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Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Comtemporary Japanese Animation. By SUSAN J. NAPIER. New York: Palgrave, 2000. viii, 311 pp. $16.95 (paper).
Writing a book on Japanese animation, or anime, is not an easy task. This is not because anime is an esoteric topic that attracts only a limited number of potential audiences. On the contrary, the difficulty of anime-rather than, for instance, Japanese cinema or literature--comes from its enormous popularity. The great number of anime fans and the tremendous emotional involvement of these amateur-experts in the object of their love make it almost impossible to produce a purely academic study of anime that would escape their critical scrutiny. It is this challenging task that Susan J. Napier takes up in her book, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing
Contemporary Japanese Animation. The strategy Napier adopts is to delimit the scope of her study very clearly. The coherence of the book is maintained through two organizing principles. First, instead of trying to touch on every aspect of anime in an encyclopedic fashion, Napier specifically focuses on the question of anime and cultural identity. Second, Napier proposes to examine anime in terms of what she calls "three major expressive modes," or three basic plot patterns and thematic motifs: the apocalyptic, the festival, and the elegiac. The apocalyptic is literally what it says; that is, it presents the visions of apocalyptic destruction and...