100
Anime is an exploration of the wonderfully complex and beautifully
disorienting world of Japanese animation – anime. This expansive
& mind-blowing book delves deep into the chaos of meaning gorged
by anime's mutation of Eastern/Western themes, images and sounds. Read
this book & navigate the postwar shock waves which still propel
Japan's mass media. Ride cultural currents of animation, comics, cinema
& music which embody some of the most explosive ideas to ever be
contained within any pop culture.
100
Anime is neither an academic text, nor a scant journalistic
glance at Japan's ‘freakishness’. The lively text is aimed
at: (i) those who have gleaned the weirdness of anime but could not
uncover rhyme or reason for the weirdness; and (ii) those who already
know and revel in that very weirdness. Exploiting the current fascination
with modern Japan, the book fuses funky vernacular idioms, transcultural
and post-human imaginings, and electrifying concepts born of a technological
and audio-visual awareness. The flow of the text is designed to be giddy,
sensory, exhausting. Analysis is melted into observation; critique is
dispersed into sensory accounts; and overview is displayed as an expansive
plateau for further investigation. The reader will be stimulated with
revelations of the wild world of anime whilst being grounded by an overview
of: how vast the anime industry is in comparison to live action cinema;
how important the calligraphic vein of Japanese culture is in its dissemination
of highly graphic material; and how the westernized reading of Japanese
iconography requires a complete and irretrievable dumping of all that
we have learnt in the Judeo Christian Eurocentric postulation of semiotics,
symbolism and mythology.
More
than a flirtatious flick through weird cartoons, 100 Anime
presents an apparition of ‘the cinema’ turned inside-out:
reborn in a post-apocalyptic realm and remade by one of the world’s
most unique and hype-multiple cultures.
Asian
and Pan-Pacific postwar cultures are no longer confined to their territories
on the global map. They progressively invade, transgress and envelop
Euro and Anglo societies. Consequently, our understanding of pop culture
is being transformed in strange and compelling ways. For some –
and for the young in particular – an unlikely contentment blankets
the chaos released by collisions between East and West. If one is instinctively
attracted to all that is manifest by the postmodern condition, one can
understand the so-called collapse of meaning as a flowering of new possibilities
and permutations.
This
is not news – nor does one have to undertake a course to know
it. Time has well passed for the need to analyse pop culture, as if
it is a frustrating closed system of signs. Pop culture is too pervasive,
rampant, eclectic and multiple to be unraveled and remade into an academic
macramé pot holder. Yet this is not a generation gap –
it's a cultural gulf, wherein the collapse of meaning is refreshing
and stabilizing …
Japanese
postwar pop culture stands as the ground zero of this mutative phenomenon.
Somewhere between the mid-40s nuclear decimation of old world Hiroshima
and the early-60s electronic reconstruction of new world Tokyo lies
a dimensional warp. The new and the old fold into each other, forever
defining Japanese fabric as a hybrid polymer of exacting tradition and
radical invention. Smell the old in Japan – it shines like new;
rub the new – it sounds old. Sense, experience, comprehension
and meaning are melded into a living sensurround which can make you
feel simultaneously engulfed and detached in its urban and rural terrain.
Japan – that fascinating 'empire of signs' – can be imagined
as a transcultural hologram, sent to us in the West as a concentrate.
It comes in a hydraulic anti-gravity capsule, labelled in five languages:
"the taste of meaning". Drink it and you will understand the
free-floating collapse of meaning, the pleasure of weirdness, and the
heady flowering of new permutations in the communication of culture.
Anime
and manga (Japanese comics) are the most immediate and potent signs
of Japan's postwar pop culture. After your first random fifteen minutes
of any (non-US-dubbed) anime you're bound to be overwhelmed by its otherworldliness.
You will encounter a different gravity, an unlikely atmosphere, an unexpected
climate. Tangible one moment, it melts into a strange texture the next.
Once caught by its ocular excess and sonic gestalt, your sense of the
imaginable future is radically changed. The growth in Western audiences
over the past five years testifies to the addiction these worlds induce.
And you too can be easily snared by the sexy danger of it all, as you
stand before a world of paranormal engines, metallic succubae &
cute weapons. Dive in – things become viscous, shiny, loud. This
is the appeal, the fascination, the allure of Japanese animation.
100
Anime threads a counter-ideology through its words to address
this irritating bias. The book in effect aims to touch a rash of cultural
indentations rendered by the hyper-fungal spread of anime over the last
thirty years. The result is a sensorial critical text, designed to allow
one to feel the spongy deeper levels of meaning in anime – without
reducing it to familiar terrain. Ultimately, anime is enduringly strange
and microcosmically weird. Scanning and dissecting some of the form’s
most perplexing and overwhelming titles, 100 Anime
exacts & proclaims the confounding cultural difference that produces
plastic beings, intelligent metals & beautiful worlds.
