Building on a novel reading of Azuma's framework introduced in the present article the now mostly overlooked tension in fan cultural practices pointed out by Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers in relation to Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of pure and popular aesthetic disposition is reexamined. Focusing on Azuma Hiroki's book The Birth of Game-like Realism this paper both highlights the theoretical richness of works which have yet to be translated into English, and emphasizes the importance of manga research – in this case Itō Gō's book Tezuka is Dead – beyond the confines of manga/comics studies. Finally, the argumentation arrives at the plurality favored by the medium itself, suggested by Lamarre himself, but not ultimately prioritized.įollowing Casey Brienza's call for drawing on Japanese 'otaku theory' in order to further comics studies, the present article demonstrates how the wider interrelated discourse around anime, manga, and otaku can be productively related to fields such as Western fan studies. In the discussion of these issues, anime is viewed not as a text, but as a hub of interrelations, including the interrelations between audience groups. But does the same kind of criticality that Lamarre finds in Miyazaki’s prior works also apply to the latest one, and if so, to what extent? These questions leads one to reconsider whether the conclusions Lamarre arrives at actually capture the critical potential of his theory.

This free, critical relation seems to be most noticeably depicted in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 1984) and Castle in the Sky (Tenkū no shiro Rapyūta, 1986). What Lamarre sees in Miyazaki’s manga eiga is a new way of gaining “a free relation to technology” as idealized by Heideggerian philosophy, but, of course, “in animation” (Lamarre 62). Mimicking the first part of Lamarre’s book, this article approaches Miyazaki’s last work, The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu, 2013). This article aims to demonstrate how exactly Thomas Lamarre reads movement, plot, and characters in The Anime Machine (2009), as defined to an extent, yet not completely determined by the concept of the animetic machine.

The Anime Machine by Thomas Lamarre