Interpreting Anime

For students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches

Well-known through hit movies like Spirited Away, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, anime has a long history spanning a wide range of directors, genres, and styles. Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is a thoughtful, carefully organized introduction to Japanese animation for anyone eager to see why this genre has remained a vital, adaptable art form for decades.

Interpreting Anime is easily accessible and structured around individual films and a broad array of critical approaches. Each chapter centers on a different feature-length anime film, juxtaposing it with a particular medium—like literary fiction, classical Japanese theater, and contemporary stage drama—to reveal what is unique about anime’s way of representing the world. This analysis is abetted by a suite of questions provoked by each film, along with Bolton’s incisive responses.

Throughout, Interpreting Anime applies multiple frames, such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of postmodernism, giving readers a thorough understanding of both the cultural underpinnings and critical significance of each film. What emerges from the sweep of Interpreting Anime is Bolton’s original, articulate case for what makes anime unique as a medium: how it at once engages profound social and political realities while also drawing attention to the very challenges of representing reality in animation’s imaginative and compelling visual forms.

• Beautiful Fighting Girl
• Anime Impact: The Movies and Shows that Changed the World of Japanese Animation
• The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media
• The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation
• The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Experimental Futures)
• Anime: A Critical Introduction (Film Genres)
• Anime: A History
• Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation
• They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Fourth Edition)
• A Geek in Japan: Discovering the Land of Manga, Anime, Zen, and the Tea Ceremony (Revised and Expanded with New Topics)