Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke

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Author: Susan Napier

Book Review
First off, some of the feedback I've received on my criticism of this book included the defense that this is an old book. That's not a defense against these criticisms. The mistakes here are timeless.

But first, I want to praise Professor Napier for her early and incisive analysis of anime. This book filled a critical gulf in early scholarly works about anime.

The book covers several major themes: body transformation (e.g. Akira and Ranma 1/2), hentai, high tech, shoujo, World War II, apocalypse, and the elegiac style in anime.

However, it falls into a common fallacy in scholarly analysis of pop culture: forgetfulness that the work being discussed is pop culture. It's designed to be broadly popular. Stories often go in a certain direction not to make a point, but because any other direction would lose the audience.

This book repeatedly violates Occam's Razor in attributing deep psychological import to plot twists that can much more likely be explained by catering to the audience's desire for wish-fulfillment. Several sections in the chapter on hentai attempt to psychoanalyze Japanese sexual identity via plot twists in Twin Dolls. I'm sorry, but a mildly popular pornographic anime is no evidence of anything.

Fortunately, Napier does provide much insight in other sections of the book, particularly in how she analyzes Nausicaä as an idealized shoujo character, and her comparisons of Barefoot Gen to Grave of the Fireflies, pointing out that Barefoot Gen is arguably the more powerful work because of its straightforward presentation, as opposed to Fireflies' cheesecloth elegiac style.

So, a mixed bag here, including some infuriating over-reaches of analysis and some interesting points.