Rebuild of Animétudes

It has now been three years since the last publication on this website. In the meantime, I’ve left one of my most ambitious projects, the history of Mushi Production, unfinished, and mostly stepped back from online anime and sakuga discussion spaces. I feel like this deserves some sort of explanation, especially as I am in a new phase in my relationship towards anime and considering reviving this blog.

First things first, as much as it grieves me to say it, the history of Mushi Pro will most probably remain incomplete. I had two more pieces planned out, the basic structure of which was already laid out, and parts already written. But in summer 2023, I basically burnt out from this project and haven’t found the energy nor the time to get back to it since; my personal situation which I’ll roughly lay out below makes it even more impossible for me to go back to such long-term, heavy-investment projects at present. I am myself quite frustrated to give up on this, especially since these last two articles were supposed to play a large part in my objective to rewrite the narrative on Mushi Pro and early TV anime history. I may one day release my unfinished notes here or, if anyone is interested to continue the work, share them on an individual basis. I do also have something in mind about Yoshinobu Nishizaki’s 3 series, Wansa-kun, Umi no Triton and Yamato (no promises). In the meantime, I can only encourage you to read Mark Simmon’s history of Sunrise, which covers part of the events I intended to discuss.

I must also say that, when I took what I thought would be a break from Mushi Pro, I had other priorities. Summer 2023 was the time I poured all of my energy into another website, Fullfrontal, to conduct and translate interviews. I am quite happy and proud of the work accomplished there; but I eventually burnt out from it as well, alongside growing personal and professional disagreements within the team which led me to leave in spring 2024 and stop most involvement with them the following summer.

And, since then, I have been working here and there, never quite abandoning anime writing but never pouring the kind of energy I had until then. For those who have been following me on social media, you may be aware I’ve been active in French for the magazine Animeland — another effort I’ve distanced myself from these last few months for personal reasons. But, in the meantime, I’ve gotten involved in a (yet unannounced) relatively big translation project, and, perhaps most importantly for me, I’ve been progressing in my academic activities: I have completed the first year of my PhD, with my thesis being dedicated to the history of the anime boom and the place of anime magazines within early anime fandom.

This new research in an environment different from the online one I’ve mostly navigated in is directly related to the future of this website. My PhD research and all that goes along with it (notably, teaching) will make it difficult, if not impossible for me to go on large-scale projects like the ones I made a speciality of. The relative distance I now have towards anime and the ‘sakuga community’ would also make the kind of content I produced earlier awkward. I do plan on reviving Animétudes; but in a different, more varied shape.

First is stuff directly related to my academic work. The papers I have already published so far and some I plan to publish are largely born out of the ambition to reconcile my experience as a fan (especially as a sakuga fan) and academic standards; I intend to pursue that here, for instance publishing paper drafts that have failed to pass review or developing ideas and threads that didn’t make the wordcount. Similarly, my PhD research largely comes from the (re)discovery of 70s and 80s anime magazines I made alongside other online anime fans a few years ago. That effort has developed into an acceleration in scanning and sharing Japanese material. On my end, while I don’t know what shape it will take yet, I hope to bring that back to the fandom by sharing some of my findings here.

In that regard, what should take a large role would be book summaries or reviews. Indeed, there still is some disconnect between anime fandom and academia, although the former could constitute a part of the latter’s readership. By orienting potential readers towards publications I find most interesting or innovative, and introducing them to untranslated Japanese research, I hope to bridge that gap at least a little as well as contribute to the overall diffusion of knowledge within fan spaces.

Similar but different is what I would call essays, perhaps the closest to this website’s old content, although the ambition will be different. I probably won’t write anime history anymore, at least not on here or not in the same way, but I want to write on anime history, on methods and concepts and the ways one can work with them. I’ve already talked here and there about my frustration with online anime writing, or rather the lack of it; and while I certainly don’t think I could revive anything, I hope I can lay out some ways in which it would be interesting to conduct it. The para-academic stuff and these essays are, in a way, a return to the initial goal I had when creating this website: more than history or animation or sakuga, I just intended it as a place to think about anime somewhere between the fan and academic spaces.

Finally, I will probably come back to interviews and translations. I don’t think I can go back to conducting original interviews (yet); I do, however, have a backlog of unpublished ones or some only published in French, which I feel deserve to be shared more widely. Depending on my possibilities, I may also work on translations of Japanese materials, either in the continuity of book reviews, or of all kinds of materials (interviews, testimonies, essays, etc) that I’ve encountered in my research and that I find worth sharing.

I must confess that, in the age of AI, changing investment into anime and sakuga, global and national socio-political turmoil and my own personal (family) troubles, I’m not quite sure about how much engagement I can expect and put into long-form writing about old or niche Japanese animation. In other words, don’t get too excited; for better or worse, this blog isn’t my main activity anymore and I can’t make any promises regarding the content or release schedule, without even mentioning the quality. This will now be a side job and an outlet, nothing more, nothing less. Nevertheless, it has brought me so much in past years and I hope it has brought at least a little something to anime discussion; if it can continue to do so in the future, it would make me very glad. See you soon, then.