Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle by Susan J. Napier

Also, I’ve seen my fair share of anime, and I’m a member of the generation that is old enough to have seen most of the works Napier discusses in Anime. The first chapter of the book (appropriately titled “Why Anime?”) explains why Japanese animation is amazing and exciting and well worth academic attention, and I feel like it conveys a great deal of appreciation and respect for the medium. My experience of reading the book was completely the opposite of the bad rumors I had heard. I didn’t have a particularly strong impression from the chapters on magical girls from the original 2001 edition that I had read as a freshman in college (probably because I was eighteen years old), and several people had said that the book is poorly written, gets plot points wrong, and doesn’t respect anime as a medium. If I had to guess, it probably had something to do with the bad reputation the book had (has?) among anime fans. I had taken a lot from Napier’s two earlier books on literature ( Escape from the Wasteland and The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature) as an undergraduate, so I’m not sure why it took me so long to sit down and starting reading Anime.

For whatever reason, however, I read the 2005 updated edition of Susan Napier’s book on anime during my first winter break and was so inspired that I decided to start writing about popular media, too. This is something I wouldn’t have dreamed that I’d be doing when I first entered graduate school.

Title: Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese AnimationĪlthough I consider myself a literature person, it might be better to call what I do “media studies.” I write papers about books, but I also write more than a few papers about movies, and at least half of the Japanese movies I watch and write about these days are animated.

Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle by Susan J. Napier