Knowing an anime’s story beforehand

A recent post by Marth brings up the idea of how our perception of an anime adaptation can be greatly influenced by our prior knowledge of the anime’s original source material. This can apply to all forms of media really, such as book-to-movie adaptations or movie retellings of TV series. In anime fandom, there’s strong opinions among those who intensely care about faithfulness to the source material and those who don’t know or care…

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What it means to be nostalgic – a tribute to old anime

As I’ve grown out of student-hood these past few years and moved on to being what the Japanese call a “shakaijin” (person of society), I’ve been taking the word “nostalgia” more to heart. I’ve often wondered, “How old does one have to be in order to feel nostalgic?” And while pondering this questions, I’d like to pay tribute to some old anime that hold particularly nostalgic memories for me…

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Anime worlds I would like to visit

A couple of weeks ago, Caraniel came up with a great idea for a post that entails thinking about which of the various anime worlds you would like to visit. I thought it would be a fun thing to try, so like Caraniel, I came up with a list of five worlds in anime I would enjoy spending time in…

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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 strangeness and ambiguity of love in anime

From what I’ve observed in the many anime titles I’ve watched over the years, the concept of love, especially compared to most Western TV shows and movies, is much more ambiguous, and sometimes downright strange…

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