The Soul of Anime is a scholarly look into Japan’s anime industry, media and fandom. This is a “serious” book about a fun topic. Published in 2013 it recounts ethnographic accounts, interpretations and conclusions on participant observation and interviews rating since (as far as I could tell) 2004. The aim of the book, I think, is to develop the concept of Collaborative Creativity as the combustible which keeps the industry alive and working in synch with parallel industries and fandom. Condry defines the anime industry as being transmedia, that is it embraces/crosses/feeds other medias such as toys, figurines, video games, manga and at the same time feeding from them. So the study in the book contains references to all these media and their relationship with the anime industry. Collaborative Creativity arises from these relationships to create characters and worlds depicted in anime films but also recreated in toys and video games as well as fan created media (fan art, fanfic, fan videos, etc.) I don’t think I am capable to develop more this concept here but I guess I have given a slight initial approximation.
In addition to insights on Collaborative Creativity I found two aspects of this book extremely interesting. The first one is the ethnographic tales on meeting reputed directors and artists, participation in script, storyboard meetings and even voice recording for an anime film. The second one is the multiple references of interesting anime including some failures. I ended up with a short list of anime I didn’t know about but which I want to watch now: mainly Summer Wars and The Girl who leapt through time by Mamoru Hosoda who Condry actually met.
My edition was published by Duke University Press and it has 242 pages
No comments:
Post a Comment