By Mike Toole

I’m really not convinced of the efficacy of the “digest version” movie adaptations of so many popular anime shows.  Decades ago, they made sense; 24-hour cable TV wasn’t around, so they were used to fire interest in the stuff on TV ( Heidi ), fill in gaps in the story ( Space Runaway Ideon ), provide a much-needed ending that was precluded by the TV show being canned ( Baldios ), or revit...

By Daryl Surat

Kazuo Koike may be the most respected living manga author of all, but read enough of his manga and you’ll realize that respect comes from the fact that he’s certifiably insane. But he won’t be around forever, so in order to ensure that his manga-fu legacy lives on he took it upon himself to open a school and train students in the mystic arts of how to create hit manga. His most well-known stud...

by Paul Thomas Chapman

Hayao Miyazaki is his own fiercest competition. Even though his films have captured the hearts and minds of audiences both in Japan and abroad, even though Miyazaki's career as a film-maker spans decades, even though his influence in the world of Japanese animation is second only to Osamu Tezuka, even though he has rightly earned his place as a titan within the industry, I often examine his la...

By Darius Washington

Recently, I was going through some older anime magazines and saw a blurb about the impending release of the Vehicle Team Voltron DVD sets… accompanied by a pic from the Lion team. I started looking through other publications and it occurred to me there’d been very little coverage of these sets other than on one or two websites, which is very sad considering this was a pretty cool mech series i...

By Joseph Luster

Playing Bayonetta is sure to elicit a variety of reactions from fans of virtual fisticuffs. There's titillation, naturally; frustration, as enemies continue to upstage your various forms of witchery; and pontification, which starts as early as the opening credits. To wit: who is that bold man whose name practically bursts forth from a tombstone after the first cutscene? Is this "Hideki Kamiya"...