Thomas Lamarre

Machine generated contents note: -- Contents -- Introduction: Television Animation and Infrastructure Ecology -- Part I. The Screen-Brain Apparatus -- 1. Population Seizure -- 2. Neurosciences and Television -- 3. This Stuff Called Blink -- 4. A Thousand Tiny Blackouts -- Part II. A Little Social Media History of Television -- 5. Media Genealogy and Transmedia Ecology -- 6. A Little History of Japanese Television -- 7. Television and New Media -- 8. Sociality or Something Like It -- 9. Platformativity and Ontopower -- Part III. Infrastructure Complexes -- 10. The Family Broadcast Complex -- 11. The Home Theater Complex -- 12. The Game Play Complex -- 13. The Portable Interface Complex -- Conclusion: Signaletic Animism -- Notes -- Bibliography

A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media

The Anime Ecology

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.

A Media Theory of Animation

The Anime Machine

Lines of Sight-the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga-explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art-from scroll paintings to superflat-challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian (or one-point) perspective, the dominant mode of visual culture in the West since the seventeenth century. More than just a visual mode or geometric system, Cartesianism has shaped nearly every aspect of modern rational thought, from mathematics and science to philosophy and history. Framed by Thoma.

Lines of Sight

Mechademia 7

A major work destined to change how scholars and students look at television and animation With the release of author Thomas Lamarre’s field-defining study The Anime Machine, critics established Lamarre as a leading voice in the field of Japanese animation. He now returns with The Anime Ecology, broadening his insights to give a complete account of anime’s relationship to television while placing it within important historical and global frameworks. Lamarre takes advantage of the overlaps between television, anime, and new media—from console games and video to iOS games and streaming—to show how animation helps us think through television in the contemporary moment. He offers remarkable close readings of individual anime while demonstrating how infrastructures and platforms have transformed anime into emergent media (such as social media and transmedia) and launched it worldwide. Thoughtful, thorough illustrations plus exhaustive research and an impressive scope make The Anime Ecology at once an essential reference book, a valuable resource for scholars, and a foundational textbook for students.

Thomas Lamarre

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