This lovely and feminine poster was made for the Sakura Jidai Festival, also known as the Festival of the Ages. While it is certainly beautiful, it’s garnering attention online because it was created by an 81-year-old man.
manga (Page 93)
You know all those cool-looking anime warriors with a katana strapped to their back? It turns out some of them would be really easy to beat in a fight, and it’s all the artist’s fault.
This new batch of smartphone protectors features group shots of the Sailor Senshi drawn in a style that blends influences from both the Sailor Moon anime and manga.
Sometimes, the physics of physical affection in anime and manga just don’t make sense.
The official website of KOEI Tecmo‘s game based on Hajime Isayama‘s Attack on Titan manga revealed new characters and story details about the game on Sunday.
Next month, Hetalia, the anime and manga franchise featuring anthropomorphized nations and a hefty amount of homoerotic subtext, is getting its very own live-action musical adaptation, and the play’s producers have just released the first photos of the cast in costume as their respective nations.
Anime based on a successful manga series sometimes run into an awkward situation where they have to use “filler episodes” in order to give the manga time to add more story. These episodes are generally more of the same stuff fans already love, but in the back of their mind, they know nothing truly groundbreaking can happen in them.
Gintama is a special case though since the series is quite episodic and those in charge of the anime are free to add their own additional stories. Which is probably why one of the best stories from the original manga hasn’t made it to air yet. Gintama fans don’t have to wait too much longer, though, as the Assassination Arc is finally making its debut on TV this December.
When you’re looking for cute inspiration, you don’t have to look much further than Japan. As the birthplace of the world’s beloved wide-eyed, chubby-faced anime characters, the nation is full to overflowing with commercials, posters, sweets and goods that are so adorable even self-respecting adults can’t help but squeal like delighted children when they catch sight of them.
Now Japan’s cast of cute characters have found a home for themselves across the seas in a gorgeous little Airstream trailer in California, where they continue to pop up in limited numbers in the best way ever: as deliciously sweet macarons. Come with us as we take a look at some of the cute critters and adorable edibles in the collection after the break.
Japanese publisher Shueisha puts out a number of manga anthologies, but by far the jewel in the publisher’s crown, and really the entire Japanese comics industry, is Weekly Shonen Jump. For decades, the magazine has been home to the biggest manga hits, whose creators achieve legendary status in the hearts of legions of fans.
As a matter of fact, so many of Japan’s best-loved manga writers and artists achieved fame through Weekly Shonen Jump that Shueisha is getting self-referential with a new magazine set to launch soon, in which each issue highlights a different manga artist and comes bundled with a DVD of the creator at work and tracing paper so you can try to duplicate the results.
The currently airing anime TV series One-Punch Man is winning fans for two reasons. First is the way it turns the idea of a handsome, hot-blooded action hero on its head with protagonist Saitama, a laid-back, completely bald superhero who looks more like Charley Brown than Superman. Second, the show features some gorgeous animation from Madhouse, the veteran production studio behind such landmarks of anime visual style as Redline, Ninja Scroll, and Millennium Actress.
But as impressive as the movement in the One-Punch Man anime is, its animation has just been shown up by the most unlikely of rivals, the One-Punch Man manga, as in the non-animated comic the TV show is based on!
With its pudgy, simplistic character designs and sharp-edged humor dicing up current trends, American animated comedy South Park is about as different from anime as it can be in look and tone. But every now and again the show’s focus swings around to Japanese culture, and the theme of its most recent episode was none other than yaoi/boys’ love, the anime subgenre of male homosexual romance that’s loved by legions of female fans.
So while the episode featured the inane logic of South Park’s citizens and resulting laughs fans expect, it was also filled with anime-style artwork depicting its two male characters who had become the darlings of the city’s amateur artist community.
As we head into winter, you can spot more and more people out and about in Japan wearing cloth masks. The main reason is to prevent the spread of germs during cold and flu season, but recent research suggests that for women, wearing a pink mask could make them appear twice as attractive.
Based on that, we can only assume that anyone wearing one of these new Sailor Moon masks instantly becomes three times as good-looking.
Although everyone just calls it Sailor Moon, the official title of the anime and manga franchise is Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon, which translates out to Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon. A couple of years back, though, Sailor Moon’s producers decided they’d prefer for it to be called Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, a shift which irked anime purists and linguists alike.
Still, “Guardian” is a fitting title for the inspiration of these new smartphone accessories, which protect your phone’s plugs from dirt, dust, and grime while also adding a touch of Sailor Moon style.
We recently took a look at the first photos of the upcoming Rurouni Kenshin stage musical cast in costume, and looking at the comments for that article, more than a few fans of the hit anime and manga franchise are wishing they see the show in person. But if a trip to the Takarazuka theater in Tokyo or Hyogo Prefecture doesn’t fit into your schedule, there’s still a way to get a taste of the all-female performing troupe’s live-action spectacle, as the theatre company has released a preview video of the cast showing off their fighting moves and crossing swords!
The international anime fan community has adopted a number of Japanese loanwords for concepts that originated in Japan and don’t have succinct, ideal vocabulary equivalents in other languages. English-language discussions between foreign fans are peppered with terms like otaku (fans whose enthusiasm for their hobby is so strong it affects their life balance), tsundere (a person whose expressions of emotion towards an object of affection run hot and cold), and moe (a feeling of devotion and protectiveness, often in response to a display of innocence or purity), just to name a few.
Now, though, the shoe’s on the other foot, as one woman in Japan with a soft spot for anime showing deep, emotional bonds between male characters is calling for the popularization of an English loanword to help her avoid being mistaken for a fan of homoerotic anime and fan fiction.
It’s no secret that Hayao Miyazaki and his team of animators find inspiration for Studio Ghibli’s movies all over the place. Ponyo’s setting was inspired by a harbor town in Japan, Spirited Away’s world was based on a location in Taiwan, and Princess Mononoke’s forest came from Japan’s Yakushima Island.
But it was recently brought to light that a lot of inspiration for Ghibli’s movies came from a more innocuous place: a manga. The title is Mudmen, named after the Asaro Mudmen of Papua New Guinea, where the manga takes place.
Who are these “mudmen” and where do their inspirations crop up in Ghibli films? Read on to find out!
The fujoshi (“rotten girl”) subculture is well-established in Japan with its sizable population of girls and women who enjoy the past time of homoerotic fan art. Its members are often a contentious presence on the internet for their particular passion of sometimes corrupting young men’s adolescent heroes into love interests. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say Goku and Vegeta cuddling and making out itself isn’t right. It’s just not right for them.
Depending on your own parenting aims you may want to steer your young girl away from drawing pictures of unrealistically well-groomed samurai lying naked beneath the sheets together, or you may find it a relatively harmless pastime compared to something like airplane glue sniffing and thus want to encourage fujoshi tendencies in your young one.
Either way, one Twitter user claims to have unlocked the environmental conditions (seven in total) that make a young girl go fujoshi and presented it for peer evaluation on Twitter. But do they hold up to the scrutiny?
If you’ve finally met your real-life Princess Serenity or Prince Endymion and have decided to venture out together in holy matrimony, congratulations! Now it’s time to invest in a tiara, stock up on some sexy lingerie and start planning a wedding filled with special Sailor Moon details. And when it comes to filing the paperwork at City Hall, you’ll no longer be plunged back into reality with boring forms because now you can continue the fantasy with two very special Sailor Moon-themed marriage registration kits!
It’s time for another fun survey from anime informational website Charapedia!
The site recently asked 10,000 of its users to share their top picks for the top 20 manga/anime series that they would like to show to their children. If you think that the results are full of fluff and potty humor, you may be surprised at some of the more thought-provoking choices on the list.
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Monthly
Tokyo’s life-size Gundam anime mecha statue will be removed this summer
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