With the rise of digital culture since the late 1980s, Japanese animation, widely known as anime, has become a global phenomenon. Given its sweeping impact worldwide, we can no longer dismiss it as mere pop culture and entertainment. Indeed, anime has gradually emerged as a new field of research, dominating film histories and theories in the academia. This course offers an overview of anime by examining its histories, techniques and technologies, medium, genres, and conceptual issues. It will track anime’s early years, development, industrialization, globalization, and explosive boom in the digital age. Focusing on cinema features and TV series, this course will explore a variety of overlapping (sub)genres, such as Robot, Mecha, Cyberpunk, Apocalypse, Adventure, Supernatural, Shōjo, and Tragedy. Conceptual issues like cuteness, gender, sexuality, race, nation, environment, human-machine interaction, AI and posthumanism will be examined closely. Japanese language and knowledge are welcome but not required for this course.