Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Thomas Lamarre contends that the history, techniques, and complex visual language of animation, particularly Japanese animation, demands serious and sustained engagement, and in The Anime Machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media.

The Anime Machine defines the visual characteristics of anime and the meanings generated by those specifically "animetic" effects-the multiplanar image, the distributive field of vision, exploded projection, modulation, and other techniques of character animation-through close analysis of major films and television series, studios, animators, and directors, as well as Japanese theories of animation. Lamarre first addresses the technology of anime: the cells on which the images are drawn, the animation stand at which the animator works, the layers of drawings in a frame, the techniques of drawing and blurring lines, how characters are made to move. He then examines foundational works of anime, including the films and television series of Miyazaki Hayao and Anno Hideaki, the multimedia art of Murakami Takashi, and CLAMP's manga and anime adaptations, to illuminate the profound connections between animators, characters, spectators, and technology.

Working at the intersection of the philosophy of technology and the history of thought, Lamarre explores how anime and its related media entail material orientations and demonstrates concretely how the "animetic machine" encourages a specific approach to thinking about technology and opens new ways for understanding our place in the technologized world around us.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. ix)
• Introduction: The Anime Machine (p. xiii)
• Part I Multiplanar Image
• 1 Cinematism and Animetism (p. 3)
• 2 Animation Stand (p. 12)
• 3 Compositing (p. 26)
• 4 Merely Technological Behavior (p. 45)
• 5 Flying Machines (p. 55)
• 6 Full Animation (p. 64)
• 7 Only a Girl Can Save Us Now (p. 77)
• 8 Giving Up the Gun (p. 86)
• Part II Exploded View
• 9 Relative Movement (p. 103)
• 10 Structures of Depth (p. 110)
• 11 The Distributive Field (p. 124)
• 12 Otaku Imaging (p. 144)
• 13 Multiple Frames of Reference (p. 155)
• 14 Inner Natures (p. 166)
• 15 Full Limited Animation (p. 184)
• Part III Girl Computerized
• 16 A Face on the Train (p. 209)
• 17 The Absence of Sex (p. 221)
• 18 Platonic Sex (p. 234)
• 19 Perversion (p. 242)
• 20 The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter (p. 252)
• 21 Emergent Positions (p. 265)
• 22 Anime Eyes Manga (p. 277)
• Conclusion: Patterns of Serialization (p. 300)
• Notes (p. 323)
• Bibliography (p. 351)
• Index (p. 367)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Although anime has been part of the Japanese cinema world for decades, only recently have research and criticism on anime surged. Lamarre's major object is to demonstrate how to "read anime." Lamarre (East Asian studies, art history, and communication, McGill Univ.) derives his stance from experimental sciences and technology studies, the technologies of the moving image, which give "priority to function and value over form." His investigation stresses the animated moving image rather than narrative or theme or even "patterns of editing." This approach involves post-Heideggerian thinking, Lacanian viewing, and Cartesian analysis of modernity. The author cites several Japanese researchers and anime creators, particularly in reference to Hayao Miyazaki, a major maker of manga film. In dealing with the significance of the "multiplaner image," Lamarre gives considerable attention to the animation stand and how it can be manipulated to produce the "dynamism of interactions that arise between viewers and animation that makes for the novelty of anime." Lamarre's arguments are complex, and he expects readers to have the necessary theoretical background to follow him in his scholarly journey. More visual examples would have been helpful. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals. K. Marantz emeritus, Kent State Univeristy