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ANM0010.1177/1746847719856174AnimationBook reviews

Book reviews

animation:

Book reviews an interdisciplinary journal

2019, Vol. 14(2) 164­–173
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Christopher Bolton, Interpreting Anime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 328 pp.: ISBN
978 1517904036 $24 (pbk)

Julia Alekseyeva
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is an ambitious and intriguing take on the study of con-
temporary Japanese animation. Taking as his starting point the release of Otomo Katsuhiro’s
beloved dystopian anime Akira in 1988, Bolton demonstrates how several feature film, television,
and direct-to-video (OVA) anime reflect different aspects – formal, narrative, and ethical – that are
intrinsic to the medium.
Interpreting Anime is organized around the quite convincing assertion that anime is unique in
its ability to rapidly oscillate between extremes of identification and alienation. Anime tends to
immerse the viewer in extraordinary worlds while still maintaining a surprising number of meta-
textual, self-reflective, and even self-critical elements. Even more so than other genres, media,
and global animation traditions, anime winks at its viewer, creating layers of meaning beyond
what may be presented diegetically. As Bolton argues along these lines, anime is uniquely able to
render the viewer both a consumer and a critic – enjoying the world-making before him or her, yet
often with a reflective twist. This argument is refreshingly bold because it sets out to define all of
Japanese anime through its formal elements and this curious oscillation between immersion and
distance rather than through its historical or industry-oriented contexts.
Bolton develops this claim with case studies of a different film, television series, or franchise in
every chapter, including critically acclaimed films such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell (Oshii, 1995),
Millennium Actress (Kon Satoshi, 2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki Hayao, 2004), and Sum-
mer Wars (Hosoda Mamoru, 2009), as well as less commonly known films and series such as Read
or Die (Masunari Koji, 2003–2004), Patlabor 2 (Oshii Mamoru, 1993), 3x3 Eyes (Nishio Daisuke,
1991–1992), and Blood: The Last Vampire (Kitakubo Hiroyuki, 2000). With this, the book moves
from high to low art, critically-acclaimed art to pop culture, with relative ease. Each chapter also
compares the anime under consideration with a corresponding aesthetic mode reflected in the for-
mal qualities of the text, or a different medium’s take on the anime franchise. For instance, Bolton’s
discussion of Ghost in the Shell compares the film to traditional Japanese puppet theater, and his
chapter on Howl’s Moving Castle compares the film to the novel by Diana Wynne Jones (1986)
on which the film was based. At times, the comparisons are striking and reveal each film’s larger
theoretical strands. Ghost in the Shell, for example, is illuminated by Bolton’s analysis of Ningyo
Joruri (puppet theater) and its later iteration, Bunraku. Bolton links cyborg bodies with those of
puppets, and through this juxtaposition reveals an uncanny core at the heart of Ghost in the Shell,
cyborgs and the use of puppets, which are also animated in the sense that they are ‘brought to life’.
Book reviews 165

However, certain juxtapositions seem a bit forced. Bolton’s comparison of the manga and an-
ime versions of Akira, for example, describes the difference in plot between the two media as the
result of technological determinism, the idea being that the medium necessitates certain plot ele-
ments. For Bolton, the anime’s ending was more abrupt because the animators could not create the
complexities of depth of field that the manga’s more drawn-out conclusion depicted. However, the
anime Akira was an unparalleled masterpiece, due in large part to the complexities of its use of
both cel and early computer animation, and its abandonment of limited animation techniques. It
also had an incredibly high budget. Had Otomo desired to depict the manga’s ending faithfully, he
surely would have done so. While Bolton’s decision to compare the manga and anime versions is
certainly useful in its own right, it does not easily align with the book’s overarching thesis. These
sections occasionally struggle to find a cohesive argument, and seemingly exist just to allow the
book to fulfill a certain organizational framework. Given that some of these comparisons are truly
striking, while others would function better without them, the reader is left wondering why this
strict methodology was always necessary.
Bolton also includes a chapter in the middle of the book that functions as a kind of interlude
with a focus on the otaku (a somewhat derogatory word for an anime fan) in the context of the se-
ries 3x3 Eyes. According to Bolton, the otaku exemplifies many of the traits endemic to their object
of obsession: they are capable of embodying both extremes of immersion and critical distancing,
simultaneously. There is no shortage of critical analysis of the otaku, from Akuma Hiroki’s Otaku:
Japan’s Database Animals (2001) to Saito Tamaki’s Beautiful Fighting Girl (2001). Where the for-
mer frames the otaku as a postmodern consumer created by the disappearance of grand narratives,
the latter sees the otaku as a hyper-savvy textual interpreter, fully cognizant of anime’s multiple
layers of meaning and fictionality. Bolton weaves these texts into his work as well, and attempts
to find a happy middle between Akuma’s pessimistic reading and Saito’s far more optimistic take.
He argues that the otaku, like many of the films analyzed in Interpreting Anime, exist through a
combination of immersion and distance: otaku are consumers of innumerable animated media
(immersion), yet are able to analyze them critically, with surprising intellectual acumen (distance).
Bolton’s perspective skews toward a reading that gives otaku a great deal of empowerment and
agency, a rarity in a field which tends to treat the otaku with some degree of embarrassment. While
this view is greatly needed, Bolton’s argument is not entirely convincing here, and one wonders
whether the majority of otaku are truly as reflective and self-aware as Bolton and Saito claim.
Interpreting Anime is notable for its inspiring and, indeed, deeply ambitious desire to focus
almost entirely on the formal qualities of the animated films that Bolton analyzes. As he rightfully
notes, there have been strangely few academic texts which endeavor to analyze animation, and
especially its eclectic and prolific Japanese iteration, from the standpoint of theoretical and formal
analysis alone. The exception is Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine (2009), which avoids
excessive discussion of content and instead focuses on aspects intrinsic to animation technolo-
gies, such as anime’s ability (or inability) to produce a sense of depth and motion within a two-
dimensional frame.
It is debatable whether Bolton succeeds entirely in his formalist endeavor, given that such a
large portion of the book is devoted to the often complex and confounding narratives of the films
he describes, as well as the extra-diegetic facts of their distribution processes. However, Bolton
does accomplish something even more rare and necessary in the field of animation studies by
weaving a discussion of content and form into a comprehensive whole. In his writing, narrative
and formal analysis merge almost seamlessly, which allows the reader to maintain a holistic un-
derstanding of each work he discusses. One of Interpreting Anime’s best attributes along these
lines is that it is eminently readable. The book is delightfully free of the excessive technological
and theoretical jargon that tends to accompany even the best scholarship in the field. Indeed, I was
166 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

immediately bookmarking chapters for use in future courses on animation because Bolton’s clarity
lends itself perfectly to an undergraduate syllabus. More than Lamarre’s text, Bolton’s Interpret-
ing Anime finds its most perfect pairing with the work of Susan Napier, whose wide-ranging text
Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) weaves historical context and methodological
analysis to describe popular works of film and television anime. Notably, Interpreting Anime is
more formally inclined than Napier’s work, thus forming a crux between Lamarre’s formalism and
Napier’s thoughtful contextualization.
While some of its analyses remain underdeveloped, Interpreting Anime will no doubt become
an important text in a developing field. Perhaps even more crucially, its readability will surely lend
itself to opening anime studies to non-academic audiences. Bolton claims that one of his goals is
‘to preserve and extend the sense of wonder and surprise that originally drew us to these texts,
by helping readers develop new meanings and interpretations for themselves’ (p. 23). By merg-
ing formal and narrative-based analysis, Bolton’s book maintains, much like anime itself, a sense
of joy and wonder, and even playful experimentation, alongside its meta-textual and analytical
framework.

References
Lamarre T (2009) The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Napier SJ (2005) Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese
Animation. Chichester: Palgrave Mamillan.

Author biography
Julia Alekseyeva is an assistant professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania. She researches the relation between global media and radical politics. Currently, she is writing
a monograph on Japanese and French avant-garde documentaries in the 1960s.
Email: jalekseyeva@gmail.com

Weihua Wu, Chinese Animation, Creative Industries, and Digital Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017: 194 pp.:
ISBN 9780415810357, £115/£35.99 (hbk/e-book)

Shaopeng Chen
School of Arts, Southeast University (China), 2 Southeast University Road, Jiangning District, Nanjing City, Jiangsu
Province 211189, China

Looking back over the past several decades, the study of Chinese cinema has been flourishing in
English-language scholarship that covers a wide range of subjects, including Chinese film genres (mar-
tial arts, ghosts and immortals, etc.), key filmmakers such as the Chinese genealogy of directors, the
cinema in Communist China, Chinese postsocialist cinema, domestically-made blockbusters in the new
millennium and Sino-foreign co-productions. However, while Chinese animation has played a vital role
in shaping mass culture in contemporary China, scholarship has left the study of that field, particularly
animations produced in the new millennium, largely untouched or forgotten. When compared to its live-
action counterparts, there have been relatively few systematic book-length studies of Chinese anima-
tion. Sean Macdonald’s Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media (2015), which analyzes classical
Chinese animated works produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS) from the 1950s to the
1980s, was the first scholarly book in English wholly devoted to the subject. Weihua Wu’s Chinese