How important is originality in anime?

I’ve heard it said that most anime, even some of the best loved series, are in fact cliche and unoriginal. I’m sure many would agree that the majority of moe/harem/fan service anime that have come out in recent years are annoyingly cliche, but it can even be applied to shonen, shojo, slice-of-life, and other genres…

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Do you watch anime for the story or the characters (or both)?

The idea that, in order for people to like an anime, it has to have a good story AND good characters, sounds plausible. However, that’s not the case for many fans – often times, they’ll like one of the two aspects in a series and not so much the other. For me, there are many anime I like for both the story and the characters, but there are also just as many I like for only one of the two…

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Animism and “non-human” characters in anime

There’s a certain trope that’s quite popular in anime, though not so common in Western TV shows and movies – the abundance of characters who embody animism, with human traits and often human form, but are not human…

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The common themes of anime songs

One (of many) things about anime that’s always stood out to me since I became a fan is the songs. No matter what the nature of the anime in question is, with relatively few exceptions, the majority of anime opening and ending songs, more often than not, have common themes…

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End of year updates and site news

Today I finally did an update on the main AnimeYume.com site, mostly new mp3s, which you can find links to below…

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More on anime as commercialism or art

This is a followup of my previous post, “Anime – a product of commercialism or art?“…

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Anime import calendar scans


I’ve been collecting original Japanese anime calendars for a few years now, either buying them myself or downloading the scans online. I’m just a big sucker for large, original, and gorgeous images of official anime artwork! XD As of today, I have over 150 calendar scans on my computer from 11 different anime (and I always add a few more each year). Since I started collecting the import anime calendars, I created a page on the main Anime Yume site to post them. As the years went by however, that page fell into a bit of a disarray but I finally took the time today to organize the calendar scans and to also share them here on the blog…

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Bleach movie: Memories of Nobody US theatrical release

Last night I went with my one of my friends to see the US theatrical premier of the first Bleach movie at a theater in Woodland Hills, CA. Like the US premier of the Death Note live-action movies back in May, Viz premiered the English dub of the Bleach movie for two nights (June 11th and 12th) at a few select theaters across the country…

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Media update(also JLPT tomorrow)


I finally had time for a small mp3 update on the main site today ^.^ Scroll down to get links to the new songs I uploaded onto Anime Yume’s mp3 pages(all of which are full versions of new openings and endings that were released recently.) And check the main site for more update details.

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Anime 2007 calendar scans!


The four 2007 anime calendars that I had preordered from CDJapan(Bleach, Inuyasha, Pokemon, and Konjiki no Gashu Bell) arrived yesterday. And since I had nothing much to do today, I made scans of all of them and posted them on the main site ^_^ You can see all 28 of them on the Anime Import Calendar Scans page(along with all the other calendar scans I’ve posted from previous years.) Just like pretty much all anime calendars straight from Japan, the artwork on them is absolutely gorgeous! ^.^ Enjoy!