By Andrew Osmond. As long as new fans are stepping tentatively into anime, there’ll always be a need for an up-to-date guidebook, helping them tell their moe from their mecha. There’ve been a great many English-language guides in the last three decades. At one end, the mammoth Anime Encyclopedia encompass the whole medium. At the […]
May 11, 2022 • Subscribe
More like this
Books: Anime — A History
By Zoe Crombie. Since its initial release in 2013, Jonathan Clements’ Anime: A History has served as a unique resource for anyone looking to contextualise their love of…
Book Review: 500 Essential Anime Movies by Helen McCarthy
"this is deliberate misinformation"
Books: Ghibliotheque Anime Movie Guide
By Andrew Osmond. Last year saw Ghibliotheque: The Unofficial Guide to the Movies of Studio Ghibli, a book by the hosts of the popular Ghibliotheque podcast, which I…
Books: Anime Streaming Platform Wars
By Jonathan Clements. Sneaked out this week by Concordia University’s Platform Lab, Anime Streaming Platform Wars might sound like an oddly business-focussed computer game, but is actually a…
Pure TokyoScope PODCAST #62: Patrick's New Book THE ESSENTIAL ANIME GUIDE!
Matt Alt and Patrick Macias bring you pop culture info from Japan!
Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Books: Ghibliotheque
By Andrew Osmond. The Ghibliotheque podcast started in 2018, and soon became an institution. It offered a journey through the films of Studio Ghibli, presented by Michael Leader…
Books: Sexiled
By Shelley Pallis. Tanya is twenty-five years old. She’s got half a decade of adventuring behind her, looting treasure from dungeons, spell-casting to protect her friends from goblins…
Books: Orienting
By Jonathan Clements. “My stay here has been so short,” said Rabindranath Tagore to Japanese students in 1916, “that one may think I have not earned my right…
'Jujutsu Kaisen' leads Crunchyroll anime awards
Plus: Print manga continues dominance in France; Digital share of light novel sales grows; Gundam plastic model kits move upmarket; and more
Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2021 – Our Choices!
We make our choices for the 2021 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, including Best Animation, Best Director and Anime of the Year!
Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2021 Winner list
Crunchyroll is the biggest anime streaming platform, and streaming anime is not the only thing Crunchyroll is famous for. The company has been providing a ton o
Crunchyroll Announces New Anime for 2022
The good folks from anime streaming service Crunchyroll have just revealed details of their new anime for 2022. They headline with Attack on...
Doctorkev’s Autumn 2022 Anime Postmortem: Crunchyroll
2022’s final anime season has seen fit to bless us with an embarrassment of riches. At least as far as Crunchyroll’s offerings go, this may…
Doctorkev’s Spring 2022 Anime Postmortem: Crunchyroll
What a great anime season it’s been! Winter 2022 was comparatively quiet, but Spring 2022 has brought both quantity and quality. Mostly…
5 Essential Factors for Choosing a Boarding School
Boarding schools provide students with independence and vital skills, but for families seeking a well-rounded education, selecting the ideal one in an evolving landscape can be a daunting…
The (Absolute) State of Crunchyroll Original Anime
Crunchyroll Originals have a reputation for being awful. Which makes sense, some of them REALLY ARE. But are they all that bad? With the label basically dead, it's…
In/Spectre, Noblesse, So I'm a Spider, So What?, Tower of God, Blade Runner: Black Lotus
Crunchyroll Announces 2020 Anime Awards Categories & Judges
Earlier today, Crunchyroll opened their official website for the 2020 Anime Awards. The site includes this year’s list of categories, as well as the panel of judges for…
Yuri Is My Job! Anime on Crunchyroll
Earlier this year, I started a series on YouTube called Erica Reacts (Not Really) to first episodes of Yuri anime coming out this year. Long Covid has pretty…
Crunchyroll aims for one-stop anime service
Plus: Kadokawa finds anime success from light novel portfolio; MANGA Plus debuts at NY Comic Con; Anime personnel face harassment on social media; and more
Crunchyroll Has The Monopoly On Anime Now
Hey remember Hidive? Yeah I don’t either.
Crunchyroll Announces Spring Anime Streaming Season 2023
The good folks from anime streaming giants Crunchyroll have sent us details of their Spring 2023 streaming line up. This season has so much ...
Predicting the Crunchyroll Anime Award 2022 winners
The Crunchyroll Anime Awards are about a week away. To keep up my new tradition of predicting the winners as I did last year, time to see if…
Crunchyroll aims for one-stop anime service
Plus: Kadokawa finds anime success from light novel portfolio; MANGA Plus debuts at NY Comic Con; Anime personnel face harassment on social media; and more
Anime Expo 2023: Crunchyroll Industry Panel Announcements
Last weekend marked massive anime convention Anime Expo and many industry announcements were made. Not wanted to be left out the good folks ...
Crunchyroll aims for one-stop anime service
Plus: Kadokawa finds anime success from light novel portfolio; MANGA Plus debuts at NY Comic Con; Anime personnel face harassment on social media; and more
Crunchyroll Commission Anime Mural in London's Shoreditch
The good folks from anime mega company Crunchyroll have taken marketing to the next level in the hipster central part of London by commissio...
The problems with the Crunchyroll Anime Awards
Last year I did a whole string of posts predicting the winners of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards. I got them about half-right, with most of my errors coming…
Another Year, Another Problematic Crunchyroll Anime Awards
You know, I poke fun at the Crunchyroll anime awards a lot. I really do but, sometimes me picking fun at it is just me hiding thinly veiled…
NEWS: New 24/7 Anime Crunchyroll Channel
Crunchyroll announced a new 24/7 anime channel, available on Amazon Freevee, LG Channels, The Roku Channel, and VIZIO WatchFree+.
Books: Anime’s Identity
By Jonathan Clements. Stevie Suan’s new book, Anime’s Identity, cannot resist telling a story from the production of King’s Avatar (above), a 2019 Chinese animated series that subcontracted…
Books: Hayao Miyazaki
By Andrew Osmond. Hayao Miyazaki, published to tie in with the current exhibition about the director at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, is a whopping big book.…
Books: Tearmoon Empire
By Jonathan Clements. Then she woke up, and it was all a dream. Or was it? The teenage princess Mia Luna Tearmoon vividly recalls being eight years older,…
Books: Spirit Chronicles
By Shelley Pallis. Yuri Kitayama’s Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles has several different beginnings, and to be frank, I am not sure that it has stopped beginning yet, even…
The Best Books
Buying books, especially old books, is a fascination and my biggest weakness. I love the old wear and tear on antiques, and sitting and pondering where the scraped…
Books: Terminal Boredom
By Jonathan Clements. “There is something wrong with our present society,” Izumi Suzuki once wrote, “and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that… Even…
Books: Japanese Drinking
By Shelley Pallis. Masaaki Watanabe’s anime series Bartender is part of a long tradition of TV shows about smart loners who help others in secret. Its leading man…
Books: Hell Mode
By Shelley Pallis. Kenichi is a gamer suffering from that common modern malaise, a frustration with games that make life too easy for him. He’s just spent three…
Books: Combat Baker…
By Jeannette Ng. The light novel series The Combat Baker and the Automaton Waitress follows Lud “Silver Wolf” Langart, a former captain and mech-operator who retires after a…
Books: Leiji Matsumoto
By Jonathan Clements. For all the passion and excitement that the contributors bring to the new collection Leiji Matsumoto: Essays on the Anime and Manga Legend, their subject…
Books: Monster Kids
By Jonathan Clements. In his lively new book Monster Kids: How Pokémon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All, Daniel Dockery talks us through the original plans in…
Books: Japanese Cinema
By Jasper Sharp. There are many paths one might take through the vast and varied terrain of Japanese cinema. Peter Cowie’s addition to the ever-expanding range of publications…
Books: Kyoto Stories
By Jonathan Clements. “Riding on public transportation in Japan makes you feel a part of the general population,” writes Steve Alpert in Kyoto Stories. “One of the people.…
Books: Rediscovered Classics
By Zoe Crombie. Anime has taken inspiration from Western cultures throughout much of its history, from Astro Boy’s Disney-inspired aesthetics to the gorgeous European locales of films like…
Books: Reading Murakami
By Jonathan Clements. Almost everything that is written about fiction is either reception (what the reader thought of the book) or production (an occasional making-of about the author…
Books: Studio Ghibli
By Jonathan Clements. Producer Toshio Suzuki was entertainingly underwhelmed when he was approached by agents for the pop stars Chage and Aska, who asked if Studio Ghibli would…
Books: Rebuild World
By Jonathan Clements. When we first see Akira, he is gripped in the jaws of a mutant dog. Nafuse’s Rebuild World ditches the tiresome induction scene of many…
Books: Otherside Picnic
By Shelley Pallis. Sorawo Kamikoshi is a loner, a twenty-year-old nerd studying cultural anthropology at a Saitama university, whose hobby is exploring spooky places. Nor are these randomly…
Books: Infinite Dendrogram
By Shelley Pallis. Infinite Dendrogram is the best game ever invented, a “virtual reality massively multiplayer online game” but not a crap one like all the ones that…