Anime Through the Looking Glass

A uniquely powerful form of artistic expression, anime 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.