Midnight Eye, the definitive website on Japanese film, just published an in-depth review of The Anime Encyclopedia: Revised and Expanded Edition, by Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements. Read the whole review here, and please enjoy this excerpt!If the original Anime Encyclopedia already represented a stunning casebook of otaku obsessiveness, then this goes doubly so for the update...Very impressive.
One notable improvement over the first edition in this respect is the inclusion of individual entries for directors and studios, as well as 'Thematic Entries', which do a good job of situating the included titles within a wider context. 'Argot and Jargon' for example, should clear up any mysteries and misconceptions about the derivations of terms used by the otaku community like 'dojinshi', 'gekiga', 'mecha' and 'moe'. 'Ratings and Box Office' also answers a lot of very useful questions about anime's actual standing in its own country, while 'Puppetry and Stop Motion', as with the entries for directors...shows that anime is not all doe-eyed virgins and robots, and should help broaden further discussions about what the field actually is beyond the narrow framework through which it is usually approached.
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