Philip Brophy,
100 Anime.
London: BFI publishing.
ISBN: 1 8445 7084 3
272pp
£12 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)

Anyone familiar with Philip Brophy’s fascinating work on Body Horror will not be surprised by how he approaches Japanese animation in 100 Anime. Brophy’s book is emphatically not a paint by numbers introduction to anime (or a “tourist guide book”, as he dismissively describes such works). Readers will not find a history of how Japanese animation came into being, nor will they find even a single discussion of an anime director or an anime studio. 100 Anime also does not offer such typical genre categorizations as “drama” or “comedy” although you will find such thought provoking descriptions as “Mutant Sci-Fi” or “Urban Power-Suit Melodrama.”

What 100 Anime does offer is a brilliantly conceived no-holds barred embracing of anime as an art form unto itself, an art form that is resolutely “other” in relation to live action cinema, photography, and Western animation. Brophy plunges into the sometimes dazzling sometimes dark torrent of anime’s unique visual and aural qualities. Brophy refuses to discuss anime in either implicit or explicit comparison to more referential media because he feels that would inevitably stigmatize it as “not-cinema.” Instead he sees anime’s mission as mapping an “alternative ‘unreality’ on its plane of materiality.” (3) This mapping seems to be a guiding principle that he finds in Japanese pop culture in general which he sees as “consistently privileg[ing] the imagined over the authentic.” (132)

The book is worth buying for the introduction alone. Brophy really looks at what makes animation and anime so distinctive. Among his most salient points are the “energized form” that helps anime “exploit the dynamism of movement” (9) and stimulates the medium’s obsession with metamorphosis. This insight has been available elsewhere but Brophy links it to the “mannequinned form”, anime’s fascination with the posthuman and the “mega-ornamental, hyper-extended figure.” (15) that characterizes so many anime bodies. He also includes a short discussion of anime’s “sonic aura” that explores the interaction between sound and silence in anime in a thought provoking section that I only wish had been longer.

Brophy also tries to link anime to certain aspects of Japanese aesthetics. On the whole he does this successfully, or at least provocatively. His most effective analysis is in his linking with the surface and decorative nature of Japanese traditional art (such as screens and woodblock prints)with the diagrammatic flatness of anime, suggesting that “[d]epth in anime is best characterized as an arrangement of flat decorative screens which appear to be progressively behind each other while contrarily declaring that the implied depth is but the limited expanse of the staged image.” (14) Perhaps a little more problematically, he also finds “Zen form and space” (10) and a “calligraphic momentum” (10) behind some of anime’s unique elements. While I don’t necessarily disagree with these ideas, I wish they might have been balanced with a discussion of some of the important elements that Japanese animators have taken from Western animation.

The rest of the book consists of two page discussions of some of the most interesting anime that has been created in the last four decades. Ranging from Kimba the white lion in the 60’s to such recent work as 2001’s Spirited Away, they are useful for anyone wanting a quick reference to a wide variety of anime. But Brophy’s discussions are far more than just plot synopses (although he does provide a little of that as well). Rather, they are dazzling and provocative analyses of these works as artistic entities unto themselves. Thus, although you will not find a discussion of Miyazaki Hayao’s humanism in his entries on Spirited Away (Japan 2001) Kiki’s Delivery Service (Japan 1989) or Mononoke Hime (Japan 1997), you will find a thoughtful discussion of the characters’ development combined with brilliant explorations of how the animation serves to delineate the characters. For example, of Chihiro in Spirited Away he writes that she “moves throughout…like a puppet of unbelievable realism. Her complete being is expressed more by mime than by mimetics….Thus, her mobility is rendered frail, unsure, traumatized. When she moves down treacherous steps to the workhouse of Kamaji…the elongated scene is a miniature ‘rite of passage’ through bodily control, lingering over every move no matter how slight.”(220) In a few sentences Brophy shows how animation can make a convention “rite of passage” trope into something memorable, touching, and unique.

Almost every one of these 100 mini-essays contains at least one such interpretive gem. Brophy’s discussion of Adolescence of Utena illuminates the doll like aspects to Utena and her crew but goes further, pointing out that the Baroque space she inhabits is “not merely a hermetic social sphere but a Russian doll of interior and disguised realms of sexual conflict and gender multiplicity.” (18) Even his essays on such pornographic/erotic works as Cream Lemon and Urotsukidoji, while not attempting to see them as great works of art, still give the reader the sense of what makes them strangely watchable, as when he links power, dynamism and sexual energy in Urotsukidoji‘s demon tentacle sex scenes.
There is little to criticize in 100 Anime. My main criticism is a compliment – I only wish the book were longer. As it stands, the book is a dazzling entrée into a world where unreality holds sway.

Susan Napier
Tufts University, USA.

Created on: Friday, 24 November 2006