Composing a Societal Backdrop: Case Studies in the Intersection of Anime and Music

The last twenty years have seen an impressive proliferation of academic works tackling the medium of Japanese animation (anime)- with studies such as Susan Napier’s Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation (2005) and Rayna Denison’s Anime: A Critical Introduction (2015) laying down a comprehensive framework of theoretical thinking that allows us to better extract meaning from this form of Japanese pop-cultural output. Some, such as Antonia Levi (1996), Sharalyn Orbaugh (2002) and Ian Condry (2013) have applied the lens of genre-theory and transnationalism to focus in on particular thematic sub-genres or trends in the globalisation of anime. Others, like Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s database animals (2009) and Sandra Annett’s Anime Fan Communities: Transcultural Flows and Frictions (2014), have turned the lens on the viewers of anime- utilising the language of fan studies to argue that it is not only the medium itself that is worth studying, but those that consume it.