argue that the anime is inconclusive not because Ōtomo could not think of a solution but because he could not animate it" (p. 47). That is, in the manga the ending evokes a clearer political, revolutionary message through the use of perspective [End Page 165] and Ōtomo's meticulous draftsmanship, while the abstract flashing lights at the end of the anime are necessarily more ambiguous. Bolton also suggests a new way of reading the cyborgs of Ghost in the Shell in terms of puppets, and particularly the bunraku puppets of the Edo period. He draws a parallel between the human-like cyborg body of Major Kusanagi and the elaborate puppets of bunraku, which not only share an uncanny realism but also function within genres—anime and bunraku—that offer similar portrayals of embodiment, gender, and violence. He writes, "The major, like the puppets, oscillates between being more and less present than flesh. The result is that the violence is more and less real; … it is both multiplied and displaced" (p. 121). Likewise, Bolton's comparison of Howl's Moving Castle with the source novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones presents a new way of thinking about Miyazaki Hayao's films. Although it shares many features of Miyazaki's other films (girl protagonist, antiwar message, preindustrial fantasy setting, flying sequences), Howl was not one of Studio Ghibli's biggest hits, and because of the...