Book excerpt: This handbook fills a substantial gap in the international academic literature on animation at large, on music studies, and on the aural dimensions of Japanese animation more specifically. It offers a unique contribution at the intersection between music and popular culture studies on the one hand, and research on Japanese animated productions (often called ‘anime’) as popular art forms and formats of entertainment, on the other. The book is designed as a reference work consisting of an organic sequence of theory-grounded essays on the development of music, sounds, and voices in Japanese animation for cinema and television since the 1930s. Each chapter deals with a phase of this history, focusing on composers and performers, films, series, and genres used in the soundtracks for animations made in Japan. The chapters also offer valuable interviews with prominent figures of music in Japanese animation, as well as chapter boxes clarifying specific aspects.