Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mapping Anime Scholarship in the Post-Genre Age

2019; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2019.0014

2327-6207

Kumiko Saito,

Japanese History and Culture

166 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) Kumiko Saito Mapping Anime Scholarship in the Post-Genre Age Bolton, Christopher. Interpreting Anime. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2018. 328 pp. $96 hc, $24 pbk. Anime, “a style of Japanese film and television animation” (Oxford Dictionary), has been a focus of Western scholarship since the early 2000s, and many brilliant books on anime, both academic and fan-oriented, have appeared since then. When the mysterious word “anime” began circulating as a trend word early in the twenty-first century, the question scholars asked was: “So, what is anime?” Today the question is: “So, which book should I use for my course on anime?” The shift of focus in these questions does not signify that scholars understood what anime is and then moved to the next question: rather, the new question suggests that many are experiencing difficulties judging which book represents which discipline, or even whether a particular book targets fans or scholars. This condition mostly derives from anime’s own character. Anime appears solely to consist of visual texts and is thus a medium with close disciplinary affiliations to film studies and literature; anime has proven to be quite compatible with many other fields in and outside scholarship, however, especially studies on—and participation in—fandom and pop culture, as well as anthropology, sociology, history, and industry research on media-crossing marketing strategies that fluidly traverse games, music, and other entertainment media. Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is a rare instance that accurately describes its task in just two words. Interpretation is a core practice of literary criticism, which is fundamentally an act of finding values and meanings in literary texts by means of close reading. Bolton introduces the critical stance of Interpreting Anime by explaining his disciplinary background: “I have been teaching Japanese literature and visual culture to college students for twenty years, meaning that I received my graduate training at a time when studying Japanese literature meant studying Japanese poetry, stage drama, or prose” (16). During his career, he has observed and has been engaged in “some exciting debates and decisions about the most productive and interesting ways to read this new medium” (17). One purpose of his book is “to trace that critical history” (17) by reading a range of anime. All chapters have appeared in different publication venues since 2002, so that this study tracks Bolton’s own critical history on anime as well as aspects of the scholarship on anime. Each chapter focuses on a specific anime film or original video anime (OVA or OAV), starting with Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988), and then progressing through Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor 2 (1993) and Ghost in the Shell (1995), Yuzo Takada’s 3x3 Eyes (1991), Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2002), Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), and Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). Bolton presents an in-depth and 167 ANIME SCHOLARSHIP IN THE POST-GENRE AGE comprehensive discussion of key aspects of each anime text, often with close attention to Japanese art and society. For example, the chapter on Ghost in the Shell connects the cyborg protagonist Motoko’s skepticism about her identity at the intersection of human and machine to the scholarly skepticism that oscillates between the implications of the female cyborg as, on one hand, “a euphorically powerful and flexible new posthuman (even feminist) subject” and, on the other, as “an objectified doll” (96). Then Bolton further expands his interpretive praxis to note the cyborg body’s commonalities with puppets in bunraku, a form of traditional puppet theater in feudal Japan, taking full advantage of his wide knowledge of Japanese literature. Along with his lucid and accessible language, Bolton’s well-balanced and sophisticated discussion makes this study an ideal choice for students and scholars who want a good overview of academic approaches to anime as well as for fans who seek more knowledge about the socio-cultural contexts of Japan. The hermeneutic approach to texts hinges this book to a specific location within anime scholarship. If we are to visualize a spectrum of theories and disciplines concerning anime for a better grasp of current anime scholarship, one end...