100 Anime - (Screen Guides) by Philip Brophy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An exploration of the wonderfully complex and beautifully disorienting world of Japanese animation - anime. Provides an overview of the importance of the anime industry in Japan by analysing 100 of its most important and influential productions. An ideal introduction to a fascinating genre.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

...small, to the point and relevant.

About the Author

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).