Anime Review Heavens Lost Property Season One

All Tomoki wanted was a little peace and quiet ... and the occasional glimpse down the necklines of his female classmates (or a peek up their skirts). Then one day, the "Angeloid" named Ikaros quiet literally drops into his life. She can grant any wish, and it isn't long before Tomoki's using her to do everything from sneak into the girl's locker room to you-name-it -- but who is this mysterious creature from the sky, really?

Most Anticipated Anime Releases of Spring 2012

With "White Day" (Japan's companion holiday to Valentine's Day, where women give tokens of appreciation to men) just behind us and spring coming fast around the corner, it's time to take a look at some of the most anticipated anime releases for the season.

Anime Review Legend of the Legendary Heroes

Fantasy adventures take many forms, but they usually have a few dependable elements to make them, well, fantasy. Among them are The Hero and The Magical Artifact(s), two things -- among others -- that The Legend of the Legendary Heroes stands on their heads.

Cyborg 009 LiveAction Film Gears Up

Prepare for yet another possible anime-to-live-action adaptation! Shotaro Ishinomori's Cyborg 009 (compare prices), originally a classic 1970s manga which later found its way to TV, has been picked up for a live-action production on this side of the Pacific.

According to the Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog, Ishinomori Productions is looking to work with producer F.J. DeSanto (who previously gave us the live-action version of Will Eisner's The Spirit) to bring Cyborg 009 to the big screen as a live-action feature.

New Feature Best Sword Sorcery Fantasy Anime

You know the tropes. Big swords, daring heroes, dangerous villains, unpredictable magic, giant dragons. Turns out the whole subgenre of swords-and-sorcery fantasy that we all know, courtesy of everything from Lord of the Rings to The Wheel of Time, is its own subgenre of anime as well.

Toonami Programming Block Returns To Adult Swim

"Attention Toonami Faithful - We heard you," went out the broadcast on multiple social networks, along with a URL: http://www.adultswim.com/shows/toonami/

That's right -- the long-missed Toonami programming block, part of the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network that broadcast action-oriented anime from 1997 through 2008 and helped allow anime to reach a wide segment of the U.S. viewing audience, is being reinstated as of May 26.

Animation Director Noboru Ishiguro Passes Away

Longtime anime director and industry veteran Noboru Ishiguro has died at the age of 73.

A full list of Ishiguro's achievements and contributions reads like a rundown of almost every major seminal anime franchise of years past: the 1980s incarnation of Astro Boy, Space Battleship Yamato, Super Dimension Fortress Macross (the series that served as the basis for the English-language Robotech), and Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

LiveAction Noir Anime On Pause

Looks like we won't see live-action versions of Mireille Bouquet and Kirika Yumura anytime soon.

Starz CEO Chris Albrecht, in an interview with Multichannel News about a number of Starz properties in development, admitted that the live-action remake of the Noir anime (which is a Starz project) is "in a bit of a holding pattern."

FUNimation Adds Anime Rentals On Facebook

FUNimation just added another way for anime fans to get their fix: video rental via Facebook.

New Feature Great Anime For Adults

Anime is a medium rather than a genre, in much the same way "the movies" encompass more than just what comes out of Hollywood. The diversity of anime is a big part of what drew me to it and keeps me there: it's more than just kid's stuff. (Not that "kid's stuff" is by itself a bad thing -- the new My Little Pony is far better than it has any right to be.)

Anime Review Grave of the Fireflies

On any list of undisputed classics of anime, there are a few titles that recur regularly: Akira, for instance, or My Neighbor Totoro. Grave of the Fireflies belongs on that very short list, although for the last few years it suffered from being out of print no thanks to the demise of its American distributor, Central Park Media.

Now that problem's been fixed thanks to Sentai Filmworks, who have since reissued Grave of the Fireflies in a new DVD edition and made it available through the Anime Network's online service.

Sailor Moon Gets A New Adaptation

Fans of a classic anime are getting their fandom rewarded. Sailor Moon (compare prices), the 1990s anime title that is widely credited for introducing anime to a whole generation of viewers worldwide, is being re-adapted from its source -- Naoko Takeuchi's manga, also recently re-released in English after being out of print for a time.

ViKi FanSubbed Anime Goes Legit

A new online video portal is looking at legitimized fansubbing as a way to reach fans that are being overlooked.

As anime distributors continue to weather out a tough market, they've started exploring new ways to get their product to a digital-savvy audience, from YouTube streams to digital downloads from the iTunes store. But one of the reasons why digital piracy continues to thrive is to serve the needs of the niche: people who want anime titles that may never get licensed for distribution outside of Japan.

Ergo Proxy Returning To DVD

FUNimation is bringing Proxy back.

The dystopian cyberpunk anime Ergo Proxy wowed (and baffled) audiences in its original release back in 2006. Set in a domed city where a subclass of robot servants are going berserk, and with a screenplay from Eden of the East and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex scripter Dai Sato, it touched on a whole slew of themes -- self-aware machines, the problems inherent in creating a utopian society, and how to look good in blue eyeliner while wielding a shotgun.

Anime Review Oh Edo Rocket

Welcome to Edo -- Tokyo, that is, circa 1840 -- where fireworks are banned and so are many other forms of fun. What's Seikichi Tamiya, the town's scrappiest and most ambitious fireworks-maker, to do? Break the rules, and in the ballsiest way possible. He's building a rocket which can reach the moon -- all for the sake of the pretty young girl he met the other night who's, well, not from around here, to put it mildly.

New Feature Best English Dubs

Few topics in anime, apart from maybe piracy, are as divisive as English dubbing. Some love it because it makes their favorite shows that much more accessible to other audiences; some hate it because it was done outside of the original production team, or because they resent dubbing on principle.

I've been on both sides of this argument, and a big part of what's moved me gradually into the pro-dub camp has been the gradual but measurable improvement in quality of the average English-dubbed anime title. So much so that it seemed high time to compile a list of titles that have dubs of note.

Anime Releases for Winter 2012

Welcome to the new year, one in which with any luck the world won't end on schedule (my money is on "won't"), and in which we will be inundated with a whole spate of new anime releases. To celebrate that fact, here's a list of some of the best and most head-turning, eye-opening anime products for the first three months of the year -- including the title featured here in this post, Princess Jellyfish.

Anime Review Infinite Stratos

One thing I love about anime is how it makes everything look stylish -- yes, even future war machines and combat technology. In anime, it seems, the war machine of the future will be something you slip on like an evening dress or a three-piece suit.

In the world of Infinite Stratos, the new mecha / SF / comedy series courtesy of Sentai Filmworks, the "Infinite Stratos" of the title is just such a machine -- a personal suit of fighting armor that looks classy enough to give Tony Stark a fit of jealousy (and destructive enough, too).

New Series Profile Hetalia

"Controversial" is such an open-ended word. With anime, it's typically used to refer to two basic kinds of shows. The first sport the easy kind of controversy: violence, sexuality, or material intended for mature audiences that seems aimed at younger viewers (for the latter, consider Shin-chan).

The second kind of controversy involves political incorrectness, or better to say variations in cultural viewpoints that don't always make sense from the outside. What's offensive in Japan may pass without a blink in the United States, and the same is often true in reverse as well. Case in point: Hetalia, a surprise hit anime about ... anthropomorphic countries.

Anime Review Boogiepop Phantom

Japanese and American popular culture share many fascinations, among them a love of urban legends and modern-day folklore. Such obsessions show up routinely in anime as well, with Boogiepop Phantom (compare prices) being one classic example.

Originally released in 2000, Boogiepop Phantom appeared on video in English but -- as is the fate with many anime titles that don't begin with "Dragon" and end with "ball" -- lapsed out of print. Being able to find a copy of the series became something of an urban legend unto itself. But now Nozomi Entertainment -- the folks who gave us the excellent reissues of The Dirty Pair and Revolutionary Girl Utena, among others.

Series Profile Haruhi Suzumiya

Some anime are geared for the broadest possible audience; others seem designed for fans. This isn't a criticism, just a fact: you wouldn't give Finnegans Wake to someone just cutting their teeth on the classics, for the same reason you probably wouldn't want a newcomer to anime watching a "400-level show".

But some of those more fan-oriented shows are just about impossible not to run into even if you're a newcomer to anime. Among them is the Haruhi Suzumiya series (compare prices), center of a whirlwind of fandom that's engulfed audiences both in Japan and abroad, and which persists to this day.

Anime Review Princess Jellyfish

You know the classic formula for a love story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. But this is 2012, and so we need a new twist on the old story. How about: girl lives in insular all-girl environment, girl meets and admires other girl, girl discovers other girl is in fact a boy? And that's just for openers?

Anime Profile KON

Face it: deep in our hearts, we all want to be rock stars. Why else would so many of us strap on guitars, pad our garages and basements with packing blankets and egg cartons for soundproofing, and wail away?

The four (and eventually, five) high school girls of K-ON! have a little of that ambition, but at first all they want to do is be together. K-ON! (compare prices for the show) is the story of how their casual afternoon "light music club" turns by degrees into something far more adventurous.

Anime Review Fractale

Virtual reality is becoming, well, a reality. Yesterday I watched along with a great many other people as Google demonstrated their new experimental "Project Glass" -- which is technically augmented reality, but either way, you're talking about a synthetic world that overlays the real world.

Fractale (compare prices on the show here) starts from that premise -- people in the real world are part of a universal network (dare I say "matrix"?) through which they communicate with each other seamlessly and live out their lives. For most of them, Fractale is their world -- which makes it all the more dangerous when Fractale begins to fail on them, inspiring a cadre of revolutionaries to urge mankind to throw off its digital chains.