Digital technology has transformed cinema's production, distribution, and consumption patterns and pushed contemporary cinema toward increasingly global markets. Japanese cinema has been revitalized as regional genres such as anime and Japanese horror now challenge Hollywood's preeminence in global cinema. In an investigation of J-horror, personal documentary, anime, and ethnic cinema, this book deliberates on the role of the transnational in bringing to the mainstream what were formerly marginal B-movie genres. It argues persuasively that convergence culture, which these films represent, cons ... More

Digital technology has transformed cinema's production, distribution, and consumption patterns and pushed contemporary cinema toward increasingly global markets. Japanese cinema has been revitalized as regional genres such as anime and Japanese horror now challenge Hollywood's preeminence in global cinema. In an investigation of J-horror, personal documentary, anime, and ethnic cinema, this book deliberates on the role of the transnational in bringing to the mainstream what were formerly marginal B-movie genres. It argues persuasively that convergence culture, which these films represent, constitutes Japan's response to the variegated flows of global economics and culture. Analyzng new modes of production emerging from the struggles of Japanese filmmakers and animators to finance and market their work in a post-studio era, the book holds critical implications for the future of other national cinemas fighting to remain viable in a global marketplace. As academics in film and media studies prepare a wholesale shift toward a transnational perspective of film, the book cautions against jettisoning the entire national cinema paradigm. Discussing the technological advances and the new cinematic flows of consumption, it demonstrates that while contemporary Japanese film, on the one hand, expresses the transnational as an object of desire (a form of total cosmopolitanism), on the other hand, that desire is indeed inseparable from Japan's national identity. The book challenges the presumption that Hollywood is the only authentically “global” cinema.