This handbook fills a substantial gap in the international academic literature on animation at large, on music studies, and on the aural dimensions of Japanese animation more specifically. It offers a unique contribution at the intersection between music and popular culture studies on the one hand, and research on Japanese animated productions (often called ‘anime’) as popular art forms and formats of entertainment, on the other. The book is designed as a reference work consisting of an organic sequence of theory-grounded essays on the development of music, sounds, and voices in Japanese animation for cinema and television since the 1930s. Each chapter deals with a phase of this history, focusing on composers and performers, films, series, and genres used in the soundtracks for animations made in Japan. The chapters also offer valuable interviews with prominent figures of music in Japanese animation, as well as chapter boxes clarifying specific aspects.

Has the virtual invaded the realm of the real, or has the real expanded its definition to include what once was characterized as virtual? With the continual evolution of digital technology, this distinction grows increasingly hazy. But perhaps the distinction has become obsolete; perhaps it is time to pay attention to the intersections, mutations, and transmigrations of the virtual and the real. Certainly it is time to reinterpret the practice and study of music. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran, is the first book to offer a kaleidoscope of interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars around the globe on the way in which virtuality mediates the dissemination, acquisition, performance, creation, and reimagining of music. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality addresses eight themes that often overlap and interact with one another. Questions of the role of the audience, artistic agency, individual and communal identity, subjectivity, and spatiality repeatedly arise. Authors specifically explore phenomena including holographic musicians and virtual bands, and the benefits and detriments surrounding the free circulation of music on the internet. In addition, the book investigates the way in which fans and musicians negotiate gender identities as well as the dynamics of audience participation and community building in a virtual environment. The handbook rehistoricizes the virtual by tracing its progression from cartoons in the 1950s to current industry innovations and changes in practice. Well-grounded and wide-reaching, this is a book that students of any number of disciplines, from Music to Cultural Studies, have awaited.

This book bridges the existing gap between film sound and film music studies by bringing together scholars from both disciplines who challenge the constraints of their subject areas by thinking about integrated approaches to the soundtrack. As the boundaries between scoring and sound design in contemporary cinema have become increasingly blurred, both film music and film sound studies have responded by expanding their range of topics and the scope of their analysis beyond those traditionally addressed. The running theme of the book is the disintegration of boundaries, which permeates discussions about industry, labour, technology, aesthetics and audiovisual spectatorship. The collaborative nature of screen media is addressed not only in scholarly chapters but also through interviews with key practitioners that include sound recordists, sound designers, composers, orchestrators and music supervisors who honed their skills on films, TV programmes, video games, commercials and music videos.

This handbook is an essential creative, critical and practical guide for students and educators of screen production internationally. It covers all aspects of screen production—from conceptualizing ideas and developing them, to realizing and then distributing them—across all forms and formats, including fiction and non-fiction for cinema, television, gallery spaces and the web. With chapters by practitioners, scholars and educators from around the world, the book provides a comprehensive collection of approaches for those studying and teaching the development and production of screen content. With college and university students in mind, the volume purposely combines theory and practice to offer a critically informed and intellectually rich guide to screen production, shaped by the needs of those working in education environments where ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ must co-exist. The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production fills an important gap in creative-critical knowledge of screen production, while also providing practical tools and approaches for future practitioners.

Bringing together dozens of leading scholars from across the world to address topics from pinball to the latest in virtual reality, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound is the most comprehensive and multifaceted single-volume source in the rapidly expanding field of game audio research.

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.

Race does not exist in animation—it must instead be constructed and ascribed. Yet, over the past few years, there has been growing discourse on the intersection of these two subjects within both academic and popular circles. In Race and the Animated Bodyscape: Constructing and Ascribing a Racialized Asian Identity in "Avatar" and "Korra," author Francis M. Agnoli introduces and illustrates the concept of the animated bodyscape, looking specifically at the US television series Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel, The Legend of Korra. Rather than consider animated figures as unified wholes, Agnoli views them as complexes of signs, made up of visual, aural, and narrative components that complement, contradict, and otherwise interact with each other in the creation of meaning. Every one of these components matters, as they are each the result of a series of creative decisions made by various personnel across different production processes. This volume (re)constructs production narratives for Avatar and Korra using original and preexisting interviews with cast and crew members as well as behind-the-scenes material. Each chapter addresses how different types of components were generated, tracing their development from preliminary research to final animation. In doing so, this project identifies the interlocking sets of production communities behind the making of animation and thus behind the making of racialized identities. Due to its illusory and constructed nature, animation affords untapped opportunities to approach the topic of race in media, looking beyond the role of the actor and taking into account the various factors and processes behind the production of racialized performances. The analysis of race and animation calls for a holistic approach, one that treats both the visual and the aural as intimately connected. This volume offers a blueprint for how to approach the analysis of race and animation.

This book aims to provide an account of both what and how onomatopoeia communicate by applying ideas from the relevance theoretic framework of utterance interpretation. It focuses on two main aspects of the topic: the contribution that onomatopoeia make to communication and the nature of multimodal communication. This is applied in three domains (food discourse, visual culture in Asia and translation) in the final sections of the book. It will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, stylistics, philosophy of language, literature, translation, and Asian studies.

One of the most remarkable trends in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades has been the resurgence of interest in the history, theory, and practice of rhetoric: in an age of global media networks and viral communication, rhetoric is once again "contagious" and "communicable" (Friedrich Nietzsche). Featuring sixty commissioned chapters by eminent scholars of rhetoric from twelve countries, The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies offers students and teachers an engaging and sophisticated introduction to the multidisciplinary field of rhetorical studies. The Handbook traces the history of Western rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome to the present and surveys the role of rhetoric in more than thirty academic disciplines and fields of social practice. This combination of historical and topical approaches allows readers to chart the metamorphoses of rhetoric over the centuries while mapping the connections between rhetoric and law, politics, science, education, literature, feminism, poetry, composition, philosophy, drama, criticism, digital media, art, semiotics, architecture, and other fields. Chapters provide the information expected of a handbook-discussion of key concepts, texts, authors, problems, and critical debates-while also posing challenging questions and advancing new arguments. In addition to offering an accessible and comprehensive introduction to rhetoric in the European and North American context, the Handbook includes a timeline of major works of rhetorical theory, translations of all Greek and Latin passages, extensive cross-referencing between chapters, and a glossary of more than three hundred rhetorical terms. These features will make this volume a valuable scholarly resource for students and teachers in rhetoric, English, classics, comparative literature, media studies, communication, and adjacent fields. As a whole, the Handbook demonstrates that rhetoric is not merely a form of stylish communication but a pragmatic, inventive, and critical art that operates in myriad social contexts and academic disciplines.