However, more care should be taken either to provide more evidence for their influence, as Ruh does with Ghost in the Shell and Drazen with Princess Knight, or to resist making such sweeping claims.ĭrazen and Ruh share a concern for the roles of women in anime and analyze them within the context of wider Japanese cultural expectations for how women should (not) behave. Discussing certain films as benchmarks is a useful even if hardly scientific process.

Drazen believes that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind deserves to be called a 'groundbreaking masterpiece' (259), but that conclusion is based only on Nausicaä's top ranking status in an Animage magazine poll, albeit for ten years in a row. But Ruh does not go into how Patlabor 2 is an influential film for the medium itself, except perhaps indirectly as foreshadowing Oshii's more prominent Ghost in the Shell. Ruh's analysis of Patlabor 2's messages on technology, mythology, and hierarchy also shed light on why this film matters for Oshii's role as a director who illustrates a complex philosophy. The film critic Tony Rayns and the director himself both recognize it as a major career achievement, which helps us determine its importance for Oshii. Ruh refers to Oshii's second Patlabor film as such a benchmark. However, their assessments of certain anime titles as representing benchmarks of achievement lack compelling external evidence. Much of Drazen and Ruh's praise for anime is well deserved. Ruh acclaims Oshii's implicit critique of Japan's neglect of historic preservation through his necessitated use of anime: he could not have made that exact point using live action. Since Jin-Roh takes place in an alternative late-1950s Japan, it had to be animated, because many of the structures of older Japan needed for a live-action film had been torn down. Critics questioned making Jin-Roh-for which Oshii wrote the screenplay, but did not direct-as animation rather than as live action, a notion that Ruh disputes as unfairly dismissing anime out of hand and as missing a larger point. Ruh, on his part, discusses Oshii's work with anime as itself partly the message of his oeuvre. Drazen praises Tezuka's directorial skill in conveying animated characters' struggles in ways that live-action cannot. For Drazen, Tezuka Osamu virtually founded manga's cinematic, as opposed to merely unique, style that later allowed anime to engage audiences more deeply than animation had done previously.

They base much of their confidence on the artistic strength of their favored directors to use anime to tell a compelling story. Both Drazen and Ruh find scholarly value in studying anime not just as a cultural artifact but primarily as literature that can speak to an assumed coherent 'human condition' transcending national boundaries.

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