What? No pictures?
While most scholarly journals have e-versions, academic scholarship has not caught up with technology. Dani Cavallaro’s Anime and the Art of Adaptation: Eight Famous Works from Stage to Screen, is well researched but suffers due to its medium.
Content-wise, Cavallaro has entered an old discussion: the story of animation as the story of adaptation. From Topcraft’s Hobbit to the Disneyfication of Rusalka, animators regularly reinterpret, satirize and retell classic stories. They translate folk tales specific to one culture into something understandable to a larger population. Reams have been written on this subject. And a look through Cavallaro’s excellent bibliography provides an excellent journey through that discussion.
While the book offers no new insights regarding the link between one piece of art and it’s translations, however, it tightens the discussion’s focus to a very specific style of animation, anime. Since the 1980s — when anime began to reach global audiences — it has proven itself to be extremely conducive to this sort of repackaging. Drawing upon her in-depth studies, Cavallaro forces the casual consumer of anime to recognize its vital position as a link allowing the tropes of both Eastern and Western literature to work together.
Unfortunately, Cavallaro’s academic style prevents all but college students assigned this text from ever penetrating its pages. For example:
Therefore, the two works benefit exponentially from parallel exploration of their respective semiotic webs — a critical venture that ultimately enhances not only our understanding of the two works as distinct entities but also of a third party: the hypothetical third text, as it were, brought into being by their dynamic interplay.
Bloated sentences like the one above used to encapsulate Critical Theory 101 topics obscure any worthwhile information. It places the her work out of the hands of the casual consumer of theory as well as the hand of passionate anime fans.
Medium-wise, it’s counter intuitive to publish a book about animation without, at the very least, a supporting website hosting stills or video clips of the subjects. By not publishing this as an enhanced e-book, the author has lost the chance to not only make arguments through her words, but to also underscore every point by providing side-by-side comparisons of the texts examined.
Ironically, Anime and the Art of Adaptation: Eight Famous Works from Stage to Screen represents the perfect missed opportunity to adapt to technology.
(McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010)
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