100 Anime is an exploration of the wonderfully complex and beautifully disorienting world of Japanese animation - anime. This expansive and 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 and 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.
