As I’m writing this, we are mere months away from the premiere of the live-action Hollywood adaptation of Ghost in the Shell . But before we get to the, ahem, Johansson-ization of Ghost in the Shell , let’s take a look at the anime and …Read more »
Don’t let Emerson’s “Life is a journey, not a destination” fool you. Sometimes, destinations can be their own journeys. Take, for instance, Kino (a perpetual traveler) and Hermes (an AI-imbued, talking motorcycle), who stay no longer than three days in any country they happen upon. …Read more »
Nurse Witch Komugi was a colorful, frenetic OVA that lasted for six episodes, originally released back in 2002. It was meant as a parodical spinoff of the series SoulTaker , with several of the characters that appeared in that anime taking on weird parodical versions …Read more »
Five years after the release of what was billed as his final film, the (ultimately pointless) debate rages on: who is the next Miyazaki? His son, Goro? His one-time almost-collaborator, Mamoru Hosoda? New box-office king Makoto Shinkai? This week, it turned out the next Hayao …Read more »
Hitoshi Sakimoto is a well-known composer in the video game world, with a generations-spanning career that includes games like Final Fantasy Tactics , Final Fantasy XII , Valkyria Chronicles , and many more. We caught up with him at the Tokyo offices of BlazeGames, where …Read more »
By all accounts it appears as if sports anime is more popular than ever. It’s taken some time to really sink its hooks into Western fans, but at this point there’s something legally streaming, and either running now or having aired very recently, for pretty …Read more »
Mineralblu Photography Hello fellow otaku! By now, you guys have been working all winter on your new cosplays (or at least thinking about them …) and the big summer convention season is about to begin gearing up in just a few more months. With all …Read more »
Manga authors rarely visit the United States because of their constant deadlines, so seeing Rei Hiroe, creator of Black Lagoon, at AnimeNEXT 2016 was quite the rarity. We got a chance to talk with him … while surrounded by a small army of publishing execs …Read more »
Whenever I watch Drifters: Battle in a Brand-New World War, that opening exchange from 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II comes to mind. It’s a top-rate action movie, hugely influential on film and video games (you’d have no Metal Gear without it), but it’s also …Read more »
Once upon a time, anime and manga fans actually thought Dragon Ball Z was a long series. The notion seems ridiculous now—Akira Toriyama’s original manga ran for 519 chapters across a total of 42 volumes, each of which has been collected in myriad ways since—but …Read more »
Anyone about to watch a series called Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? has to have a few questions floating around in their heads. Why is the title so long? What kind of dungeon are we talking about? And …Read more »
Amid the pressures of being the sole figure skater representing Japan in the Grand Prix Final, Yuri Katsuki gets news from home of his beloved dog’s death. The breaking of that emotional straw, along with the associated lethargy of depression and comfort food ingestion, spurs …Read more »
If Drifters contains too much testosterone in your revisionist war history wish fulfillment for your liking, worry not! Japanese otaku and the Winter 2016 anime season also offer their other most common variant. For, as strange though it is for me to say this, “alternate …Read more »
Tetsuya Akutsu stands with his hands in his pockets, an embarrassed grin on his face. “I haven’t cleaned the place in a while,” he explains. In his defense, the place, a room on the second floor of a house in west Tokyo, isn’t so much …Read more »
In the early going of Tiger Mask W , a character wonders why the devious Tiger’s Den gym (not to be confused with the heroic Tiger Mask) would recycle 50-year-old gimmicks like Yellow Devil and Black Python in place of creating new ones for its …Read more »
Evan Minto
Ink
Brittany Vincent
Matt Schley
Joseph Luster
Ani-Mia
Daryl Surat
Wes Black