Through the Looking Glass

The magic and mastery of anime springs to life in this gorgeous celebration of the genre that features more than 150 full-color frames.

ANIME GOES TO WAR: A powerful narrative engine, such as Kaneda’s red motorcycle in Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira, war is thebeating heart of anime, its shadow hovering over various genres.

HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN?: Man versus machine. Exploring new dialectics of body and mind through films like Rintaro’s Galaxy Express 999 andMamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: On the other side of the mirror, we discover wonderful worlds in dreamlike colors populated with protective spirits, fantastic creatures and humans that save the world like the messianic girl in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä to the Space Pirate Captain Harlock

LIFE NOW: Exhibiting the metamorphosis of society and lifestyles, with scenes from family life to the schoolyard to the company, anime also sketches the human tragic-comedy with great acuity like Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name.

This uniquely powerful form of artistic expression has embraced complex and provocative ideas since its inception in the mid twentieth century.

This dynamic and wide-ranging book explores eighty key themes of the genre, from wars to natural disasters, nature to ecology, childhood to magic, dystopias to fables. It looks at more than one hundred masterpieces of Japanese animation, including Akira, Ghost in the Shell, One Piece, Princess Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies and Howl’s Moving Castle, to show how practitioners consistently balance tradition with modernity and how anime’s distinct style has influenced other forms of media such as video games, comic books and live-action films.

Covering an enormous range of talent--from Isao Takahata, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, and Makoto Shinkai to Studio Ghibli and Mamoru Oshii--it demonstrates how anime makes room for limitless creativity. Unfettered by the physical constraints of nature’s laws, these artists realize our deepest emotions and our wildest dreams.

NATHALIE BITTINGER is a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Strasbourg, France. She has published several books on Asian cinema.