Anime

With Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal and Puella Magi Madoka Magica commanding sizeable stateside audiences, a growing number of viewers are discovering the merits of the magic girl genre. But anime aficionados will quickly point ...

As the overabundance of police procedurals and supernatural-themed teen lit have demonstrated in the West, a single success can spur an upsurge of copycats. Naturally, anime follows an equivalent route, with depictions of high-school romance ...

As a gainfully employed adult living in the United States, I frequently have to justify my appreciation for anime. Woefully, many still associate animation with children’s entertainment. A typical response involves a discussion between the ...

One of the more fascinating elements of modern anime is the existence of fan service- material that is specifically included to gratify or titillate an audience. From manga drawn to reveal a sliver of shimapan ...

Last August NIS America published The Secret Lives of High School Boys, a thoroughly charming anime which cultivated humor from the unexceptional existence of a trio of good-natured friends. In execution, the series was unfalteringly ...

Save for the dogfighting depicted in The Princess and The Pilot, NIS America’s output of anime has enigmatically evaded the high action which is characteristic of shōnen. With the release of Brave 10, a twelve ...

Growing up in the Bay Area as an introverted, video-game obsessed, athletically-inept young boy didn’t provide many opportunities for socialization with girls. As such, most of what I learned about females came either through stealthy ...

I’d like to think that there’s a bit of Takashi Natsume is every person. As the eponymous protagonist of Natsume’s Book of Friends, the high-schooler faced an unrelenting rivulet of adversity. Growing up, the youth ...

Although absorbing character arcs are ubiquitous in anime, few depictions of development have been as gratifying as the first thirteen episodes of Hanasaku Iroha: Blossoms for Tomorrow. Viewers witnessed protagonist Ohana Matsumae move from Tokyo ...

In his 2006 book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter, writer Steven Johnson asserts that the act of watching television has shifted from simple passive escapism to ...