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McCarthy, who has written extensively about anime, offers an overview of the artist's career in animation and manga. She discusses each film in detail, with character descriptions and plot synopses, but she writes as a fan (rather than a critic or historian), and her text overflows with superlatives. Miyazaki is an exceptionally talented director, and his work merits a more discerning evaluation. McCarthy is also surprisingly careless about details: the ill-fated Japanese-American collaboration, Little Nemo, was in the works far longer than six years; and she describes the boar-god Nago in Mononoke as being wounded by a "ball of stone" when it's a actually an iron bullet. The latter may seem like nitpicking, but the hero's search for the source of the iron sets the plot of the film in motion. Finally, like Schilling's Princess Mononoke, Hiyao Miyazaki would have benefited from more careful proofreading; for example, McCarthy misspells the name of animation giant Winsor McCay. The extensive, but by no means complete, bibliography is a useful resource. --Charles Solomon
