Book review: Interpreting Anime

Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is an ambitious and intriguing take on the study of contemporary 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 Summer 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 formal 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’.

However, certain juxtapositions seem a bit forced. Bolton’s comparison of the manga and anime 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 elements. 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 series 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 former 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 technologies, 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 understanding 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 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 Interpreting 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 merging 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.