Shounen-ai—literally “boy’s love”–is a curious genre of anime and manga that has no American counterpart. It depicts innocent romances between bishonen (beautiful young men), but it’s created by women for female audiences. Some people use the word interchangeably with yaoi. Others maintain yaoi involves sexually explicit scenes, while shounen-ai never does. The characters may kiss […]

Times are tough for Yato (voice by Jason Liebrecht), the minor god of calamity who’s at the center of the broadcast series Noragami Aragoto (2015), the sequel to Noragami (2014). He’s still knocking around Tokyo in an old warm-up suit and busted boots, offering to grant wishes for ¥5 coins. Yato may be broke, but […]

The 2015 broadcast comedy Ultimate Otaku Teacher focuses on the nutty Jun’ichiro Kagami (Anthony Bowling). At 17, Kagami was a physics prodigy, authoring a paper that proved it was theoretically possible to create Doraemon’s Anywhere Door. But when he discovered the technology needed to realize his vision wouldn’t exist for at least another century, he […]

The broadcast series Amagi Brilliant Park boasts an impressive pedigree: Its original creator is Shoji Gatou, who wrote the light novels that served as the basis for the hit comedy-adventure Full Metal Panic! Former child actor Seiya Kanie (Adam Gibbs) is one of the brightest and best-looking students in his high school. But he’s so […]

On the “Day of Destruction,” which occurred 200 years before the fantasy-adventure Wolf’s Rain (2003) begins, much of human civilization was destroyed. Wolves supposedly died out at the same time, yet the story centers on four humans who turn into wolves. Like the young father in Hosoda’s Wolf Children, they are wolfmen: not the violent […]

Based on 2009 manga by Yasuhiro Nightow, the creator of the 90’s hit Trigun, Blood Blockade Battlefront (2015) is a supernatural adventure that takes place in what used to be New York City. A few years before the series begins, the city was engulfed in an impenetrable fog that was somehow linked to a fissure […]