This is a layman review. In other words, it's written by an interested, non-academic, non-Japanese- speaking anime fan whose knowledge of the medium is patchy at best. Many readers, no doubt, will be in the same position and many, like me, will have looked forward to this book. I think they're likely to be disappointed.

It's not boring. Susan J. Napier throws out a steady barrage of comments, suggestions and speculations, some of which seem plausible, perceptive and thought provoking. Among the book's virtues is that Napier quotes anime professionals and critics in Japan, whose views make fascinating reading. Napier also quotes Western critics whose direct relevance is less clear, at least to a reader unfamiliar with them. For example, in the first pages she quotes a passage from John Treat (author of Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture) on how: 'to worry about the relation of the popular to high or official culture is to think about the perennial problem of value...perennial because value is so exasperatingly mercurial (p4).' Maybe, but it's not clear how this observation advances Napier's discussion, what it entails or 'proves.' There are many sentences like this, including provocative but undeveloped claims on animation. Thus 'animation is a fusion of technology and art, both suggesting in its content and embodying in its form new interfaces between the two' (p11). Much later, we're told, 'The definition of animation is of something that gives movement and life to inert materials...anime gives movement and life to any and all fragments of identity in a world that's insistently unreal' (p238). Too much of the book is given to little-argued statements like this, lending an impression -- fair or not -- of specious vacuity.

But then Napier has trouble with the concrete too. One reason it's hard to trust her is that she gets so much so wrong on the simplest levels. For example, she suggests the sci-fi ghost story Magnetic Rose is a self-contained anime (albeit based on a 'manga anthology'), when it's actually part of the anthology movie Memories. She talks of the 'puzzling and subversive' last TV episode of Evangelion when she means the last two. When Napier moves on to content she fares worse. Her biggest howler is perhaps in discussing Ghost in the Shell, where she asserts Kusanagi is a 'technological creation' with 'no past' (pp106-7). One of the key points of the film is that Kusanagi began life as a human. Similar sloppiness abounds, both in terms of plot mistakes and incorrectly describing what's on screen. There's little sense of what a particular film looks or feels like. For example, neither Napier's descriptions of the opening (p201) or end (p42/48) of Akira are accurate or adequate. Again, she opines 'perhaps the single most lyrical sequence in anime' is the melancholy canal-journey in Ghost, describing it as 'slow-paced,' 'a series of long shots' and 'a brilliant combination of beautiful music and images of crowds, water and rain' (p32). But does that really convey its lyricism to someone who hasn't seen the film? Similarly shallow is her discussion of the TV and film ends of Evangelion (pp101-2, 212-4), where Napier's penchant for abstraction and speculation gives way to a bland synopsis.