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 release schedules can be fickle, since they depend on so many things not directly within any one person's (or organization's) control. I know of at least one long-anticipated anime that's been licensed by a distributor, but hasn't had a formal title announcement for almost two years now. Part of it was scheduling, part of it was the restructuring of the company's distribution system, and I'm sure some of it was just plain bad luck.

For that reason, you don't tend to know an exact street date for a given title until only a couple of months before the actual release. When I started assembling this list, I could only get firm release dates for up to March or so; everything after that wasn't even in the dealer solicitation lists yet. I knew that other titles had been scheduled for 2012 generally, but they've yet to turn up in any official release or documentation. Part of the fun is guessing which titles you know have been licensed show up when -- or, if they even show up at all.

Check out our Winter 2012 Releases roundup, and chime in with notes about which of your favorite titles is coming out in that timeframe.

Image: Princess Jellyfish. Image courtesy Pricegrabber.