Thomas Lamarre teaches East Asian studies, art history, and communication studies at McGill University.

Presents a foundational theory of animation and what it reveals about our relationship to technology

Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Thomas Lamarre contends that the history, techniques, and complex visual language of animation, particularly Japanese animation, demands serious and sustained engagement, and in The Anime Machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media.

The Anime Machine defines the visual characteristics of anime and the meanings generated by those specifically “animetic” effects—the multiplanar image, the distributive field of vision, exploded projection, modulation, and other techniques of character animation—through close analysis of major films and television series, studios, animators, and directors, as well as Japanese theories of animation. Lamarre first addresses the technology of anime: the cells on which the images are drawn, the animation stand at which the animator works, the layers of drawings in a frame, the techniques of drawing and blurring lines, how characters are made to move. He then examines foundational works of anime, including the films and television series of Miyazaki Hayao and Anno Hideaki, the multimedia art of Murakami Takashi, and CLAMP’s manga and anime adaptations, to illuminate the profound connections between animators, characters, spectators, and technology.

Working at the intersection of the philosophy of technology and the history of thought, Lamarre explores how anime and its related media entail material orientations and demonstrates concretely how the “animetic machine” encourages a specific approach to thinking about technology and opens new ways for understanding our place in the technologized world around us.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: The Anime Machine

Part I. Multiplanar Image

1. Cinematism and Animetism

2. Animation Stand

3. Compositing

4. Merely Technological Behavior

5. Flying Machines

6. Full Animation

7. Only a Girl Can Save Us Now

8. Giving Up the Gun

Part II. Exploded View

9. Relative Movement

10. Structures of Depth

11. The Distributive Field

12. Otaku Imaging

13. Multiple Frames of Reference

14. Inner Natures

15. Full Limited Animation

Part III. Girl Computerized

16. A Face on the Train

17. The Absence of Sex

18. Platonic Sex

19. Perversion

20. The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter

21. Emergent Positions

22. Anime Eyes Manga

Conclusion: Patterns of Serialization

Notes

Bibliography

Index