A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos Summary and Reviews

A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos
by Donald Richie

A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos
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Book Summary Information

Author: Donald Richie
Foreword: Paul Schrader
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-01
ISBN: 4770029950
Number of pages: 319
Publisher: Kodansha International

Book Reviews of A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos

Book Review: Great, but...(and it's an animated but)
Summary: 3 Stars

Most of this book is highly recommended - having lived in the country for more than 50 years, Donald Richie's knowledge of Japanese live-action cinema is unrivalled. But on page 246 Richie turns his attention to animation, and soon finds space for the reactionary opinions of critic Kenji Sato (who bemoans "the thin, insubstantial reality of animation" - I wonder if he's seen The Mummy Returns?), as well as several mistakes: Hayao Miyazaki's elegiac blockbuster Princess Mononoke is set in the Muromachi period (1392-1573), not "pre-history" (p.277); its American release was in 1999, not 2000 (p.251); and the original comic-book version of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira runs to six volumes, not four (p.250).

I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but facts matter, and Miyazaki - whose critical and commercial success in Japan is at least comparable to that of Spielberg in the West - deserves better. There's at least one spelling mistake, too: "slogun" instead of "slogan", near the bottom of page 9!

Five out of five for the first 245 pages, minus two stars for what's after that: it's Richie's knowledge that's thin and insubstantial, not Japanese animation.

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