The author documents his experiences, which were almost entirely at Mushi Productions. It’s written like a novel, but the author says he faithfully recorded what actually happened. You can get a good grasp of the history of Mushi Productions with this book alongside “Tezuka Osamu Gekijou” (Osamu Tezuka Theater, Tezuka Productions editors, 1991).
My book, Nihon no animēshon wa ika ni shite seiritsu shita no ka (How Japanese Animation Was Created), covers a period of almost 100 years, starting with the Meiji era when foreign animation was first screened in Japan. I focus on animation located at peripheries and boundaries, and I examine how the concept of animation was created and developed in Japan. I wish to provide a list of books, perhaps arbitrarily, that, I believe, can be used as references in terms of the history of animation in Japan; I combined with my own book.
The fact that I’m compiling this list means that this list will have nothing to do with “academism.” That is to say, I picked books to understand “anime history” and not the history of animation, and I focused on commercial books that probably haven’t gotten much attention in academic circles. However, I excluded my own books, and I also deliberately left off some standard references. The list is in chronological order based on publication date.
This is an autobiographical fiction of Ani Meita (Annie Mator). The protagonist depicts the reality of Mushi Productions from its founding to its bankruptcy. It describes a crazy, ultra-black workplace that somehow makes impossible deadlines possible.