The past 15 years have seen a boom in academic studies of anime, ranging from thematic and cultural analysis such as Susan J. Napier's "Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle" to formal theory based on technical processes and the nature of two-dimensional images such as Thomas Lamarre's "The Anime Machine." Alistair D. Swale's "Anime Aesthetics: Japanese Animation and the 'Post-Cinematic' Imagination" covers even more ambitious ground. It asks: how is anime "art"?