This is obviously late and fairly beyond the point, but when reading Levi, Drazen and Napier, realizing what the books actually *are* goes a long way to understanding them. Samurai From Outer Space was essentially *the* first book-length discussion of Japanese animation published in English. Of course it was going to be fairly basic, and simply did not have a lot in the way of previous research to fall back on or push off from. Drazen's book is similar; good for an introduction, but a mass-market, unannotated book about a popular culture topic that was published in 2003 cannot be taken too seriously in 2010. Well, and Napier simply was the first one with solid academic credentials to write about anime, and to show you you *can* write about anime. As you say, yeah, she is a bit of a "lamp-shader" (though much less so in her articles), but at that point, she was exactly what the field needed. Taking her to task for focusing on a particular show that you and fic-writers didn't really care for, is neither here or anywhere, really. She is not in the business of being a movie critic, so either media-critical or fan-critical responses to what she sees in a particular text are, for her purposes, irrelevant.
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Date: 16 Jun 2010 10:57 pm (UTC)- Mikhail Koulikov (LJ: corneredangel)