The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Japanese Animation

This handbook fills a substantial gap—at the international level—in the scholarly and academic literature on animation at large, on music studies, and on the role of the aural dimensions in Japanese animation more specifically. It is a unique contribution, placed at the very intersection between the studies on music in popular culture and the scholarship on Japanese animated productions (which are often generically called anime) as popular art forms and formats of entertainment. The book is designed as a reference work consisting of an organic sequence of theory-grounded essays on the development of music, sounds, and voices in Japanese animation for cinema and television since the 1930s. Each chapter deals with a phase of this history, focussing on composers and performers, films, series, and genres used in the soundtracks for animations made in Japan. The chapters also present precious interviews made by the Editor and Contributors with prominent figures of music in Japanese animation, as well as chapter boxes clarifying specific aspects.