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Summary: teoría y crítica, no historia ni estética
Review: Ante la insuficiencia de textos criticos sobre animación este libro proporciona un buen panorama sobre algunos de las más importantes constantes del género "anime". Descalificarlo por no ser lo que no es me parece bastante injusto. Susan Napier no pretende ofrecer un trabajo totalizador (en efecto la parte estética del anime no está suficientemente desarrollada), sino una introducción a los temas y obsesiones de un género de la cultura popular contemporánea particularmente interesante. Un buen trabajo de teoría y crítica sin duda.
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Summary: Solid academic intro to anime...but lots of gaps/stereotype
Review: Anyone who's taken a college-level Japanese class in the last few years knows that most of the students are there because of ANIME. That's the major hook for those of us who want to learn the language. Napier's book definitely fills a need: that of students and professors looking to incorporate anime into their curricula, in a way that reflects current Japanese society, pop culture, and traditional ways of thought. She does a good, solid job of this, and hits all the high notes... sailor moon, akira, atom boy, etc. But what about everything else??? The U.S. media (and academics, apparently) still have a pretty narrow view of what constitutes anime, and stereotypes abound. But this is still a solid, plausible look at the "anime phenomenon" from the academic perspective, and a lot more exciting than reviewing your hiragana or kanji! ** But anyway, real otaku should be holding their breath for THE ANIME ENCYCLOPEDIA, which is coming in September. If you're hardcore (or aspiring to be), definitely check this one out. It's 600 pages, with over 2,000 anime listed, dating from 1917 till the present. All the details on all the films. I think it's by Jonathan Clements, who was the old Manga Max editor in the U.K.
Rating: 
Summary: Sometimes interesting, but dense and slanted
Review: As other reviewers have stated, this book is not really an overview of contemporary Japanese animation. Rather, it is a work of film criticism. Unfortunately, two problems mar what would otherwise be a halfway decent book. First, the author writes in dense, verbose academic style that often uses pages of text to say basically nothing (the entire first chapter is especially bad with respect to this information/verbiage ratio). The second problem is even more annoying, in that Napier seems to see all sociocultural issues through the extremely tinted lenses of "political correctness" melded with a simplistic and shallow form of feminism. If you're looking for a work on anime that will really give you an appreciation of the form along with a more in depth (and unslanted) look at the Japanese culture which created it, then I'd much sooner suggest Samurai from Outer Space : Understanding Japanese Animation by Antonia Levi.
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Summary: Great for students, maybe puzzling for others
Review: As the divided reviews of this book suggest, Napier's book seems to have a positioning problem: many general readers find the writing too abstract, dislike Napier's practice of "reading meaning into things," and are justifiably upset about the scattered factual inaccuracies in the writing. In my opinion, this is actually a very good book; it works best, however, for a broad but specific audience. Napier is a professor of the humanities -- she started out specializing in Japanese literature -- and she writes like one. As some critics have pointed out, Napier is not an anime "fan" in a conventional sense, and it's clear that she isn't up to date on every aspect of fan culture, including the encyclopedic desire for detail and accuracy which many fans demand. However, despite some angry reader comments, Napier is not an "intruder" from the distant world of academia who has swept down on anime to fulfill someone's hypothetical publication requirement. Although anime is not her home territory, she treats it with enormous respect, choosing her representative texts carefully. Her experience and perspective allow her to discuss patterns and consider trends and themes in ways which much popular writing about anime can't do. At the same time, her writing style -- while actually very accessible for an academic book -- seems to put off many casual readers who weren't expecting the whiff of theoretical abstraction. (Suggestion: if you hate the very idea of an anime book that uses terms like "the feminine," "physical fragmentation" or "apocalyptic identity," this probably is not a book for you.) Anime is becoming more and more a subject for academic, "high-culture" consideration in both Japan and the U.S., and that seems like a good thing. Fans and academics don't need to be at each other's throats -- everyone can coexist happily. After all, look at the way film culture works! As advice to readers, I think Napier's book will probably be most interesting to anime fans who already spend a lot of time with literary abstractions, or students and fans who are interested in writing and thinking critically about anime -- it's been well received by students at a couple of universities I know who found it very valuable when writing papers on anime subjects for their classes. It's especially useful on subjects like feminist thinking, sexuality, and ecological attitudes: the kind of seriously hard-core issues that American animation never seems to address, and that much writing on anime fails to dig into deeply enough.
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Summary: A very educational look at Anime
Review: Aside from a great cover, this book is an extremely interesting read, taking a whole new look at anime. I wasn't sure what to expect, but this isn't a guide to anime movies, or even anime in general. Rather, it takes fairly popular titles and explores the meaning behind the movies. A very interesting look at anime through the eyes of a professional. Enhances the experience.
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Summary: A deeper look at anime
Review: Back in college I had a bunch of friends who were heavily into anime and so I ended up watching quite a bit of it. The main reason for watching it was sophisticated level of animation, quite a bit beyond anything being done in the U.S., but there were also some interesting themes and characters. I enjoyed this book because it was fun to read an attempt to look at some of the underlying themes in those movies. The author's analysis of 'Princess Mononoke' was brillant and gave me some insights into why this movie was a such a success in Japan, an advanced industrial society whose native religion, Shintoism, involves the worship of nature. She also did a nice job with the 'Ranma 1/2' series(about a boy who changes sex), and the 'Evangelion' series (a powered armor anime that is a fairly sophisticated). On the other hand, the author seems a little bit over obsessed with gender issues. So for example 'Ghost in the Shell' is a masterpiece that addresses questions about human identity in the face of transforming technology, but the author misses most of the symbolism and focuses on the which characters are female and why. I found myself angry when the author insisted on applying this gender based analysis to 'Grave of the Fireflies', the story of an orphaned boy and his baby sister slowly succumbing to poverty in World War II Japan. If you are someone like me who used to watch these films and is interested in looking at them with an in depth approach, I'd have to recommend this book, even with the reservations about the gender based analysis
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Summary: Finally, someone gives anime the attention it deserves
Review: Here it is, one of the most serious, well thought out books on anime written by a single author (rare if you have tried to look for scholarly books in this area). Instead of writing to a bunch of fans in order to expound on the glories of anime, Napier writes critically and intelligently, and while I do not always agree with her reading of certain texts, she does explain her position well, articulating that position in well structured theory. I am thrilled to see that other people are doing this very important work, as anime has become a serious cultural phenomenon to consider--taking the West by storm. It is time, I think, to actually critically engage these texts and think through what we are watching and the effects that it this media has on our culture.
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Summary: Um. . . pretty good but. . .
Review: Honestly I haven't read the other reviews so someone might have already mentioned this, but the labelling of certain scenes from the different anime is wrong that is not Akane in the picture it's Ranma's mother, and in another picture that is Kaneda riding the bike definately not tetsuo
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Summary: The Woman Who Ate the Metanarrative
Review: I am not a fan of Post-Modern literary analysis. I cannot get enthused about any method of viewing artistic creation that has a paradigm or 'method' to its madness, but Post-Modernism is a pet peeve. By the end of a Post-Modernist study, I know considerably more about the writer's ideas about method than I do about the ostensible subject. Napier is by no means the worst example of this I have seen, but she still falls for the substitution of terminology for content that is so rife in this school. And the same willingness to renegotiate narrative paradigms without any allegiance to the source context. The title is somewhat misleading. I picked up 'Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke' because the title seems to promise a survey of a range of anime. Actually, the organization of the book, and the basis for the inclusion of a particular title, is primarily driven by a set of theories about anime. 'From' and 'to' are inapplicable. The primary sections of the book are essays, one group about 'Body, Metamorphosis, Identity', another about 'Magical Girls and Fantasy Worlds', and a last on 'Anime Confronts History.' The productions selected for inclusion were chosen by the author's need to make a point. While Napier does cover some important anime (Evangelion, Mononoke, Akira, Miyazaki Hayao, etc.) there are many others that might contradict her theses that are simply glossed over. In the section on 'Body', there are many cases where she seems completely unaware of focusing on a factor and interpreting it in an American way, divorcing the material from its Japanese root. In other words, the effect of 2,000 years of Japanese culture is minimized, and perspectives common to many cultures are presented as if they were uniquely Japanese. Anyone who watches anime knows that the physical is an important part of the art form. But American film is just as exploitative if not more so. The shame is that films like 'Akira' and the 'Ghost in the Machine' have much more to them than this, and all that is missed. Napier is quick to use American definitions of pornography as well, rather than use cultural divergence as a way to gain insight into what the Japanese consider intimate or prurient. Another example of this is in a longer discussion of Evangelion as an apocalyptic film. Keep in mind that there are two different endings to Evangelion, and that the series ending really is not about apocalypse at all. The second ending, of course, definitely appears to be an apocalyptic vision. Napier takes the repetitive presence of some arcane Judeo-Christian symbolism as evidence that the director really intended a Christian 'Revelations' context and pursues that to excess. In doing so, she completely missed the fact that the film is also an enactment of the Kojiki, an important Japanese creation legend. My personal belief is that the misleading Christian symbolism is used to create a mysterious atmosphere, but in no way is intended to become the 'meaning' of the film or the series. By failing to note the Japanese facets of Evangelion, Napier tries to recreate it in an American context. To me, this is a narrow vision. I find the use of Post-Modern terminology when plain English will do tedious. I don't think that 'problematize,' defamiliarize,' and 'deassurance' are value added. At best, they are a short hand, and at worst, they mislead the reader into thinking that they stand for the creator's actual purpose. So read this with the warning that it is not an unbiased attempted to expand upon our knowledge of anime as an art form. Susan Napier has a several theses that she wishes to propound. Her choices are based on their ability to promote her opinions. Had the book been represented as what it actually is, I would have far less to quibble about, although I would still have disagreed with several of her ideas. Alas, this is decidedly not a study of anime as a Japanese phenomenon, and that is what I was looking for.
Rating: 
Summary: Psychobabble-gum Crisis
Review: I had the opportunity to listen to a lecture by Susan Napier at an anime symposium in Minneapolis last October (2002). She was certainly the best speaker there with her topic of Liminal Worlds and Liminal Girls. She is very knowledgeable about the genre, obviously taken with it, and delves into it voraciously. Unfortunately, that is not the Susan Napier that comes across in this book, and my admiration for her passion soon turned to disappointment. Her writings go way beyond introducing anime to the uninitiated, or helping those (like me) already enamored with the genre to achieve a greater appreciation of it. Rather, she spends a great deal of time psychoanalyzing stories through what appears to be a predetermined view of the world. While perusing this book, I paid special attention to those portions that address stories that I am most familiar with, like Ranma ½ by Rumiko Takahashi. Anyone who has read the manga or seen the anime has little difficulty absorbing what Ranma ½ is about; a 16-year-old boy (Ranma), because of a recent curse, occasionally changes into a girl. He is affianced, by parental arrangement, to boy-hating 16-year-old Akane. Neither of them approves of the match, but neither of them can admit that each likes the other. One doesn't have to go any farther to understand why this creates the volumes of humor, trauma and hijinks that it does. Yet Ms. Napier doesn't seem to be able to take this at face value. According to her thesis, there must be some deep psychological meanings and hidden pathologies causing these discomforts. They must be addressed, rooted out, and corrected. To most well adjusted people, the fact that this life-long boy now becomes a girl is more than enough cause for consternation. But Ms. Napier uses these understandable and expected reactions to glide into summary judgements about societal confusion, homophobia, strict gender roles and generational conflict. She goes so far as to state that, according to the story, "It is clear that the male is the norm, and it is the female that is one of a variety of attributes (including panda-ness, pig-ness) that signify difference. Furthermore, being female is coded as being inferior to either pig or panda." These aren't supported conclusions; they are the legerdemain of sexual politics, and cut out of whole cloth. When Ms. Napier asks why Ranma thinks that he and Akane can't be friends now that she knows he's a boy, her conclusion is that "The answer lies in the strict gender construction on which his and Akane's world is based." No, the answer is rooted in Akane's inexplicable boy-hating attitude. Given the level of analysis applied to the story, it's surprising that Akane's view passes without commentary. Does she consider Akane's hatred of boys 'normal'? This deconstruction of the story makes it decidedly 'un-fun'and without even academic value. It may be possible to use Ranma ½ as a jumping-off point for discussions about adolescence, relationships and sexuality, but it is a serious mistake to treat Ranma ½ as the embodiment of any conclusions that may be reached, particularly from such a western academic perspective as Ms. Napier's. I could go on for pages with other stories that come in for similar treatment, but this is enough to get the idea. Perhaps a better title for this book would have been Social Psychology in Anime. One can only help wondering what Ms. Takahashi thinks of such analysis of her work. My guess is that she would be astonished to learn that her manga/anime was so replete with layers of hidden cultural commentary. Analyzing an entertainment medium is a worthy topic as long as you keep in mind that it is, first and foremost, entertainment, as Patrick Drazen does in his excellent book, Anime Explosion. Ms. Napier seems to lose sight of that on occasion, which does a disservice to the wonders of anime and manga, and well as her otherwise talented ability to make observations about the genre. To paraphrase the Freudian saw, sometimes an anime is just an anime.
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