anime

DC’s squadron of supervillains hasn’t gone down too well when it comes to film adaptations. Suicide Squad from 2016 (made by David Ayer) was a massive disappointment, especially compared to its flamboyant, Bohemian Rhapsody-fueled trailer. Birds of Prey had some charm but it was a box office flop. In 2021, James Gunn created The Suicide Squad, which was supposed to be a reboot of the story. However, despite its campy vibe, it wasn’t the hit Warner Bros hoped for. Peacemaker and the animated Harley Quinn show…

Prices taken at time of publishing. While this backpack is small, it’s packed with little details, including all of the main characters of One Piece, and a map of the open seas that are sure to be filled with treasure and opposing pirates. Prices taken at time of publishing. While this backpack is small,…

Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama has passed away. On Thursday, March 7, a statement published on the official Dragon Ball website announced that Toriyama had passed on March 1 due to an acute subdural hematoma. He was 68 years old. Toriyama was an acclaimed manga artist and character designer who first gained mainstream recognition in Japan through his sci-fi comedy manga Dr. Slump, published in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1980 to 1984. In 1984, Toriyama began publishing Dragon Ball, a martial arts adventure manga…

It will take decades for the world to fully unpack all the ways Akira Toriyama shaped our culture. The legendary artist and author, whose death was publicly announced Thursday, was a pioneer in manga, comics, anime, and video games, and his work formed a foundation for everyone in those industries who followed him. But Toriyama’s presence and importance can be felt far wider than in just the fields he excelled at. It’s hard to think of any single work that’s been as consistently important in the lives of kids growing…

Ever compared Cassidy to Spike Siegel or gunslinger Ashe to gun-toting Faye Valentine? Write this date down: March 12. That's when Blizzard is launching Overwatch 2's collaboration with legendary anime Cowboy Bebop, which will bring five skins based on the show to the game. The trailer released for the collaboration also shows the hacker Sombra dressed as her fellow hacker Ed, the Tank hero Wrecking Ball/Hammond as the data corgi Ein and the Samoan warrior Mauga as Jet…

We were all sad to see Ash Ketchum go, but his still being the Pokémon anime’s 10-year-old main character after 25 years of adventures was a huge part of why the show seemed stuck in the past. Though Ash never really changed all that much, the larger Pokémon franchise did. And while the anime always took cues from the games, it also became very comfortable sticking to its own straightforward formula. Considering how buggy the most recent generation of Pokémon games has been, it might be hard to imagine the anime faring…

The wonderful characteristic of family-friendly anime movies is that they are just as enjoyable for adults as they are for kids. The artistry of the animation is world-class, and the stories are dramatic yet wholesome. While anime is a Japanese style of animation, it spans various genres that include adult themes, and not all of them are appropriate for children (we’re looking at you, Goblin Slayer: Goblin’s Crown). Luckily, there is a growing number of wonderful anime movies that are suitable for all ages, and the…

In a recent interview with The Verge about the future of what is now the dominant anime streaming platform in the west, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini suggested that one way to combat anime piracy should be an embrace of AI models to speed up the subtitling process. But AI won’t do anything of the sort—and a fraught aspect of the process of bringing anime to global audiences will only get messier with it.Prepping the Sandworm Scenes in Dune: Part Two “A.I. is definitely something we think about at a lot of different…

Production studios still regularly release their latest, greatest films and series on DVD and Blu-ray. But over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that physical media just isn’t as much of a priority as it used to be for Hollywood’s biggest players. You could see it in the way that Barbarian — one of the biggest sleeper hits of 2022 — came and went without a physical release and in the way Disney only seemed keen on putting projects like WandaVision, Loki, and The Mandalorian on disc years after their…

Today, I’m talking with Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll, a streaming service focused entirely on anime — and really, the biggest anime service still going. Rahul has a long history with anime: he spent more than seven years at Funimation, a company that started in the ’90s to distribute Dragon Ball Z to US audiences, before getting the top job at Crunchyroll.Anime might seem like niche content, but it’s not nearly as niche as you might think — our colleagues over at Polygon just ran a huge survey of anime…