_Otaku USA_: Interview with Jonathan Clements

[DocWatson]

Found via The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog:

"The Man Behind the Milky Crisis: A moment with Jonathan Clements"

Of particular interest to me are the last two paragraphs:

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis has actually grown into a full-on documentary history of anime now. At the moment, I am indexing dozens and dozens of Japanese-language anime industry memoirs and interviews, so I can build up a picture of the whole anime business, told by the people who actually work in it. That's the subject of my PhD, which I am completing now, and it will also be published as a book, an industrial history of Japanese animation that the British Film Institute will be publishing in 2012.

Once that's done, I am going to publish a very dull book that only 20 people will read, and it will be called something like "A Preliminary Concordance to Japanese Books About Japanese Animation". Hardly any books about anime have proper indexes, so I have had to write my own as part of my research. But once you have, say, all the times that Star of the Giants has been mentioned by animators, indexed and ready to hand, or access to every time someone has mentioned Gigantor, all sorts of amazing connections come to light. You can also verify the claims of the Japanese by comparing stories from two animators who work on the same production. And that's going to make a big difference to people who write about anime for a living.

I'm looking forward to both of those books.

[Shiroi Hane]

Oh absolutely.
I still need to get myself a copy of the Anime Encyclopedia mind.

[DocWatson]

Originally Posted by Shiroi Hane

Oh absolutely.
I still need to get myself a copy of the Anime Encyclopedia mind.

Here's a little help in that direction:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1933330104/

[Shiroi Hane]

I think you mean http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1845765001 which is in my Amazon wishlist.
Since it's still in print there's a lot of limited edition anime that is higher up my priority list for when I get some money.

[DocWatson]

Originally Posted by Shiroi Hane

I think you mean http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1845765001 which is in my Amazon wishlist.

It's the same thing—Titan Books just imported 3,000 and (presumably) slapped their own name on them in the place of Stone Bridge Press'.

[Shiroi Hane]

One of them is only available used, and I prefer to buy direct from Amazon.