Experimental Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. x, 241 pp. (B&W illus.) US$23.95. ISBN 978-0-8223-5394-2.
This book explores the development of anime as a social phenomenon where a range of different actors inside and outside the Japanese anime industry work together, collaborating (sometimes facing tension and needing to compromise) at the various stages of the life of anime, from its planning, production and distribution to consumption. The author argues that the “soul” of anime emerges throughout the process and lives of participants’ hard work and devotion and the creative connection and synergy among them. The soul is not fixed, static and textual but it is evolutionary, dynamic and contextual. Thus finding and examining anime’s soul would be more of an anthropological inquiry than a textual or political economic one. I think the term soul is an excellent metaphor that aptly captures social energy, excitement and commitment that are strongly felt by participants in this field but difficult to be theorized and scientifically explained. Similarly, “dark energy,” another metaphor, cleverly conveys social meanings and dynamics generated by interactions among overseas anime fans, anime text and the industry.
While providing lay readers with a good introduction to anime with many interesting findings, the book would also serve as a helpful reference point for academic researchers who study anime, media, media production and distribution, cultural globalization, fan culture and copyright. The author skilfully combines his insights into these issues and neatly interweaves them throughout his narrative. The narrative is engaging so readers can easily follow the main arguments of the book and feel the social energy in the field (or “world”) of anime, however indirectly. As seen from the table of contents, the book’s organization does not show a clear thematic development. Yet, it is visible that the book moves its weight from the culture of anime production to participatory consumption over the chapters while keeping its focus on the collective nature of these activities. The middle part takes an historical angle to discuss the emergence of anime during the postwar decades, its growth as a franchise business with close relations with toy merchandising in particular and the co-existence of different orientations of anime aesthetics, production culture and business. Throughout the book, anime’s trans-media and border-crossing life across the fictional, real and virtual has been explored via relevant examples and cases. Overall, the book is informative and engaging, and succeeds in making a persuasive argument that contextualizing anime from social perspectives would be the most fruitful way to understand its multi-dimensionality as a medium, practice and culture.
Meanwhile, I want to point out the book’s two limitations, which apparently stem from its two key threads remaining as threads only rather than acting as theoretical arguments or frameworks that evolve over chapters. The first thread is the usefulness of the anthropological approach for investigating the social world of anime. Although the introduction gives us an effective guide to this approach and the main premises of it are revisited when key anthropological findings are discussed in the main chapters, I seldom feel a strong sense of theoretical development here. The book repeatedly highlights social relationships, settings and meanings found “within” the field of anime. I wish that it could stretch its anthropological investigation outward and explore what happens “in between” anime and society, explaining wider social structures and fabrications that underpin the social side of anime. The second core thread of this book is the idea of the collaborative creativity and social energy involved. The issues of collaboration, co-creation, connectivity and convergence have been hot topics for researchers in media, cultural and consumer studies. Indeed, anime and anime fandom would be an excellent example that vividly demonstrates how these phenomena emerge and evolve, shaping media text and media culture beyond national and linguistic borders. Instead of rather repeatedly arguing the importance of collaboration among participants in the field of anime, the book could make further efforts to help readers understand the social conditions that allow and nurture the prevalence of collaborative creativity. At the same time, the book could generate more concrete intellectual contributions to the ongoing debates around co-creation and convergence by exploring the implications of affective, immaterial and often free work/labour of anime production, distribution and consumption, connecting them to the issues of knowledge, training, management, hierarchy and ownership. Paradoxes, conflicts and dilemmas in this regard are commented on but mostly remain to be captured by relevant metaphors, explained and theorized.
Throughout the book, I can sense the author’s genuine excitement about taking part in the world of anime as researcher and fan. In a way, the book itself can be seen as a part of creative collaboration to expand and deepen the collective knowledge of anime and anime culture. It seemingly chooses to fit comfortably within and add new empirical findings to the existing knowledge while being reserved about unsettling and challenging it and proposing alternative perspectives.
Hye-Kyung Lee
King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
pp. 351-353