In Anime's Identity, Stevie Suan proposes a methodology for analyzing a media form that is predominantly associated with Japan and Japanese culture. Through an incisive review of Japan's actual role in production and marketing of anime, including both popular and academic perspectives, the study questions the simplistic assumption that anime is Japanese, revealing instead how the media form “has coordinates in relation to Japan that cannot easily be escaped” (p. 31) and a history of transnationalism that is established rather than recent (pp. 64, 202). Grounded in this historical reparation, Suan's approach balances discourses on globality—considering hierarchies of international labor, for example—with a formal lens that grapples with the specificity of “anime's media-form,” the term that Suan demarcates as the study's object (p. 24).
Suan's methodology is guided by the notion that “each anime is its own network of relations” (p. 147). Apart from tracing semantic shifts that attend the term “anime,” Suan lays disciplinal groundwork for dealing with such networks. Several points of departure are identified: Suan echoes the concerns of Ani Maitra and Ray Chow regarding disciplinal boundaries, among others. He also discusses the difficulties of situating anime within existing divisions of area studies and suggests, following Jacqueline Berndt's articulation, that anime may help reorient such fields as to where “boundaries” currently lie (pp. 28–32). Suan identifies media studies, area studies, and performance studies as key interfaces when conducting a formalist examination of anime's transnational features (p. 6).
Apart from tracing international flows underlying anime production, the book's strength lies in synthesizing a wide range of theoretical approaches to the formalist reading of TV anime, which it distinguishes from film anime and other genres of animation.Footnote 1 Further articulating Rayna Denison's insights regarding this distinction (p. 5), Suan addresses the tendency to conflate medium and specific practice by reframing anime as a performance of the medium of animation (pp. 151–52). For this purpose, he adapts Berndt's concept of the “manga-esque” to the “anime-esque” (p. 17) and remaps interrelations of medium, materiality, and conventionality by synthesizing Caroline Levine's theory of form and Thomas Lamarre's works on animation and media infrastructures, among others (pp. 21–25). This matrix, along with Marc Steinberg's discussions of media mix and Azuma Hiroki's theory of database (pp. 38–39), is later combined with performativity, interfacing with J. L. Austin via Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, to compare the felicity of performances (pp. 160–62). With this framework, Suan avoids simplistic measures of authenticity or originality in evaluating creativity and emphasizes how anime, a media heterotopia, achieves performative uniformity through repeated citation and variation of models. He then unpacks the implications of that uniformity on dispersed transnational practices behind selected series.
On this note, the Macross series is set up as a recurring sample, analyzed alongside other anime to illustrate focal “poles of tension” per chapter. Callbacks to Macross suggest how the multifaceted approach can be applied extensively to one case; theoretical applications in each chapter may seem disparate otherwise, given the multiple networks at play for each sample introduced.
Discussions of identification and selfhood, informed by performativity and performance theory, range from topics on nationhood and lifestyle to analyses of characters and plot, on-screen performances of visual codes, execution of narrative techniques, and the (in)visibility of labor behind those performances. The close reading of Shirobako, an anime about making anime, in chapter 2 is particularly illustrative. Given the book's emphasis on the underrepresentation of outsourcing practices on which the anime industry relies, a limit of the reparative aspect of the study reveals itself: relying on episode credits, the identities of animators remain untraceable beyond studio affiliations (pp. 112–13). The irony does not detract from Suan's argument. Indeed, it highlights the difficulty of locating transnational actors despite research efforts. Suan does consistently keep such actors in mind: repeatedly hailing contributors whose skilled labor and effacement grant anime its cultural—supposedly “Japanese”—surface unity and international commercial success.
Anime's Identity provides a multilayered overview of cultural debates on anime for an English-reading audience. Notably, its academic audience may coincide with locales that are “outsources” of anime's media heterotopia: “other places in Asia,” such as Manila, where anime is both produced and simultaneously received as a cultural import.
As a theoretical treatise, the book equips scholarly readers with a well-nuanced interdisciplinary approach to TV anime. It would serve well as a model for students entering anime studies, whether from media studies, area studies, or elsewhere. Anime's Identity may also be instructive in dialogue with media-specific adaptation theory; given that anime adaptation is not unidirectional, an approach equipped to deal with multiple points of dispersion, and notions of citationality, creativity, and transformation resonates with the field.
