Since 2024, the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan has been seeking to identify creators and works of manga and anime whose production materials should be prioritized for preservation in a planned archive facility. The author has been participating in this discussion. In the case of anime, however, many materials, including those from prominent creators and works, have long left studio control and are now dispersed among former staff or circulating on the market. This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing policy discussion by examining the whereabouts and trade patterns of original drawings by Hayao Miyazaki. Based on interviews with Studio Ghibli archival staff and former collectors, as well as analysis of auction records, the study finds that Ghibli began systematically preserving production materials from the 1990s onward, whereas earlier items were largely taken home by staff. Moreover, auction prices for drawings attributed to Miyazaki rose sharply around 2020, and since 2021 their median hammer price has shifted to around two million yen.

This paper briefly outlines various factors that have contributed to Studio Ghibli’s Hotaru no Haka ( Grave of the Fireflies, 1988) becoming understood as supposedly representative for Japanese cartoon animation on the topic of World War II. It clarifies that the film is indeed iconic, but not representative for the contents of other films in genre of war anime. To this point, the paper uses the example of the broadcast history of Hotaru no Haka and other Studio Ghibli films on Nippon Television’s Kinyō Rōdo Shō as a short case study. Based on this case study, the paper elaborates on some of the problems that arise in the research of war anime as a genre due to the misinterpretation of Hotaru no Haka’s status, arguing that the perceived representative nature of the film suppresses the potential for other works to be made accessible to international audiences and researchers.

This study investigates the characteristics of hit songs used in the openings and endings of anime episodes that aired during the fall 2024 season. The literature currently lacks a clear understanding of why play counts on anime songs vary substantially on streaming platforms. Using data from YouTube Music and Spotify, the study employs multiple regression analysis to identify aspects of songs that are significantly associated with play counts on streaming platforms. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between play counts and the following factors: danceability, the popularity of the associated anime and artist, and the song’s status as an opening song. It also shows that character songs and songs sung by voice actors do not tend to become hits. Music producers and creators can consider these findings when creating anime songs to generate hits.

This paper examines how accounting practices in the Japanese commercial animation (anime) industry shape production-related decision making, and ultimately on-screen expression. Anime is produced within intertwining of culture and commerce. Accounting practices such as the design of revenue models, the determination of production budgets, budgetary control make creative decisions and set the work’s conditions.

Drawing on prior research and secondary sources, the paper analyzes two points which accounting practices may influence production. First, the design of revenue models, particularly within the production committee system, can affect a project’s positioning, source materials, and directorial focus. Second, the determination and management of production budgets shape key production decisions, including animation frame counts, episode length, characters and background density, and the scale of CG part. These decisions can manifest in the resulting on-screen expression.

By outlining these relationships, the paper proposes a framework that links anime studies with accounting research, offering one of the foundations for future investigations into the intersections of culture and management in the anime industry.

This paper examines Satoshi Kon’s animated films Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, focusing on their representations of “the Other,” understood in Levinasian terms as l’Autre. Millennium Actress, which tells the story of Chiyoko, who pursues her elusive “Kagi no Kimi” throughout her life, exemplifies Levinas’s notion of totality (totalité), in which the Other is reduced to the Same (le Même) and absorbed into a self-enclosed narrative. By contrast, Tokyo Godfathers dramatizes an encounter with radical alterity (l’Autre): the abandoned infant found by three homeless protagonists functions as Levinas’s face (visage), demanding unconditional responsibility. Through this encounter, the characters undergo ethical transformation. Taken together, Millennium Actress represents the closed world of self-love, while Tokyo Godfathers gestures toward an ethically open relation with the Other. Kon’s films, thus, illuminate contrasting modes of ethics in contemporary society, suggesting that these films can be read as responses to both the instability and the possibility of ethics in modern life.

This article examines the French critic André Martin (1925-1994), who was active in the French animation scene from the 1950s onward, focusing on his conception of cinema as articulated through both his critical practice and his involvement in the organization of animation film festivals. It reconsiders the significance of the term cinéma d’animation, which Martin employed as a conceptual notion, and seeks to understand at the level of concrete critical practice what previous scholarship has described in abstract terms as Martin’s “idea of animation.” This idea was never systematized by Martin himself but appears fragmentarily throughout his writings as an open framework. Focusing on his critiques of state-studio productions around 1955, the article analyzes his writings in dialogue with film theory in order to reconstruct this idea theoretically and to clarify its theoretical potential.