As every otaku knows, choosing your club is a key decision in Japanese high school life, and the kid who’s the only member of a beloved but obscure club is a standard anime character. Schools eliminate clubs with fewer than five members, so recruiting more kids is vital, whether it’s for the Classical Literature Club […]

Although there have been numerous books and countless articles published about Studio Ghibli and its creations, few, if any, journalists have been able to write about the internal workings of the studio. Steve Alpert, who speaks Japanese fluently, came to Ghibli in 1996 and spent the next decade and a half there as a senior […]

At a time when many American features look so much alike, the brilliant colors and boldly stylized imagery in Hiroyuki Imaishi’s Promare hit the viewer like a bucket of ice water. As Imaishi, screenwriter Kazuki Nakashima and many of the animators worked together on the popular series Gurren Lagann, the flamboyant visual style won’t surprise […]

Eiichiro Oda’s pirate comedy-adventure One Piece may well be the most popular animated franchise on the planet. The 96 paperback collections of the original manga have sold more than 450 million books–not far behind the “Harry Potter” series. More than 939 episodes of the animated TV series have been produced with no end in sight. […]

The outré sci-fi adventure-comedy RobiHachi (2019) presents the future as a tourist trap. Tall, lanky, and self-indulgent, Robby Yarge is a shameless if unsuccessful skirt-chaser and ne’er-do-well. After a series of get-rich-quick schemes crash and burn, he’s left owing a fortune to Mr. Yang. To collect the debt, Yang sends bright, eager Hatchi Ika. Hatchi […]

Fire Force is set in a future Earth that was ravaged by The Great Disaster decades earlier, when much of the planet was rendered uninhabitable by terrible conflagrations. Many survivors took refuge in the Tokyo Empire. The Tokyo Emperors brought together personnel from the Holy Sol Temples, the Fire Defense Agency and armed forces to […]