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Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations. View or edit your browsing history. Get to Know Us. I'm in the final stages of putting together my latest book and would love to hear what you think of my blurb and cover. Also this is the paperback cover and the description has not yet been added. Katie Hunter is back in Crete reunited with the vampires she thought were dead, but she is far from safe. Lolita still wants her dead and Katie's tired of running from her. But Katie will need more help if she is going to fight her army of five hundred soldiers.

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Alex hasn't given up on taking Katie to Lolita, but news about the bounty on Katie head has spread and Alex is no longer the only one gunning for her. Masha du Toit Status: Arthur C Clarke Posts: Cape Town, South Africa. The cover definitely brings across the genre - so important. I would consider putting the author name in a contrasting, neutral typeface - that way the title can shine.

Also, see if you can line up aspects of the title and author name. For example - make "Taken" much bigger, and line it up on the left with "by" so that the title becomes more of a visual block. Then make both the title and author name the same distance from the left edge of the design. I found the first line a bit hard to parse.

Both "back in Crete" and "reunited with vampires" don't come across as quite punchy enough. No idea if that makes sense for your plot! And I found the rest very name heavy. It might make more sense to people who've read the previous books though. Always a difficult balance to find. The blurb has to many names in it and I found it more of a plot outline. However, by Akira's end, we see the total diminishment of authority as, one by one, the representatives of the establishment admit that they can no longer control what is happening around them; this is seen especially in the body of Tetsuo, who they had hoped to use as an experimental guinea pig.

While the power of authority diminishes, the young man's power grows, but even he is unable to control it in the end. Total bodily transmogrification into a form of Otherness hinted at in the film's ending is the final price Tetsuo has to pay. Before this occurs however, the viewer is treated to or subjected to an awesome spectacle of corporeal mutation that conforms well to Hurley'S general description of what happens to the human subject in body horror: Tetsuo's new powers may also symbolize his development from adolescent into adult, especially since at the film's end he is identified by language rather than image, thus suggesting his entry into the Symbolic order.

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T hese transformations begin with Tetsuo losing his arm in a laser attack by a government satellite. Unable to stop the mutations of his arm, Tetsuo uses it to engulf the enigmatic military figure known as the Colonel, who has come to take him back to the government laboratory. T he arm goes on to engulf Tetsuo's girlfriend Kaori and his friend Kaneda, although in the case of these two it is uncertain whether this is an attack or a cry for help.

T his uncertainty is based on the fact that, as his mutations continue and begin to take over his whole body, Tetsuo's aspect changes from cocky self confidence "I never knew 1 could have such power! Totally defamiliarized from the wistful adolescent punk he used to be, Tetsuo transforms into a grotesque gigantic infant whose oozing pink flesh seems to overflow the screen. His newly infantile physical condition is matched by a return to his emotional dependency on Kaneda. Whereas previously he had triumphantly shouted his independence, crowing to Kaneda, "I don't need your help anymore," in these final scenes of metamorphosis, he cries out again to Kaneda as he had when they were children.

Even Kaneda cannot save him, however. He is left alone to acknowledge for the first time his newfound identity in his final statement, "I am Tetsuo. T he phallic tentacular arm that expands and contracts ultimately seems to lose itself into an oozing feminine pinkness, which in turn becomes a gigantic baby.

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T his horrifying "birth scene" echoes cinema theorist Barbara Creed's statement that the act of birth is seen as grotesque "because the body's surface is no longer closed, smooth, and intact, rather it looks as if it may tear apart, open out, reveal its innermost depths.

Instead, the moist pink oozing mass that eventually becomes the infant can be seen as the as yet unabjected maternal within Tetsuo himself, an orphan who may at last be finding or perhaps "creating" his lost mother. Given access to the secret depths of the body, and being allowed to see the transgressions of the body's boundaries, the viewer cannot quite look away. The participation of the viewer is important here because, on one level, Tetsuo's transformation may be read in purely cinematic terms as a visual "frenzy of metamorphosis. As film scholar Philip Brophy says of the grotesque transformation scene in the American film T he Beast Within, "[tl he horror is conveyed through torture and agony, of havoc wrought upon a body devoid of control.

But Tetsuo's story is not only a postmodern celebration of spectacle and boundary transgression. It needs also to be read as a deeply ambiguous rite of passage story. Tetsuo's outsider status, his rivalry with Kaneda, and his negative attitude toward authority position him as a classic alienated teenager whose mutations are also visual expressions of his own adolescent angst. Again, Kristeva's notion of abjection, this time in the sociocultural sense of the expulsion from the body politic of what is marginal, outcast, or simply "unclean," is useful here since Tetsuo and his friends and the original mutant subjects are all coded as social excrescences.

This "hole" has many associations with the abject. As a crater from a nuclear bomb it brings up links with death and destruction, unwelcome intrusions into the empty glittering world of Neo Tokyo. Psychoanalytically, the crater may be read in terms of both the vagina and the anus. Coded as the female organ, the crater evokes the dryness and emptiness of atrophy and absence, once again underlining the absence of the maternal throughout the film.

Coded as the body orifice associated with excretion, the crater is a metonym for the status of the bikers and the mutants, children and adolescents necessary only as fodder for the industrial and scientific demands of their dystopian world. In many regards Tetsuo conforms well to Bukatman's description of the outcast mutants of American comic books: They are categorical mistakes of a specific type; they are, in short, adolescents.

Given the generally safe and contained nature of Japanese society, this orgy of destruction is especially interesting.

While Tetsuo, in his down-and-out biker identity, is clearly not a "normal" teenager if there are any left in the film's dystopia , it seems likely that his anger and vengefulness may have touched a chord among the viewing public who made the film such a popular hit. Tetsuo's "accomplishments" come at a cost, however. His powers and the newfound arrogance that come with them alienate his few remaining friends and in the end, like so many of the protagonists of horror films, he is utterly alone, His "intimate apocalypse" has been vengeful not only to others but to his core identity as welL The eye that stares out at the audience at the film's end may suggest a new form of vision but, given the nihilistic events of the film's narrative, it seems reasonable to imagine that the final vision is a cold one, detached from any human concerns, The movie's nihilistic celebration of abjection and finally of extinction suggest no hope for change within the actual fabric of society.

Both Akira and Ranma play on the motif of the changing adolescent body but while Akira presents the changing body as menacing, Ranma uses it largely for comic effect. To put it another way, Akira is fundamentally apocalyptic, although it participates in the festival mode, while Ranma , although containing episodes of destruction and even elegiac interludes, is largely a celebration of the festival.

Both texts feature adolescent protagonists who deal with such classic adolescent issues as isolation, jealousy, and generational conflict,19 constructed around the motif of uncontrollable metamorphoses. Furthermore, the metamorphoses in Ranma are gendered ones, from male to female or vice versa, which raises issues of sexual identity that Tetsuo's lonely monstrousness only subtextually evokes.

For our purposes we will concentrate on the long running animated television series. Since the series went on for many episodes, a slightly different form of analysis is called for than with an epic film such as Akira. Due to the episodic nature of television comedy there is far less emphasis on character development or an overall story line although many might argue that Akira is not nearly as structured as an American science fiction or horror film would be.

What is emphaSized in Ranma are certain comic tropes such as pursuit, mistaken identity, and usually amusing, sometimes poignant, character interaction. Popular in the late s and early s, the series is an imaginative comic romance that plays with gender mis identification through a fantasized form of transsexuality. T hey are uncomfortably aware of a threatening destabilization of social boundaries without necessarily understanding the reasons for their own discomfort. Akira plays with boundaries in order to break them, but Ranma plays with them to a different, ultimately conservative, effect.

While boundaries are crossed and re-crossed to often riotous effect, the inevitably more conservative format of a weekly television series ultimately leads to a conservative resolution in which, at the end of each episode, the boundaries are reinscribed into the conventions of heterosexual hierarchical society. Ranma operates on at least two levels: At times the very wildness and unexpectedness of the comedy can lead to moments of liberating self-knowledge on the part of its protagonists.

At other times, however, the series seems to be more in-line with such Western gender bending comedies as Some Like It Hot or I Was A Male War Bride in which gender crossing is held up only as an amusing performance that temporarily disturbs but never actually unsettles society's basic assumptions about the genders.

In the case of Ranma , it is the hero who is the "alien," but his marginalization is of a very different sort than that of Tetsuo. Ranma is simply a regular high school boy who falls into a magic spring while practicing martial arts with his father. The magic of the spring causes him to turns into a girl when touched by cold water and to return to male form when touched by warm water. Saotome, is also magically cursed by falling into a spring that turns him into a giant panda, a condition that is also alleviated with hot water.

It is important to note, however, that Mr. Saotome's panda guise causes little consternation. It is Ranma's gender transformation that is the key narrative impetus in the series. Like Ranma, she too is a brilliantly gifted martial artist, but she is also a tomboy who insists that she hates boys, although they constantly flock to her beauty. The opening episode of Ranma is worth looking at in some detail as it displays some of the most prominent tropes and tensions maintained throughout the series.

In the opening scene the "camera" follows what appears to be a young girl in Chinese dress and pigtails as she argues with a giant panda while they walk down a rainy street. As agitated onlookers scatter, the panda picks up the girl and slings her over his shoulder. The action cuts to the Tendo's Japanese style house complete with a traditional pond.

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They are anxiously awaiting the arrival of their father's old martial arts companion, Mr. Saotome, and his son Ranma. Tendo tells his daughters that he hopes that Ranma might choose one of them to marry and thus carry on the "Tendo family tradition. As they talk, the doors open and the giant panda and Chinese girl appear, much to everyone's consternation.

T he girl announces that she is Ranma and Mr. Tendo, choosing to believe that "she" is a boy, folds her in a close embrace only to become uncomfortably aware that "he" has breasts. His daughters laugh sardonically and one of them, poking Ranma's breasts, asks "Don't you know the difference between a boy and a girl, Daddy?

Akane, who is at first pleased that Ranma is a girl and suggests that they be friends, is the first to discover Ranma's duality. She goes into the family bath only to discover Ranma, who has been changed back into boy form by the bath's hot water. Ranma explains the story of his and his father's change but the girls are more amused than sympathetic.

Akane's older sisters laughingly suggest that "Akane would be the wisest choice [for marriagel since she hates boys. He points out that, "You took a pretty good look at me [while I was nakedl. And anyway, it's no big deal to see a naked girl since I see myself plenty of times, and I'm better built to boot. The two stalk off in silence and go to complain to their respective family members.

What is anticipated to be a traditional reunion among old friends becomes a bizarre and disturbing event. Taking a bath leads to a frightening and unexpected encounter. Like the Shakespearean comedies and many others up until recently, the comic and fantastic nature of the plot, while thoroughly enjoyable on the surface, is also one that serves to hide or displace some important and serious issues of power and identity.

Thus, the comic high points of this opening episode are often predicated on a variety of tensions around which the series revolves. The most important of these have to do with gender identification on both a personal and a public level. At the personal level, the viewer watches the appealing characters of Ranma and, at certain moments, Akane as they attempt to construct their gender identities while navigating the confusing tides of adolescence.

At the public level, the series shows the gender norms that society attempts to impose upon them through the agencies of school and family. Issues of sexual identity, generational conflict, and societal confusion, are all invoked through Ranma's constant and haphazard transformation as he becomes variously an object of fear, derision, puzzlement, and, most often, desire.

Examining Ranma first from the point of view of individual development, it is worthwhile to consider cultural studies scholar Elizabeth Grosz's description of adolescence and the body in Volatile Bodies where she asserts that [adolescence] is the period that the subject feels the greatest discord between the body image and the lived body, between its psychical idealized self-image and bodily changes.. Neither boy nor girl, Ranma occupies a liminal space that, although played for comedy, is actually a forlorn and isolated one.

Or as he puts it at the end of the episode, "Friends, she says: The answer lies in the strict gender construction on which his and Akane's world is based. As Boronoff says in the quotation at the beginning of this section, "Japanese society defines gender roles with adamantine rules. Despite the carnival-esque nature of the situations they are thrust into, neither Akane nor Ranma himself can go beyond the rules of the real world, particularly because they are adolescents, a stage where ambiguity can be alluring but at the same time is deeply frightening.

To quote Grosz again, "it is only in adolescence that it becomes clear that the subject has a sexual, i. Tendo attempts to ignore the strange fact that he has a giant panda and a Chinese girl in his living room by embracing the "male" Ranma, only to fall into a faint at the evidence of Ranma's breasts, a sexual signifier that he is simply unable to process into his orderly world. In that scene Ranma rises from the spring, tears open his shirt, stares at his breasts in shock, and shrieks.

The fact that breasts, the signifier of femininity, mark the alien is Significant. Although it is true that many gender bending comedies emphasize men with false breasts for comic effect, in Ranma's case his breasts are not only comic but-initially at least-horrifying as well. Ranma's father becomes a panda, a guise in which he seems quite comfortable, since the viewer often sees him in panda form happily reading his newspaper while munching on a stick of bamboo.

Ryoga, one of Ranma's competitors transforms into an adorable miniature pig, unhappily at first, but he becomes increasingly philosophical about it as he realizes that this allows him to sleep with Akane. It is clear therefore that the male is the norm, and it is the female that is one of a variety of attributes including panda-ness, pig-ness that signify difference. Furthermore, being female is coded as being inferior to either a pig or a panda. Whereas turning from female into male is usually seen in many fantasies as a means of empowerment, Ranma's transformation from male to female is clearly coded as negative.

Ranma's very identity as a martial artist is threatened as well, because he is shorter and physically weaker as a girl. In a later episode Ranma is forced to enter in a martial arts competition while stuck in girl form. Although he wins in the end, his friends have little confidence in him because they are aware that even his martial arts expertise may not make up for his female limitations. Ranma's girlishness thus adds an extra tension to an already intense action sequence. Ranma-as-girl is a problematic figure. Perhaps one of the most terrifying of these fears is what literary scholar Eve Sedgewick calls "homosexual panic," the fear of the heterosexual male that he is really homosexual.

This fear is played out in a variety of episodes throughout the series.

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The first and most obvious example occurs in the second episode of the series, when Ranma first enters high school. Ranma attempts to rescue Akane from the loathsome attentions of Kuno, a pompous upperclassman who is also a master kendo swordsman. Unfortunately, Ranma turns into a girl while in the midst of a martial arts fight with Kuno and Kuno falls in love with "the pig-tailed girl" not realizing that "she" is actually the boy he is trying to fight. Kuno's confusion and Ranma's embarrassment come to a head when Ranma meets Kuno after school the following day for what Ranma expects to be fight.

Instead of bringing his sword, however, Kuno offers flowers to Ranma-as-girl, telling him "I love you. Naked in the pool Ranma imagines that he is surrounded by a circle of naked Kunos who chant to him "I love you. I would date you. T he fear of homosexuality that is the episode's subtext however, lends it a slightly more serious tone than many episodes in the series. When Kuno shouts "that man is no man" the obvious joke is again on Kuno because he is unknowingly technically correct, since Ranma is half woman as well.

But the unconscious joke is on Ranma who projects his own fears of being "sick" i. It is hardly surprising that Ranma wakes up covered with sweat. Even more potentially disturbing is a much later episode, "Watashi te Kiree?

Ranma no onna sengen" "Am I Pretty? Ranma's Declaration of Womanhood" in which Ranma loses control of both his body and his mind in a manner that links him explicitly to both homosexuality and androgyny. Struck on the head by Akane, Ranma loses all memory of himself as a boy and believes that he is a girl, who unaccountably sometimes takes on the form of a boy.

In his new mental state Ranma becomes parodically feminine. Being forced to hang up boys underwear his own , Ranma bursts into tears but is delighted when Akane invites him to go shopping. At the department store, however, he creates a scene when in his male form he picks up a bra and models it, asking Akane "Do you think this will look good on me? As a final humiliation, Ranma tries to use the men's room but is too embarrassed to urinate. Later on at home, he faints at the sight of blood, and that night comes into Akane's room "too frightened" to be able to sleep by himself.

The extremely broad sexual stereotyping of this episode is emphasized in the Japanese language version by the exaggeratedly feminine language Ranma now uses. Given that Ranma usually speaks quite roughly when in either male or female form, the emphatic feminine language is particularly disconcerting to his family and friends. At one point, Akane even angrily says, "Stop talking like a faggot! The episode veers away from dealing with homosexuality per se, however, and instead develops into an intriguing and even refreshing treatment of androgyny.

Ranma-as-girl insists that she truly feels much more at home as a girl, asserting that, "The real me has awakened and the other person was just fake memories. While Ranma's father and Mr. Akane's only response is to take on and defeat every one of them, all the while intoning "I hate boys!

However, she is carefully presented as having feminine aspects as well. One of the series subplots involves Akane's unrequited love for the family doctor, Dr. Tofu, who is passionately in love with her elder sister. As the series progresses, Akane's unrequited love for Dr. Tofu begins to dissipate and there are increasing suggestions that she and Ranma are beginning to appreciate each other. Well before the "Am I Pretty? While, as Butler says, "there is a cost to every identification," sometimes there may be a benefit as well.

T he two protagonists' impliCit identification with the opposite sex opens up the potential for genuine self-knowledge and even, in Ranma's case at least, empathy for the opposite sex. As the series develops, Ranma overcomes the problems of his physical weakness as a girl by relying more on strategy than physical strength.

This provides a different kind of tension in the series that the more purely fantastic treatments do not. The relation between body image and desire is paramount in Ranma's relations with the outside world. His public transformations ensure his objectification by others in a variety of ways. To his father his transformations make him an object of embarrassment.

To others they are a source of fascination and he becomes an object of desire. Kuno no doubt finds the "pig tailed" girl particularly attractive because of her mysterious provenance and tendency to disappear abruptly. Many others find himlher an object of intense desire as well. Indeed, much of the action in subsequent, increasingly broad episodes consists of Ranma fleeing various male and female figures who have fallen madly in love with one or the other of his identities.

As in Shakespeare, Ranma's changes usually set into motion an intense amount of narrative activity revolving around pursuit and competition. At other times it is Ranma himself pursuing the ultimate prize, the magic that will turn him back into a boy permanently.

Tendo's martial arts master, is usually presented as a shrunken old lecher in pursuit of panties and bras. The series contains an inordinate number of scenes of frenzied activity as one or more of the characters is either chased by a huge crowd or forced to perform in increasingly bizarre forms of competition including even a martial arts ski tournament. Accompanied by fast-paced music, the images speed by at a dizzying pace, but the prize Ranma, Akane, panties, magic potions is never permanently won, allowing for ever more bizarre variations on the theme. While the frenzied but essentially aimless motion of the bikers in A h ira underlined the contrast between them and their immovably dystopian society, the privileging of movement in Ranma suggests a parody of the intensely pressured real world of contemporary Japan in which everyone-workers, students, housewives-is in constant pursuit of some ever-receding goal.

Although played as festive comedy, the underlying sense of oppressive pressure is hard to avoid. Interestingly, many of the series' episodes revolve around competition among girls who compete as ruthlessly and sometimes more craftily than the boys. Perhaps the most consistent display of competition, however, is between the generations, specifically between Ranma and his father, who are constantly fighting. Much of this is clearly for humorous effect as Ranma and his father throw each other into water and switch constantly back and forth between male and female and human and panda.

But the sharply clear note of rivalry is impossible to ignore, as when Mr. Saotome complains that his son has disgraced him by being a girl and Ranma appropriately ripostes, "who are you to talk? My old man is a panda! Sao tome and the amusingly inept Mr. Tendo are honorable descendants in a long line of inadequate father figures. Chinese girl makes for superb comic dissonance while also evoking the unsettling strangeness of change that has penetrated even into the most traditional corners of Japan.

Faithful to its comic form Ranma always manages, if only barely, to contain the chaos each episode unleashes. The tropes of adolescence such as generational conflict, competitive pressures, and struggles with identity construction that we saw dealt with so darkly in Akira are given a lighthearted treatment here. While Akira showed the cathartic destruction of what was left of the world of adult authority, Ranma shows its farcical subversion.

Despite their very strong differences in tone, however, both Akira and Ranma revolve around the exultant privileging of change. Ultimately Ranma 1I2's narrative framework allows the threat to dissipate, while Akira's open-ended text suggests possibilities of ominous empowerment, but both texts allow the viewer to entertain, if only briefly, a pleasure predicated in going beyond the fetters of the physical. If you control the womb, you control the woman. La Blue Girl I'm going to change. Although enveloped in a hardcore s exual framework, the pornographic anime goes beyond the sexual in terms of plots, themes, and settings.

O ften, sexually explicit situations are integrated into dense narratives that are usually related to the fantastic, the occult, or science fiction. As such , pornography not only brings up obvious questions of gender c onstruc tion and interaction , but also less obvious ones as well, such as the relation of gender, p ower, and control to technology, tradi tion, and transition.

More than any other genre with the possible exception of ho rror, with which it is often linked , 1 pornography brings the body to the fore , not only in terms of sexuality but also in relation to aesthe tics, gender, and social identity. Although the genre also contains many examples of " normal," i. Much work remains to be done on the motivation behind these disturbingly frequent scenes, but, just as with slasher films in the Wes t , it is impossible to reduce all J apanese pornography to a simple vision of bru tal male dominance. As popular culture scholar D ouglas Kellner says o f Hollywood films, " [ E]ven conservative ones.

Pornogra p hic animation in Japan may want to show women in positions of abjection and submission, b u t what i t in fact shows is a m u c h more intricate series of contesting hierarchical relations in which men do not always come out on top. In this regard the depic tion of both male and female bodies is crucial. Belying the s tereotype of women as being only sex obj ects , Jap anese p ornogra p hic animation tends to depict the female body in an often contradictory variety of ways.

T here are also scenes in which the female body is enjoyed as a partner in j oyfu l , even loving, conven tional sexual intercourse. Although the women in these films are far from being icons of emancipation , they are no closer to being the p assive obj ects of domina tion described by many critics. I n contrast, the male body is usually limited to a few very different types, the two mos t frequent of which are " comic voyeur" and the " demonic p hallus incarnate.

I n fact, the only really powerful male figures in many pornograp hic films are not human. They are , literally, demons. Based on a novel by Kikuchi Hideyuki , Wicked City posits a parallel world , called the "Black World" tha t has knowingly coexisted with the human world for a t least years. The film's narra tive tension involves the signing o f a peace treaty between the human world and the Black World and the need to protect the one human representative who can deal with the Black World, an elderly man with the I talian-sounding name of Giuseppe who turns o u t to be a massively endowed old lecher.

A handsome government agent named Taki Reizabu ro and a beautiful Black World agen t named M akie are assigned to protect Giuseppe before the treaty signing. A Black World woman, p osing as a prostitu te, almost succeeds in killing Giuseppe in an arres ting sequence in which he melds into her dissolving body, a literal return to the womb that is as gro tesque as it is memorable. Taki and Makie manage to save the ungrateful Giuseppe at the last minu te, bu t Makie is kidnapped by the evil Black World resis tance fighters , who proceed to sexually torture her in a series of lengthy and graphically sadistic sequences.

Taki is determined to rescue her and goes into the demonic O ther world to do battle in a series of violent scenes, such as the visually s tunning sequence in which he confronts a Black World woman wh o transforms in to a giant, moisture-oozing vagina and tries to seduce him. Resisting temptation , Taki ultima tely rescues M akie and the two return to the human world, only to apparently be killed in a final violent confronta tion with Black Worlders.

In the film's climax , however, they are revived and learn the truth about G iuseppe and their own ro les. I t turns out that Giuseppe has actually been sen t to pro tec t Taki and Maki e , who are uniquely capable of creating a new race tha t combines humans and Black Worlders.

I n a surprisingly tender sequence the two make love after having been brought back from the dead.

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The ending is an upbeat one in which the pregnant Makie is seen as p otentially uniting the two worlds. They inherit the task of protecting Onimaru , who turns ou t to be a lecherous midget. Much sexual humor is derived from Onimaru's persistent efforts to see the girls naked. Although the demons are eventually qu elled, the climax features a lengthy sequence in which the Twin Dolls are tied up and hung over the pit of hell with their legs splayed open while the chief demon , an enormous figure with a p enis the size of a baseball bat, tortures and taunts th em.

The equally violent La B lue Girl intermixes a certain amount of conventional sex within a similar hellish demon-rapist narrative. The film takes place in an isolated mountain village where two female ninjas, Yaku and Miko , go in search of a demonic criminal w ho is raping young high school girls. The ninjas, specially trained in "sexual magic arts , " are also a ttemp ting to recover a demonic family sword that has amazing sexual properties i tself.

The opening scene sets the tone of sexual violence within a traditional setting; the viewer sees what appears to be a temple interior in which nude bodies of women are scattered everywhere, their vaginas covered in blood. The sex in La B lue G i rl is not always violent, however.

The ending of the film is actually somewhat upbeat: The plots of these films have been detailed here a t some length , partly in order to demonstrate some of their more obviou s similarities bu t also to emphasize that pornographic animation in J apan is more than simp ly a series of bodies coming together. One striking asp ect of all these films is their use of the occul t. I t i s interesting t o consider the power o f t h e essentially gothic context of setting and theme. The gothiC is a clearly nostalgic mode, and it is p erhap s not surp rising that in the last two films outlined this world is exp licitly identified with traditional jap an.