Introduction

Japanese animation has been more broadly recognised and given fulsome academic commentary over the last two decades. However, there is arguably a need for a more philosophically consistent and theoretically integrated engagement with animation in terms of aesthetic philosophy.1 Of course, there are some notable exceptions which, as is acknowledged in more detail in the ensuing chapters, are certainly important to return to. Thomas Lamarre’s work, for example, has set an important agenda for discussing significant issues pertaining to animation as a medium in general as well as anime in particular. He has developed a distinctive theory of the composition of visual space and movement in Japanese cinematic animation works through his analysis of the “multiplanar image”, itself also rooted to a significant extent in an acknowledgement of the craft’s debt to 2D graphic imaging and cel animation (Lamarre, 2009: 3–44). In addition to Lamarre, Paul Wells has made an invaluable contribution to the analysis of animation in a more general sense and is accordingly referred to at a number of junctures. And of course there are key thinkers of contemporary aesthetic theory often invoked in relation to contemporary media, — Deleuze, Ranciere, Massumi, Shaviro and Žižek, to name the most obvious figures — who will also be discussed as appropriate.2