Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle

An academic study organised around modes rather than chronology: the apocalyptic, the elegiac and the festival, each illustrated through close readings of specific films and series.

Napier treats anime as a form worth serious critical attention and builds arguments about what its recurring preoccupations reveal.

Anime read as a literature, organised by mode rather than by studio or decade.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Napier's framework proposes that anime works predominantly in one of three registers: apocalyptic destruction, elegiac loss, and carnivalesque inversion.

The scheme is productive rather than exhaustive, and she applies it flexibly. Its value is in making comparison possible across works that otherwise appear to have nothing in common.

The method is literary: sustained attention to individual works, with particular emphasis on Akira, Grave of the Fireflies, Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke and Miyazaki's later films.

The readings are the book's substance, and they are careful and frequently illuminating about material that had not previously received this kind of attention in English.

A substantial portion concerns the representation of women, including the shōjo figure, the armoured female body and the ambivalence of magical-girl transformation.

This is among the book's strongest material, and it established a set of questions that subsequent scholarship has continued to work on. Napier is also careful to distinguish between representation that empowers and representation that merely displays, and she does not assume that a capable female figure is automatically progressive.

Napier reads the recurrence of destroyed cities, contaminated landscapes and technological catastrophe as connected to the atomic bombings and to post-war Japanese identity.

The argument is well made and is also the book's most contested claim, since it risks explaining a very large and varied industry through a single national trauma.

When it appeared, there was almost no serious English-language academic writing on anime, and the book did a great deal to establish the field.

Its influence is visible in most subsequent scholarship, including the work that disagrees with it. It also arrived as anime was reaching Western audiences in volume, which meant it shaped how a generation of English-speaking viewers understood what they were watching.

Clements and others have argued that Napier's approach is too textual and too willing to treat commercial products as expressions of national psychology without evidence from production.

The objection has force. Napier's readings are frequently persuasive as criticism and are not grounded in how the works were actually commissioned.

The prose is academic but not obscure, and the book was clearly written with an audience beyond specialists in mind.

Readers without a background in film or cultural theory will follow it without difficulty, which is not true of all the criticism in this section.

The revised edition extends coverage to Howl's Moving Castle and adds material on the international reception of anime.

The coverage stops well short of the present, which limits its usefulness as a survey while leaving its arguments intact. Readers approaching it now should treat it as a study of a particular period rather than as a guide to the medium as it currently stands.

Miyazakiworld is her later single-director study, and she has also written on Japanese literature more broadly.

The progression from this book to the Miyazaki study shows her moving from survey toward biography, and readers interested in the director should go to the later book. Her academic background is in Japanese literature rather than film, which accounts for the literary method and for the confidence with which she reads visual material as text.

For a reader who wants to think about anime rather than to learn how it is produced, this remains the most useful starting point in English.

It supplies a vocabulary and a set of questions, and it treats the material with a seriousness that was genuinely new when it appeared.

Readers who want criticism rather than history, and who are comfortable with an approach that reads popular work for cultural meaning.

It pairs naturally with Clements's history, and reading both is the fastest way to understand the main disagreement in the field. Readers who came to anime through the Ghibli films in particular will find a great deal here, since Miyazaki receives sustained attention throughout.