The Anime Ecology ― A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media

A major work destined to change how scholars and students look at television and animation

With the release of author Thomas Lamarre’s field-defining study The Anime Machine, critics established Lamarre as a leading voice in the field of Japanese animation. He now returns with The Anime Ecology, broadening his insights to give a complete account of anime’s relationship to television while placing it within important historical and global frameworks. 

Lamarre takes advantage of the overlaps between television, anime, and new media—from console games and video to iOS games and streaming—to show how animation helps us think through television in the contemporary moment. He offers remarkable close readings of individual anime while demonstrating how infrastructures and platforms have transformed anime into emergent media (such as social media and transmedia) and launched it worldwide. 

Thoughtful, thorough illustrations plus exhaustive research and an impressive scope make The Anime Ecology at once an essential reference book, a valuable resource for scholars, and a foundational textbook for students.

Thomas Lamarre is James McGill Professor in East Asian studies and associate professor in communication studies at McGill University. He is author of Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics, and The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minnesota, 2009). He was coeditor of the Mechademia annual book series and is coeditor of the Parallel Futures series with the University of Minnesota Press.