While I was teaching at University of London, I saw the European premiere of a very famous anime, based on a very famous manga, called Akira.

Why did these pop culture forms merit serious academic exploration in your view? You were one of the first Japanologists to delve into the worlds of manga and anime. Anime tackles issues like climate change, technology, apocalypse, utopia-a huge variety of rich and interesting topics. Anime can be very serious, very dark, and often quite complex. That’s really not the case with a lot of anime. When Westerners think of animation, they tend to think of children’s stuff and happily-ever-after endings. I think of animation as a medium: within anime, there are many, many genres. It has fewer cells per minute than American animation, so the movement seems slightly quicker and sharper than in American animation. “Anime” is actually short for “animation.” When we talk about anime, we tend to mean Japanese animation, which usually a certain style. People in Japan grow up with manga and take it quite seriously. They have manga to fit every niche you could think of. They have adventure manga, detective manga and etiquette manga. There are manga that are erotic and there are manga that are great for children. Unlike in American comics, they have a huge variety of themes and topics, including some very, very serious and very, very adult ones. They were very cheaply made, so they were easily distributed and became really popular.

In the twentieth century, the Japanese started developing these comics. “Anime tackles issues like climate change, technology, apocalypse, utopia-a huge variety of rich and interesting topics.” One of my colleagues captured it well: they have a picto-centric culture. “Manga” is generally translated as “comics,” but it actually means “whimsical pictures.” Manga has deep roots in Japanese tradition, which is both a visual and a literary tradition.

You’ve chosen five books on manga and anime-but first, what do these words mean? Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Anime pdf books