At this point, what do we definitely know about Dani Cavallaro? She is the author of at least 22 books, including 13 on anime. These books are available at many academic libraries – the OCLC FirstSearch database indicates that more than 500 own copies of The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki. And her work has been acknowledged by other scholars. But what do we know about Dani Cavallaro the person? What is her academic background? How is she actually qualified to write about Japanese animation and comics?
And, more importantly, how have readers evaluated her work?
Comments on the Anime and Manga Research Circle mailing list about Cavallaro include:
“I’ve only skimmed a couple of her books and found them unimpressive to say the least, and would never rely on her work in my own writing. She just seems to be, at best, summarizing other people’s scholarship at a fast-and-furious pace…There’s so much good, original research out there now, there’s no point in having students using what is, in effect, a one-person Wikipedia in print.”
“Her scholarship is dubious, at best; she ‘borrows’ from other scholars without proper accreditation; and her prose is jargony, convoluted, vapid, and incomprehensible.”
And – from a published author who is nowhere near as mysterious as she is:
“I just got a copy of Dani Cavallaro’s new book on Oshii’s films. For now I’ll just say that if (close) imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then some parts of her book compliment me highly… (Sans credit or citation, of course.)”
And those are just comments from readers. What about scholars who have actually tried to draw on Cavallaro’s work in their own?
In their essay Hoodwinked! and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade: Animated “Little Red Riding Hood” films and the Rashômon Effect (Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 27:1, pp. 89-108), Pauline Greenhill (women’s and gender studies) and Steven Kohn (criminal justice) – both at the University of Winnipeg – discuss several studies of Jin-Roh, among them, Cavallaro’s Cinema of Mamoru Oshii: Fantasy, Technology, and Politics. They acknowledge her work – but not necessarily her points. For example, the authors note that Cavallaro presents Jin-Roh as “Oshii’s retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood tale from the wolf’s point of view”, and do not agree with this assessment, arguing instead that it is “taking multiple viewpoints and, ultimately, like Rashômon, preferring none.”
More importantly, they specifically point out Cavallaro’s claim that for Jin-Roh, “Oshii chose to adopt the German version of the traditional fairytale, where the little girl herself consumes her mother’s flesh.” They ask Jack Zipes, probably the leading American specialist on fairy tales, to comment on this claim. “Zipes (personal communication, 2012) affirms that no German version does so; nor is there a German version involving the mother rather than grandmother.”
So, maybe the question is something else beyond “who is Dani Cavallaro?” What reasons do we have to trust Dani Cavallaro as an anime scholar. Should we believe what Dani Cavallaro claims in her books? And, for that matter, should we cite her books, read her books, and especially, buy her books?
I’d be interested to know what her non-academic readers think. How many stars does she get on amazon?
Readers are certainly leaving some feedback:
‘Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki’ averages just a bit over 3 stars (over 13 reviews).
‘Cinema of Mamuro Oshii’ has 3 reviews – 1 four-star, and 2 one-star. Of these two, one is by by Brian Ruh, the author of ‘Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
– Anime and Memory: one 1-star review.
– Anime and the Visual Novel: one 1-star
– Art of Studio Gainax: one 2-star
– CLAMP in Context: 2 average, over 5 reviews, including 3 1-star
– Japanese Aesthetics and Anime: one 5-star
So, there’s certainly not a lot there in terms of feedback – and not enough to make any kind of statistically valid conclusions. On the other hand, Amazon also isn’t really known as a venue for reviews of academic books – even Lamarre’s ‘The Anime Machine’ only has four reviews, and Susan Napier’s “From Impressionism to Anime”, two.
You may also be interested in my review of Cavallaro’s “Magic as Metaphor in Anime,” in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Vol. 7 No 2, Winter 2012. I went pretty easy on her–I was still a grad student at the time and you never know who it’s safe to be brutally honest about. A colleague’s assessment was more direct: “This isn’t purple prose — it’s ultraviolet!” (K. L. Hamilton, private communication)
Thank you for the citation. You did indeed take a different tone in that published review, than is being taken by the majority of respondents here.
I’ve banned my students from using her work. Most undergraduate students don’t yet have the insight to evaluate—and appropriately disregard—shoddy work like this. I do sometimes hold it up as an example of how not to write—(unless you too want to have your “scholarly output” nearly universally shunned by manga/anime scholars because of poor citation practices (at best) and shoddy argumentation).
I’ve also alerted librarians at a school I was recently affiliated with about the low caliber of her work (and frankly much of what I’ve seen coming out of that press—which seems to have no legitimate peer review process) and suggested they place her works (and possibly the press) on a do-not-purchase list. They were grateful. Unless a school/library has a manga/anime expert on staff, they are likely to have no idea of her standing.
I’m only an undergraduate myself, but being interested in studies on Anime I picked up a recent book of hers on Kyoto Animation. I did find some parts interesting (since from what I’ve seen there’s so little work done on the studio’s output), but a lot of it seemed to be things that I already knew (like the long explanation of “moe”). I think I can understand the accusation of her being a “one-person Wikipedia”.
I’m also an undergraduate and read her book on Kyoto Animation, and didn’t know what to think. While reading, I kept a notebook for words I do not know the meaning of so I could expand my vocabulary and one for any interesting facts the book provided. Safe to say the former ended up with more entries than the latter, and most of those entries came from the Filmography. For the most part, I needed to motivate myself to actually finish reading it because there was a lack of learning anything new (outside of words) while trying to traverse through her convoluted language. Originally, there were doubts I held for this book based on publisher and the looking at her bibliography, in which he/she cited BrainyQuote.com (I’m only a sophomore, but even I began to laugh at how I could find this genuinely expectable.). If anything, I wanted to read it to discover how someone can interpret the Endless Eight arch. In conclusion, I just want to thank everyone in the comment section and the author of the post telling me I’m not someone who clearly does not appreciate/understand her methods, and that other authors have made better contributions to the English scholarship concerning anime. Thank You.
I’m doing a senior thesis on Miyazaki’s late 1970s directorial work and have found Cavallero’s book on himto be uninspiring to say the least. The moment she claimed Spirited Away was a comment on child prostitution, I burst into hysterics.
I cited Cavallaro on MIyazaki once in my diss, but only to refute her. She has (he has? it has?) cribbed from people I know. Her arguments are convoluted and vapid. When you deconstruct her sentences, she isn’t really saying anything.
As a student who regrettably bought Anime and Memory for research purposes, as well as The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki to read before bed, I’m glad the provenance of Cavallaro’s work is being interrogated. With regards to Anime and Memory, I knew I was in trouble when she begins by deferring to an encyclopedia entry on traditional Japanese aesthetics as opposed to more substantial scholarship, unless you count the dubious “David Pascal” who I’ve never heard of and who I’m struggling to look up with the bibliographical information she supplies.
Anyway, it quickly became apparent that her “case studies” are compound reviews dressed in academic parlance, in which she gratingly lauds the creators “under discussion”: ‘In the hands of a less inspired director, blah blah blah’. Her work is primarily descriptive and barely analytic at best. Ditto for her book on Miyazaki, in which she has a tendency to incorporate laughable irrelevancies: ‘Disney treated their Japanese guests to a welcome lunch but tastefully refrained from throwing a sumptuous party’. Lol, okay.
I just wish I’d read this post sooner. While her works may be comparatively cheap, they’re still not inexpensive. And I am kicking myself.
As a sidenote, according to Goodreads it seems a she’s having another book published later this year (again by McFarland) to cover Miyazaki’s work 2004-2013, despite the fact that this period includes far fewer films, especially where Miyazaki himself serves as director. Hmm.
She is a real person. She taught at the Uni of North London back in the late 80’s. Very bright and amusing.
Very dull and uninspiring, you mean. She kept saying how wonderful ALL her students were and EVERYBODY got top marks, even for mediocre work. Her students knew more than she did, plus her English wasn’t really up to the job. I just hope she’s no longer teaching.
I am grateful I am not the only one to find her work slipshod. When I first encountered the plethora of her “work”, I was at first disheartened: here was what looked to be a prolific scholar churning out work as it it was nothing! Of course, it is nothing, illusory.
What I wonder is if this Dani character is the same as the Dani Cavallaro: http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/dani-cavallaro-28602
Goodreads and amazon seems to think so.
Yes that is her.
I’m so glad I found this article. I too was intrigued by the mystery of who this hyper prolific author was after finding a number of their volumes in my uni library.
I started reading ‘Japanese Aesthetics and Anime’ by them and found it almost impossible to read – bizarrely structured and full of lengthy descriptive passages that read like jargon heavy Wikipedia passages. Any analysis is surface level at best or just restructuring of what other scholars have said. For the most part though, the experience of reading just felt thoroughly unpleasant – I’ve never encountered anything else quite like it.
Utterly bizarre!
I wonder where she teaches these days and why she keeps such a low profile? Doe she not attend any symposiums?
Paul,
That’s exactly the thing – you would expect an author who is as prolific as Cavallaro, even if she is an independent scholar, to publish her work in journals, participate in conferences, have *some* kind of online presence. With her, there is nothing like that. Although, now that I look into this a bit further, there is at least one book out there (“Cyberpunk and Cyberculture”, 1998) that lists her as “a researcher at the University of Westminster”.
The following comment was posted at February 21, 2019 at 5:59 pm. I would challenge the moderator to post it this second time, and thus make clear that s/he is not trying to stifle dissenting academic opinions:
Respondent “Paul” appears to be correct, and a charitable hypothesis might be that the author in question is a former academic aspirant in the UK system that left that normal trajetory, and is making a living by independent scholarship and publishing.
I offer the first part of this hypothesis based on (a) Glen Creeber’s 1998 acknowledgment of a “Dani Cavallaro” in the “Dennis Potter Between Two Worlds: A Critical Reassessment” (Berlin:Springer), where he states “A book of this kind is always built upon a deeper foundation than those who helped specifically in its construction. Thanks must therefore go to all my friends and colleagues at the University of North London, Lancaster University, The University of East London and the University of East Anglia. Very special thanks to… Dani Cavallaro… [in an alphabetical list of several]”; and, (b) her apparent co-authorship, in 1998, of “Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body” (London: Bloomsbury), with Alexandra Warwick, who at the time was Head of English and Linguistics at the University of Westminster.
I draw the latter part of the hypothesis based on the facts that the clearest scholarly components of her publishing record seem to cease, after which time the remainder of her work—which is the part that has drawn this group’s pointed criticism—are book-length treatments of a variety of subjects, including anime. Finally, I would lean toward the charitable, as I hold to the common courtesy (and, for instance, Wikipedia’s philosophy) of assuming the good faith of a contributor, until this is fairly and justly shown to be unwarranted. In this regard, I reject at its face the easy conclusion that one justifies suspicion simply by being an independent scholar, or failing to maintain a web page, or declining to travel (cf. the translation legacy of Dorothy Sayers, the practices of many older scholars, or scholars from non-Western or small universities); in this regard, I would note that Mssr Koulikov is just such an independent.
Hence, I would challenge readers, especially those contributing above, to take the time to do an analysis of those *citing* Cavallaro’s work, over time, and of their qualifications and credentials, to see if *any* of the work is not called into question by reliable scholars (perhaps offering that to us as “Part 3”). That is to say, it does not follow from a proposal that the latter part of her work (i.e., some part of the work) is not reliable, that all of it is—and it is far too easy, and simply unjust to cast online aspersions with so little careful forensic, scholarly effort.
Cavallaro’s identity notwithstanding, your challenge to the readers is easily accepted and overcome. In your aim for the reader to do an analysis of Cavallaro’s work and ascertain for ourselves as to whether any of it is actually unreliable, it was very quickly found that besides a high volume of poor-quality work that amounts to paraphrasing Wikipedia and other tertiary sources, Cavallaro’s prose and writing style is in fact, plagiarism of said sources. Plagiarism is a very serious academic offense, and therefore, not an accusation to make lightly, but again, a brief search turned up a detailed post of how Cavallaro’s work is tantamount to plagiarism.
In the post linked, <a href="https://infinitemirai.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/investigating-unacceptable-academic-practises-in-dani-cavallaros-kyoto-animation-a-critical-study-and-filmography-with-a-case-study-on-the-k-on-movie/"a detailed breakdown, using an anime film as an example, was found to show that mistakes and inconsistencies in a tertiary source carried over into Cavallaro's writing. That is to say, there is evidence to suggest that Cavallaro had plagiarized from a blog for her own writing.
Taken together, the details in the linked post, coupled with observations others have made, also indicate that challenges to Cavallaro’s credibility and academic honest are valid. In other words, it does follow to propose that all of Cavallaro’s work is unreliable. Similarly, there has been, in fact, more than the minimum necessary scholarly and forensic effort taken to demonstrate that Cavallaro’s fraudulent practises are more than mere online aspersions.
It’s been bothering me a little: could the link in the above comment be updated to read:
…
a detailed breakdown, using an anime film as an example, was found to show that mistakes and inconsistencies in a tertiary source carried over into Cavallaro’s writing
…
This makes sure the article in question is properly linked to. Thanks!