100 Anime

Description

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 post-war shock waves which still propel Japan's mass media. 100 Anime is neither an academic text, nor a scant journalistic glance at Japan's 'freakishness'. The lively text is aimed at: those who have gleaned the weirdness of anime but could not uncover rhyme or reason for the weirdness; and 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 reader of 100 Anime 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.

Philip Brophy is a film director, composer & sound designer. He is founder of the Cinesonic International Conference of film Scores & Sound Design from which he has edited three books on film sound and music, the most recent being Cinesonic: Experiencing The Soundtrack, (AFTRS Publishing, Sydney 2002) He has also written for The Wire, London, and Film Comment. Prviosu publications include 100 Modern Soundtracks (bfi, 2004).

...small, to the point and relevant. -- Filmwerk