Studying music for anime within the North American academic framework presents a conundrum. The wholesale application of concepts and frameworks developed in western film and media studies to Japanese animation, while informative, can result in a skewed assessment of the genre. This is because anime not only embodies distinctly Japanese aesthetic traditions but also responds to an industry practice in Japan that developed independently from its counterparts in the U.S. and Europe (Lamarre 2018). Yet the steady rise in the global popularity of anime and anime music over the past decades has also resulted in the emergence of a growing body of works by musicologists, music theorists, and others in the U.S. In order to bridge this gap between Western and Japanese animation aesthetics and industry practices, these commentators and analysts often apply their own unique sets of ideas and methodologies, sometimes drawing on adjacent disciplines, but have had not many opportunities to share their findings. The purpose of this roundtable is to provide a space for scholars of anime music to collaboratively develop a set of analytical ideas and tools that can be shared widely.
The first half of this roundtable consists of presentations of brief position papers by the participants addressing a range of issues including genre designations within anime and their impact on music, applicability of analytical methodologies imported from other related fields such as film and game music studies, relevance of Japanese intellectual and aesthetic traditions, access to source materials in the original language, and tension between production and consumption especially in the North American context. All the presenters will anchor their contributions around the common theme of the “middle ground” to facilitate a dialogue among the scholars gathered.
Kunio Hara explores the positioning of Eastern Europe music in the soundtracks of select films by Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli and other studios including Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), Gauche the Cellist (1982), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Only Yesterday (1991), and The Boy and the Heron (2023) as a means of expressing the paradox of Japanese modernity. Similarly, Rose Bridges contemplates the way that Japanese anime musically constructs national/ethnic/racial Others outside of the West-East paradigm, with a particular focus on representations of South Asia and the Middle East/North Africa in anime such as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (2012−present), Fullmetal Alchemist (2003−2004) and Black Butler (2008−present). Both presentations examine the strengths and limitations of existing academic frameworks around film music and Orientalism/exoticism when applied to a non-Western locus exotifying other non-Western countries, and how Japan’s historical and present relationship to empire puts it at a middle-ground between East and West.
Gui Hwan Lee analyzes Joe Hisaishi’s climactic music for Princess Mononoke (1997), investigating how this cue realizes a cultural middle ground between the Japanese domestic film music industry (e.g., image album and title song, as discussed by Roedder 2013 and Hara 2020) and compositional practices that derive from nineteenth-century European concert halls. Drawing on and expanding Eiji Ōtsuka’s theorization of the sekaikan, Stefan Greenfield-Casas considers the role of music in situating transnational anime collaborations on a global stage, using two recent anime adaptations of Western media properties, Star Wars: Visions, Vol. 1 (2021) and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023), as his case studies. Thomas B. Yee will examine the cultural collision of Hip-hop, J-pop, and traditional Chinese music in the battle rap scene of Season 1 of Paripi Kōmei (2022), crafting a musical middle ground that positions modern Tōkyō as an exemplar of musical cosmopolitanism (Skrbis and Woodward 2013, Kelts 2006, and Consalvo 2022).
Stacey Jocoy considers the later career of composer Yuki Kajiura known for her anime soundtracks that combine medievalism, chant, and a preponderance of higher timbres to evoke magical soundscapes that depict strong female protagonists including Madoka Magica (2011), Fate/Stay Night (2014/2017), and Demon Slayer (2019−2024). Finally Nick Anderson discusses the broad-ranging hauntologies produced through Miyazaki’s deployment of popular European songs in Porco Rosso (1992) and The Wind Rises (2013).
The second half of the session centers on a general discussion with the goal of reinforcing and developing ideas exposed during the first half. The central theme of the middle ground captures the idea of combining multiple strands of analytical frameworks as well as balancing contrasting international intellectual and aesthetic streams necessary to conduct research in anime music.
