Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan

by Marc Steinberg

In Anime’s Media Mix , Marc Steinberg convincingly shows that anime is far more than a style of Japanese animation. Beyond its immediate form of cartooning, anime is also a unique mode of cultural production and consumption that led to the phenomenon that is today called “media mix” in Japan and “convergence” in the West. According to Steinberg, both anime and the media mix were ignited on January 1, 1963, when Astro Boy hit Japanese TV screens for the first time. Sponsored by a chocolate manufacturer with savvy marketing skills, Astro Boy quickly became a cultural icon in Japan. He was the poster boy (or, in his case, “sticker boy”) both for Meiji Seika’s chocolates and for what could happen when a goggle-eyed cartoon child fell into the eager clutches of creative marketers. It was only a short step, Steinberg makes clear, from Astro Boy to Pokémon and beyond. Steinberg traces the cultural genealogy that spawned Astro Boy to the transformations of Japanese media culture that followed—and forward to the even more profound developments in global capitalism supported by the circulation of characters like Doraemon, Hello Kitty, and Suzumiya Haruhi. He details how convergence was sparked by anime, with its astoundingly broad merchandising of images and its franchising across media and commodities. He also explains, for the first time, how the rise of anime cannot be understood properly—historically, economically, and culturally—without grasping the integral role that the media mix played from the start. Engaging with film, animation, and media studies, as well as analyses of consumer culture and theories of capitalism, Steinberg offers the first sustained study of the Japanese mode of convergence that informs global media practices to this day.

Genres: Nonfiction, Japan, Anime

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Damiano · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a LOT of information in this book about various marketing strategies used by companies in Japan, and I really liked that I could see how much research the author did before writing this. Recommended to anyone who's interested in this topic.

[Adriano Barone]

Non posso negare l'immensa quantità di ricerca e di fonti utilizzate nel libro.
Tuttavia per i miei scopi, molte più case history moderne e un approccio più narratologico da un lato e produttivo da un altro, mancano completamente, e quindi di interesse solo delle parti dei due capitoli dedicati alle strategie di media mix di Kadokawa. Ripeto, un buon libro, ma non il testo adatto a un professionista come il sottoscritto, fuorviato anche dalla presentazione in quarta di copertina (la dimensione merceologica e polimediale NON è affrontata in profondità, nonostante il libro venga presentato così).

[Joel Gn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drawing on the theories of Benjamin, Deleuze and others, Steinberg renders a very detailed historicization and analysis of media convergence in the context of Japanese popular culture.