Frederik L. Schodt

A short documentary on Japanese animation featured on the DVD for The Animatrix (2003).

Osamu Tezuka is known as the “God of Manga.” He was the genius Japanese artist who pioneered manga and anime after WWII. He’s often compared to Walt Disney, but that’s a disservice to Tezuka —that’s how much he contributed and how influential he was.

Otaku Unite! is a feature-length documentary on the history of Japanese animation fandom in the United States: from the importation of anime in the early 60s to the current boom in both the visibility and accessibility of its accompanying fandom.

Robotopia uses the same blend of magic realism and poetic journalism to unpick contemporary Japanese culture. Post-war Japan is viewed as a vortex that sucks in imagery, ideas and applications from all over the world and somehow translates them into diverting artefacts. For a country that never had an industrial revolution, Japan has a unique relationship to robots. Haggerty's investigation of the how and why of this phenomenon bravely slides us up and down the interface between humans behaving like robots and machine robots behaving like humans.