GKIDS Partners with Anime Ltd. & Plaion Pictures, Plain Archive, Shout! Factory, and Sugoi Co for International Home Entertainment Release of ARCANE Sign-up for e-mail updates on ARCANE * indicates required Email Address * First Season of the Emmy® Award-Winning Series from Riot Games to be Released for Home Entertainment Platforms Worldwide in 2024 NEW YORK (July 9, 2024) – GKIDS, the Academy Award®-winning producer and distributor of artist-driven and award-winning animation, announced partnerships with Anime Ltd. & Plaion Pictures, Plain Archive, Shout! Factory, and Sugoi, to rel ..read more

Ever since we announced our acquisition of NARUTO – and our plans to bring it to the UK on Blu-ray for the very first time – we’ve had many of you asking for more details of what to expect and when. ©2002 MASASHI KISHIMOTO Well, today is the day where we get to unleash all of our plans for the series upon you, so grab your headband, make some complex hand gestures, and get yourself comfortable as we reveal all. Oh, and above all else… believe it! Let’s start with the most important piece of news first – the pre-order window for the first instalment of NARUTO on Blu-ray begins retail-wide on Th ..read more

Anime Limited presents the home video release of the classic Macross title in an unmissable Blu-ray Ultimate Edition – pre-orders open June 6th! GLASGOW, MAY 25TH 2024 –  Anime Limited, under license from BIGWEST, are thrilled to reveal their plans for the release of the Macross Plus Ultimate Edition, bringing this classic show to Blu Ray in English-speaking territories for the first time outside of Japan.  In a landmark moment for fans of the decades-spanning legendary Macross franchise, the beloved classic 1995 film – together with its original four-part OVA presentation – will be ..read more

Although only the most recent three weeks of posts are visible on this blog’s front page, you can navigate through the previous nine years of articles using the tags. Click on these links to find our world-class obituaries and book reviews, or coverage of Japan and China. You can read the Hugo award-winning Jeannette Ng on Japanese popular culture,  the Harvey award-winning Helen McCarthy on anime and live events, Jeremy Clarke, Tom Wilmot and Jasper Sharp on Japanese live-action film, and Tom Smith on Japanese music. The writers for the All the Anime blog have included authors like Andr ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. Rental Magica begins like a gentler, less assertive, but actually more professional Ghostbusters. The setting is modern Japan, where many different groups of magic users exist to deal with paranormal imbalances, or as the characters put it, spell wave contamination. In one episode, it’s mentioned such contaminations have caused everything from the Marie Celeste mystery to the Tunguska cataclysm in Siberia in 1908, showing how wide-ranging and spectacular such phenomena are. The anime focuses on a particular magic-user group called Astral, an underdog team. Its more gifted me ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. Many readers of this blog will know what a dating sim is. It’s a computer game where your character develops a romantic relationship with someone else, often one of multiple “possible” characters. Actually, the definition’s more contentious than that. That above description could apply to many Visual Novels where relationships are important in the branching story, including epics like Fate/stay night and Steins;Gate. But you’ll find people claiming online that dating sims are not Visual Novels. Rather, dating sims should be seen as a different kind of game, often focused on ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. The God of High School is an unusual, perhaps even unique anime, set in Korea, with Korean heroes, a Korean director, and based on a Korean comic. At the same time, it’s unquestionably anime, produced by Tokyo’s famed MAPPA studio. It did much to establish MAPPA’s reputation for frenzied action anime, and it’s a direct precursor to MAPPA’s subsequent hit, Jujutsu Kaisen – which would be started by the same director, Sunghoo Park, The set-up of God of High School is comically generic. It’s set in the present-day world, but a world where “God of High School” is a massive marti ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. Rent-a-Girlfriend is a risqué romcom about a young man going online and… It’s as the title says. College student Kazuya is smarting after he’s dumped. That’s when he finds a website offering rental girlfriends. (“For just 5,000 yen per hour,” says the site, which was about £35 when the series was broadcast in 2020, and about £27 as of writing). As to whether rental girlfriends are anime fantasies like alien girlfriends, or whether they’re really a thing in Japan… We’ll get to that later. Soon Kazuya is sitting in a café with a gorgeously beautiful, smiling girl. The script c ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. One way you could pitch the anime series We Rent Tsukumogami would be to describe it as Miss Hokusai meets Bagpuss. Bagpuss, if you’re too young to remember it, was a vintage British animation about a shop that collects lost objects, dolls, carvings and the like, which come alive and talk among themselves. We Rent Tsukumogami has a similar idea, except that its focus shifts between the talking objects and their human neighbours, who live in Edo, the city that’ll one day be Tokyo. Edo has been shown in many period anime, but Tsukomogami feels particularly close to the Miss Ho ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. A spy, an assassin and a telepathic tot walk into a story. That’s the set-up for Spy x Family, but it’s pretty much the show’s punchline, too, repeated over and again. And we still love it. In particular, the anime’s opening and closing titles are YouTube-friendly masterworks, visions of domestic family bliss that you thought vanished with 1950s advertising. These titles are accompanied by multiple songs. Arguably the biggest earworm is the peppy “Souvenir” by Bump of Chicken, which was the opening song for the second half of the first season. It was quickly embedded in Toky ..read more