Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. ix, 322 pp. (B&W photos., illustrations.) US$24.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5179-0403-6.
Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is an impressive book that displays a knack for close reading and careful, elegant writing that offers in-depth readings of classic anime films. This book marks an important moment in the development of anime studies (1995–2005), and offers a useful series of critical readings of films mostly from this era. From the perspective of someone familiar with anime studies over the past two decades, it is also, in Bolton’s own description of other critics’ work, “convincing but predictable” (104) in object choice and method. For this reason, and for the sake of the field of anime studies moving forward, I feel compelled to offer a critical reading.
Interpreting Anime brings the traditional method of textual interpretation to bear on a number of key anime films that have organized the reception of anime in North America and Europe, such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Summer Wars. (Bolton almost entirely avoids television, the “formulaic quality” [223] of which he doesn’t hide his disdain. Given the very definition that “anime” is TV animation, it’s hard to be convinced by this omission.) Bolton justifies focusing on films based on the premise that they “provide better support for the kinds of close visual readings I am arguing for” (18). For each film the author devotes one method or problematic: Akira and postmodern theory in chapter 1; Patlabor 2 and Vivian Sobchack’s film phenomenology dealing with the inescapability of representation in chapter 2; and Japanese theatre and issues of identity in relation to the cyborg figure and Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg in Ghost in the Shell in chapter 3. Otaku theory and the spectator make an appearance in chapter 4 in relation to original-video-animation (OVA) films Vampire Princess Miyu and 3×3 Eyes. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity appears in chapter 5 in relation to Millennium Actress. Each chapter generally involves an encounter staged between an anime film and another medium: manga and anime for Akira; live action film and television and anime for Patlabor 2; puppet theatre and anime for Ghost in the Shell films; the audience or viewer in chapter 4; contemporary theatre in relation to Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress; television animation and seriality and Blood; and the novel and Howl’s Moving Castle.
One of the foremost questions I bring is whether interpretation alone is an adequate framework for approaching anime today. Surely it was the dominant framework in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, with such books of cultural interpretation as Susan Napier’s Anime. Yet, since the early 2000s writings from Thomas Lamarre, Livia Monnet, Thomas Looser, Sharalyn Orbaugh—and indeed Bolton—have advocated for a combination of a media theory and aesthetic analysis of anime and interpretation. The impact of Lamarre’s The Anime Machine, for instance, was to make thematic interpretation seem insufficient unless paired with a consideration of the formal, aesthetic, or technological properties of a work. My own work and that of others like Rayna Denison, Ian Condry, Sandra Annett, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, Sugawa Akiko, Alexander Zahlten, Sheuo-Hui Gan, Marco Pellitteri, and Stevie Suan, has prolonged the need for a material, generic, historical, or aesthetic and media industry approach to anime that also brings to attention new anime texts and their reception histories. The work of Ōtsuka Eiji, Ishida Minori, Hikari Hori, and Daisy Yan Du has advocated for the importance of a historical and transnational approach to anime, placing it in the context of the Pacific War and the visual culture of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. These are works that build or bring new methods in relation to what are often new objects of study.
The significance of Bolton’s book lies in what Jaqueline Berndt aptly describes as its “recapitulation of how anime has been discussed in advanced Japan studies settings” (Jaqueline Berndt, “Interpreting Anime by Christopher Bolton,” Journal of Japanese Studies 45, no. 2 [2019]). To his credit, Bolton takes up some of the challenge of reading text visually. However, for scholars who have engaged with anime as an object for some time, Interpreting Anime casts somewhat too retrospective a glance without alerting readers to this fact. Familiar readings practices—textual analysis supported by generally Anglo-American theoretical paradigms—are brought to bear on familiar objects: Akira, Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Howl’s Moving Castle, anime films that are generally acclaimed, and/or written about. Granted, Bolton’s own work is one of the reasons these objects and methods are familiar in the first place. His work as associate editor on the field-changing Mechademia journal project is one of the reasons we have a canon of anime works and a familiar field and set of methods of analysis.
The book’s retrospective glance makes it important and interesting enough to be of benefit to a general anime enthusiast and offers particularly provocative readings of Akira and Blood: The Last Vampire in relation to manga and 3D animation respectively. What the book doesn’t offer is much reflexivity on analysis, or innovation in method, or engagement with newer objects of study. For instance, it makes sense that when Bolton turns to Akira, he also turns to Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism. Jameson developed his formulation of postmodernism in the 1980s, around the time Ōtomo Katsuhiro was writing and then animating Akira. The problem is that Bolton doesn’t historicize it as such. He offers a historical situation of Japan, pointing to the ways the film draws on postwar Japanese history for its iconography, but does not offer a similar historical situation of the theory used to analyze it.
Anime criticism is valid and important on its own; however, as the field starts to take clearer shape and a third generation of anime scholars begins to shape the field, I hope they will set out research projects that move beyond the narrowly interpretive approach espoused by this book. In so doing they would take up the challenge Bolton poses but doesn’t adequately deliver on: to combine his approach of “interpretive close readings of individual anime” with attentiveness to the wider media ecology of which it is a part (217–218). One can only hope that Bolton’s book and the conversations it generates will prompt us to think more carefully and creatively about the future of anime studies, beyond interpretation.
Marc Steinberg
Concordia University, Montreal