Times Out of Mind: Exploring Japanese Animation

Author: Chris Robinson

Published: 2027

Print length: 209 pages

Paperback

**

While visiting Japan, animation writer Chris Robinson gets lost. Drifting through Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto, he stumbled into a string of encounters -- with mysterious figures like Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, sumo wrestlers, and Big Bird, and, by good luck, with Japanese animators both living and dead. Each meeting draws him into a deep, dark, uncanny current of Japanese animation -- one that has nothing to do with Godzilla, Akira, anime, manga, or Hayao Miyazaki.

The original book, Time Out of Mind, rewrites the this history through the artists Robinson meets and studies -- Koji Yamamura, Atsushi Wada, Taku Furukawa, Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita, Maya Yonesho, and many more -- while his drifting becomes the method: a travelogue that keeps slipping into something stranger. 

Time Out of Mind reprints that original book in full, then adds a new section written fifteen years later. Robinson returns to Japan to reopen the same uncanny thread -- new conversations, new detours -- while figures from the first journey reappear. Along the way, he meets artists including Masaaki Yuasa, Kenji Iwaisawa, Sawako Kabuki, Yoriko Mizushiri, and Ryo Orikasa. The result is part travelogue, part memoir, part fiction, and part off-the-map animation history.

Chris Robinson is a Canadian writer and the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF). He writes about animation with a mischievous, gonzo-tinged energy -- mixing memoir, history, criticism, interviews, and the occasional surreal detour to get closer to what the work feels like. He is the author of influential titles including The Animation Pimp, Unsung Heroes of Animation, Earmarked for Collision, and Raw Outrage: The Films of Phil Mulloy. Robinson received Animafest Zagreb's 2020 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies, and in 2022 was awarded the Pri René Jodoin for his contributions to Canadian animation. He wrote the award-winning animated short Lipsett Diaries (2010), directed by Theodore Ushev, and his feature screenplay Idling is in production.