The subtitle of Complex Anime. Narrative ambiguity in Japanese animation is descriptive and adjusted to its fundamental proposal: it is a study of narrative complexity, supported by the categories of information transmission theorized by Bordwell, in Japanese animation. The text, therefore, must be includedfirstinthescopeofAnimeStudiesandinthestudyof postclassicalaudiovisualnarrative.
In the epilogue of the book, its author, Antonio Loriguillo-López, outlines the great general interests that reign in the field of Anime Studies, and that end up finding accommodation in one of these two great currents of research: the process of interpretation/transformation of camp criticism, which often leads to “a minimization of films to mere allegorical reductions for heuristic purposes to deal with central themes of transnational culturalism such as identity or history” (p. 162), and the studies of context, “of maximum interest to business schools around the world since the assumption of kokusaika (internationalization) as a motto” (p. 162).
The contribution of the monograph at hand does not fall within any of these lines, but rather in a third area in which there is still a lot of work ahead, as Loriguillo-López demonstrates: narrative or, expressed more broadly, the audiovisual poetics studies. In this sense, Complex Anime is an important contribution to understanding the textual dimension of the titles that we classify under the label “anime.” Theworkdoesnotsolvetheissuewithastrokeofapen,butratheroffersathoroughand validapproach, and opens many doors that lead to rooms that, at times, are barely visible.