This handbook fills a substantial gap—at the global level—in the scholarly literature on animation at large, on studies in music, and on Japanese animation more specifically. It is a unique contribution in that it finds its core at the very intersection between the studies on music in popular culture and the studies on Japanese animation (which is often generically called anime) as a medium of entertainment.The book is an organically designed collection of essays by established scholars and emerging researchers on the development of music, songs, and sound in Japanese animation for cinema and television since the 1930s to the early 2010s; the time hiatus of about 10 years ensures a necessary distance and perspective to the whole handbook. Each chapter deals with a particular phase of this history, focussing on composers and performers, films, series, and musical genres used in the scores for anime. Organised as an internally very consistent handbook, the work also includes interviews made by the Editor and some Contributors with prominent figures of music in anime, as well as chapter boxes focussing on specific aspects.There exist isolated essays (journal articles, book chapters, blog writings) dealing with a variety of aspects or authors of music or sound design in animation at large and in anime, but never has an entire book been devoted to such a wide range of historical, cultural, and technical aspects of this very topic. Among the unique features of this book, as hinted at above, one of the most important and prestigious is the presence of exclusive interviews with some of the protagonists of this long-running history.weiterlesen