L’animation japonaise, du rouleau peint aux Pokemon

Japanese mangas are everywhere today: Western adolescents and adults are great consumers of Japanese cartoon strips. But it is pure illusion to believe it is a recent art form, born spontaneously at the end of the XXth century. The roots of the mangas (literally «group of drawings used to learn painting») plunge at least as far as the painted scrolls of the XVIIth century. This work shows the different forms Japanese animation has taken over time, since Chinese shadowgraphs up to the animated films with the famous Chihiro. It includes interviews with the masters of the genre, presents ill-known illustrations (movies in black and white from the 1920s such as The animals at the Olympic Games, a photo report on how the Toei studios functioned in 1956) and dissects the far-reaching work of Kawamoto Kihachirô, the virtuoso of paper dolls and puppets dressed in silk.

• L’animation japonaise, du rouleau peint aux Pokemon by Brigitte Koyama-Richard, Flammarion, 2010, 248 p., 40 €.