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The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ssjj/jyu007

1468-2680

Deborah Shamoon,

Multimedia Communication and Technology

In The Anime Machine, Thomas Lamarre laments the low level of critical discourse in anime studies in English, and issues ‘a call to move beyond the book report or film review model that currently holds sway in studies of anime, which tends to rely on a summary of the anime narrative in conjunction with a consideration of major themes’ (2009: p. xxxi). Although only four years have passed since Lamarre’s book was published, already the scene has changed dramatically, with the translation of seminal Japanese language texts such as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals by Azuma Hiroki (2009) and Beautiful Fighting Girls by Saitō Tamaki (2011). Anime studies in English is at last moving from description to theory, and engaging seriously with theoretical work by Japanese scholars. A major contribution to the field, and a complement to Anime’s Media Mix by Marc Steinberg (2012), The Soul of Anime by Ian Condry is the latest publication in that vein, offering new theoretical tools for discussing anime.