Anime’s “World” Masterpiece Theater: Heidi (1974), Maya the Bee (1975), and Nippon Animation’s Entry Into a Truly Global Mediascape

Anime media has garnered attention both for its distinct spreadability and the affective bonds audiences have created with its texts. Much of the deeper analysis surrounding anime’s spread however tends to ignore its global cultural impact before the 1990s, thereby overlooking many of its key incursions into the quotidian popular cultures of emerging broadcast landscapes around the world. This investigation focuses on the production and spread of two anime series from the 1970s, Heidi: Girl of the alps and Maya the Bee , in order to explore anime producers’ first collaborative, deliberate efforts to integrate a global media market beyond the usa. In doing so, it addresses the spread and reformatting of these texts through a variety of trajectories, in order to demonstrate antecedents to anime’s current transnationality, as well as highlight the breadth of voices involved in lending to meaning to anime as they integrated these diverse localities.