“There was… an initial explosion of Japanese animation on Chinese television, spearheaded by Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, which Li characterises as a delivery system for adverts for Casio watches and calculators. It, like many others – including Transformers, and outside anime, Mickey Mouse and He-Man – was practically given away free to the Chinese networks in order to seize control of the all-important advertising space in between the programmes. In the case of Astro Boy, he even starred in the commercials, bragging that Casio used the same technology that made him (presumably without the arse-mounted machine guns).”

Over at All the Anime, I review Jinying Li’s new book Anime Knowledge Cultures: Geek – Otaku – Zhai.