Anyway, on a slight tangent, time to do some book pimping:
Anime A History
So I mentioned this briefly when I first got my hands on it a couple of months ago but now that I've delved a lot deeper into the text I have more to say about it. In the English language world there honestly aren't that many academic/factual books about anime that are really worth your time. If you do a little bit of research you can find articles and essays here are there which are pretty good but, by and large, most of the work you find is really just a collection of disparate essays which are all arguing for their pet theory about this or that e.g. female identity in
Utena.
What makes Jonathan Clements
Anime A History different is that it's actually a scarily thorough scholarly work of history that devoted to the entire field of anime. Not only has Clements read the English sources, or Japanese translations of the Japanese book, but he can read all the native original Japanese sources too. He's intimately familiar with the entirety of the scholarship in the field and he does a great job in pulling it all together. Not only does he take all these varying sources and compile them but he examines them critically, pointing out where autobiographies make no sense and where people being interviewed have clearly got their facts wrong. It's thorough and comprehensive in a way that nearly every other book I've read on the subject isn't.
Probably the most interesting part of the book for anyone interested in the history of anime is the section that focuses on 'early anime' e.g. anything pre-1964
Astro Boy. Now, I imagine most people with an interest in the subject are well aware that there were anime works pre-1964 but I really hadn't grasped just how much anime had been produced in that period. To give you an idea, we don't get to
Astroy Boy till 1964 and therefore over 100 pages of the book deal with anime before that period.
What I really about the text is that you're not just getting a history of anime but you're learning about the history early 20th Century Japan as well as the earliest days of film both in Japan and elsewhere. Here's a few interesting extracts:
On Moral Panic
"The incorporation of cinema and cartoons as mere elements within the wider field of sideshow entertainment seemed to persist until 1911, when cinema itself was foregrounded as the focus of a new moral panic, in the wake of an allegedly harmful foreign import that glorified the activities of a live-action French master-theif.
Ji-Go-Ma (1911,
Zigomar)...
Zigomar was soon followed by it's French sequels, and by several Japanese works that purported to be continuations. To the horror of the Ministry of Education, Japanese children were reported 'playing' games in which they and their friends imitated the French criminals. Inevitably, newspaper reports began to associate juvenile delinquents with the film assigning the name 'Zigomar gangs' to disaffected youth...by 1912 newspaper were suggesting that
Zigomar was merely one of several dangerously influential narratives consumed by impressionable youth and that the nature of film itself made cinema a potentially dangerous and subversive blight on society."
There's a later section that deals with secret anime produced by government as instructional tools for war and later in that chapter:
On Fantasia
"In 1941, a dozen men assembled in a private Tokyo screening room. The select group had been called together to see an item that had been seized in the South Pacific by a Japanese navy patrol boat before the official outbreak of hostilities. Hidden in the hold of a raided American transport ship, a number of canisters of film had been brought back to Japan for inspection, and then prepared for a viewing.
The film was Walt Disney's
Fantasia (1940), screened in secret so that the animators of wartime Japan could know their enemy.
Fantasia itself would not be distributed in Japanese cinemas until 1955, but had a powerful effect on its tiny, invited audience. Ushio Soji, then working as animator under his real name of Sagisu Tomino, sat in the dark and wept at the finale...we only know this because it his account of the screening some sixty-six years later that confirms it...it was show only to the topmost animation directors."
