View article

I would like to take the liberty of opening this article in this important journal special issue on the “Geemu et/and media mix” with a reflection on the title of my 2012 book, whose subject in many ways intersects with that of this special issue: Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Characters and Toys in Japan. There have been quite valid questions raised around the first part of the title: why anime’s media mix? This is something I struggled with myself during the writing of this book, and developed several answers to within the book itself, as well as since its publication. To boil it down, though, I would point to three principal reasons: 1) There is an intensity to the media ecology around anime that one is more hard pressed to find, for instance, around manga alone. 1 Manga are the R&D department for what is now popularly called “contents”; anime is the means of extending and reordering a franchise such that it becomes quantitatively and qualitatively different. The tipping point of a series’ popularity and impact often occurs around the anime, rather than other media forms. Which is not to say these other media are not key to

1 I pick up on manga here in part because it would arguably be the closest historical contender for the designation of the term media mix, and in part because of reviewer Casey Brienza’s suggestion that it should be manga, not anime that we should focus on, given that many anime begin as manga. As I emphasize in the