The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media by Thomas Lamarre (review)

Thomas Lamarre's latest monograph is a brilliant book that offers a novel understanding of the history of Japanese television and of the contemporary global media landscape. The book's starting point is the apparent contradiction between the recent decline, if not demise, of broadcast television as the primary medium of information and entertainment in the age of online and social media, and the simultaneous steady growth in the production of television shows, supported by an ever-expanding consumer base. In contrast with North American and European scholars and commentators who herald the advent of a "posttelevision" era, Lamarre looks at the continuities and discontinuities between Japanese television and online media to propose a new understanding of the medium. Focusing on the Japanese case enables Lamarre to show how many of the phenomena we tend to associate with the new millennium, such as what fandom scholar Henry Jenkins describes as the rise of a "convergence culture" or what journalist James Poniewozik calls the "unbundling of TV from the medium that delivers it and the machine you watch it on," do not represent a radical break with the past. Rather, they have equivalents in the Japanese "anime media mix" of the 1960s, which can be read as an ancestor of contemporary "transmedia storytelling," or the rise of "terebi gēmu" (console videogames plugged into the television) in Japan in the 1980s, that complicates the binary division between broadcast and network. These phenomena cannot be fully explained by a progressive view of media history, whereby new media are seen as replacing or subsuming older media (broadcast television replaces and/or subsumes film, digital media replace and/or subsume television, etc.); Lamarre proposes assemblage as a more useful analytical tool to understand media history and to account for the apparent contradictions of the "posttelevision" age.

Importantly, Lamarre does not claim that the history of Japanese television is unique but rather that, precisely because the Japanese case presents both similarities and differences with the Euro-American context, it offers valuable insight into broader accounts of contemporary global media. Lamarre notes that to explain the different trajectory of Japanese television history by presenting Japan as "always already posttelevision" would be not only simplistic but misleading, as it would reinforce an essentialist view of Japan and at the same time continue to "posit North Atlantic history as a normative point of reference" (p. 3). Lamarre's detailed analysis of the specific historical evolution of Japanese television forces us to reconsider our understanding of the televisual medium, and of media of mass communication more broadly. In this respect, the book is also in conversation with a broader scholarly endeavor to look at the historical specificity of Japanese social, political, and economic formations to challenge both Japanese exceptionalism and Western-centered universalism. This approach has gained momentum since the late 1990s and today runs across fields as varied as literature, history, sociology, and cultural studies and comprises authors as diverse as Naoki Sakai, Koichi Iwabuchi, Jaqueline Berndt, and Olivier Ansart.¹ While Lamarre does not refer specifically to works by these authors, he successfully manages to avoid the pitfalls of both essentialist and universalist approaches to culture and society, and I see this as one of the most valuable contributions of his book.

As is clear from the title, Lamarre's book focuses in particular on anime, Japanese animation. This allows the author to question another assumption of media scholarship, namely that the most salient aspect of television, what differentiates it from cognate media such as cinema or photography, is its immediacy, the fact that it can offer its audience allegedly unadulterated images in real time. While previous studies of television have focused primarily on live broadcasting and the reality effect it generates, Lamarre shifts our attention toward animation as a more productive angle through which to understand the cognitive, social, and political effects of...