Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 157 monstrous. In it, Ishii finally brings together all the threads of contemporary cultural anxiety, the destructive potential of monsters real and imagined, and the power of art to impact individuals and to mediate a constructive response to culture through a new understanding of the monstrous fantastic. In this way, Ishii demonstrates that the process of creating artistic culture has the potential to reconcile cultural uncertainty and anxiety by interpreting unseen elements of the monstrous in society’s consciousness and rewriting the dominant narrative of the monstrous fantastic in a way that can be communicated to others. It is this progressive, constructive, and social aspect of the artist as mediator that allows Yoshiko to sum up her own experience with the words “Drawing is where the joy is” ( The Taste of Tea ). I suspect the director of the studio speaks for Ishii when he responds, “and that is what anime is all about” ( The Taste of Tea ).