One of the best overviews of the anime phenomenon, its history and cultural significance, ideal for surveys and in-depth study.

A fascinating guide to themes and films in the expanding Japanese megaverse. For fans, culture watchers, and perplexed outsiders, this expanded edition offers an engaging tour of the anime megaverse, from older artistic traditions to the works of modern creators like Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon, and CLAMP. Examined are all of anime's major themes, styles, and conventions, plus the familiar tropes of giant robots, samurai, furry beasts, high school heroines, and gay/girl/fanboy love. Concluding are fifteen essays on favorite anime, including Evangelion, Escaflowne, Sailor Moon, Patlabor, and Fullmetal Alchemist.

In recent years, anime—a Japanese style of animation—has become extremely popular in Western culture. Although in the West its audience previously consisted mainly of young children, it has increasingly become accepted as an art form that can be appreciated by all ages. Readers discover the controversy that has historically surrounded anime’s status in the West and its fans struggle to promote it as a serious art form. Anime’s leap from Eastern to Western culture is highlighted with full-color photographs and fact-filled sidebars.

This book describes the thematic and structural traits of a recent and popular development within the realm of anime: series adapted from visual novels. Visual novels are interactive fiction games in which players creatively control decisions and plot turning points. Endings alter according to the player's choices, providing a motivation to replay the game and opt for alternative decisions each time. Pictorial sumptuousness, plot depth and subtle characterization are vital aspects of the medium. Anime based on visual novels capitalizes on the parent games' attributes, yielding thought-provoking yarns and complex personalities.

The media industries in the United States and Japan are similar in much the same way animals on earth share a similar DNA, but while a horse and a kangaroo maybe 95% related on a biological level, they are also very different - this is the way it is with manga/anime in Japan and Hollywood animation/movies/TV. Although sharing some key common origins, they developed mostly separately but influenced each other significantly along the way. That confluence is now accelerating into new forms of hybridization that will drive much of future storytelling entertainment. Understanding these common and divergent "DNA" origins, the cross-influences and the independent traits is one of many reasons why this book is so important. Through original interviews with top creators in these fields and illuminating case studies including adaptations of Japanese mangas and animes for Hollywood remakes, Manga and Anime go to Hollywood analyzes the specific dynamics of this confluence between Japanese manga/anime and American film,animation and television. In addition, it shows how to use this knowledge creatively to shape the future of global narrative storytelling, including through the educational system. It is a fascinating to any reader with an interest in the inter-related history of Japanese manga/anime and Hollywood since the Meiji period through WW2, what is happening on the cutting edge right now - and into the future.

Appropriate for any public library collection, this book provides a comprehensive readers' advisory guide for Japanese manga and anime, Korean manhwa, and Chinese manhua. Japanese manga and anime, Korean manhwa, and Chinese manhua are Asian graphic novels and animated films that have gained great popularity in the last ten years and now are found in most public library collections. Mostly Manga: A Genre Guide to Popular Manga, Manhwa, Manhua, and Anime is the first readers' advisory guide to focus on this important body of literature. This guide provides information on all of the major manga and anime formats and genres, covering publications from the early 1990s to the present. It identifies important titles historically and provides a broad representation of what is available in each format. Selected major titles are described in detail, covering the general plot as well as grade level and pertinent awards. The author also discusses common issues related to manga and anime, such as terminology, content and ratings, and censorship.

Christianity has been in Japan for five centuries, but embraced by less than one percent of the population. It’s a complicated relationship, given the sudden appearance in Japan of Renaissance Catholicism which was utterly unlike the historic faiths of Shinto and Buddhism; Japan had to invent a word for “religion” since Japan did not share the west’s reliance on faith in a personal God. Japan’s views of this “outsider” religion resemble America’s view of the “outsider” Islamic faith. Understanding this through the book Orientalism by Edward Said, Patrick Drazen samples depictions of Christianity in the popular Japanese media of comics and cartoons. The book begins with the work of postwar comics master Tezuka Osamu, with results that range from the comic to the revisionist to the blasphemous and obscene.

"Frames ofAnime provides a wonderfully concise and insightful historical overview of Japanese animation; more importantly, Tze-yue G. Hu also gives the reader a much-needed frame of reference--- cultural and historical --- for understanding its development." - Harvey Deneroff, Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, Georgia "This is a valuable study that transcends most of its predecessors by situating Japanese anime in its cultural context and providing detailed insight into the lives and works of some of Japan's most prominent animators and their struggles to establish it as a legitimate form of cinema and television media. Its authorship by an Asian scholar also conversant with Chinese and Southeast Asian cinema and comic book culture gives it a unique comparative character."-John Clammer, United Nations University Japanese anime has long fascinated the world, and its mythical heroes and dazzling colors increasingly influence popular culture genres in the West. Tze-yue G. Hu analyzes the "language-medium" of this remarkable expressive platform and its many socio-cultural dimensions from a distinctly Asian frame of reference, tracing its layers of concentric radiation from Japan throughout Asia. Her work, rooted in archival investigations, interviews with animators and producers in Japan as well as other Asian animation studios, and interdisciplinary research in linguistics and performance theory, shows how dialectical aspects of anime are linked to Japan's unique experience of modernity and its cultural associations in Asia, including its reliance on low-wage outsourcing. Her study also provides English readers with insights on numerous Japanese secondary sources, as well as a number of original illustrations offered by animators and producers she interviewed.