Great tool | The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Revised and Expanded Edition...

Essential reading | The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Revised and Expanded Edition | Jonathan Clements, Helen McCarthy

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	• The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Revised and Expanded Edition Jonathan Clements, Helen McCarthy Stone Bridge Press, 2006 - 867 pages average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Anime Encyclopedia

Thick, recently revised, handy guide to anime, this should be your first reach when questions come up or just browsing. Sections on types of subject matter too. This is an adult reference work so some caution about child questions.

Great tool

This is a wonderful tool for all animated film works and anime lovers. It is very compete and has all the information we might need. Excellent Book!

Essential reading

This is essential for any anime person, newb or otaku. An in depth history of all anime productions and their creators from the very beginning up through about Y2K. Sorry to say, the two authors don't seem to care about anything made after the mid 90's. like other authors in this field, they seem to only care about anime from the "VHS tape sharing" days. Too bad.

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Not quite the reference book I hoped it would be

This edition of The Anime Encyclopedia claims to have over 3,000 entries for shows, studios, creators, and anime history. It also claims the book is aimed at both "newcomers and battle-hardened otaku." By the time I finished reading this book, however, I wasn't truly convinced that is book is either for newcomers or "battle-hardened otaku."

I found a number of mistakes in this book for the properties that I'm familiar with. While I don't expect a book of this nature to be 100% accurate, I was astonished by just how many errors I found. Considering I know only a small number of properties that are included in the book, this is actually a rather high error ratio. And if this error ratio were to remain constant throughout the whole text, then that would mean there are a lot of errors in this book. The worst error I found was the entry for the Fruits Basket anime series. For one thing, the Chinese Zodiac curse is never mentioned at all in the writeup; in fact, the authors of the book claim the Sohmas are "sorcerers and shape shifters" in order to explain how the characters can change into animals. This made me wonder if the authors actually watched some of the show, and if they did, how much attention did they pay to it? Another big error is in the entry for Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, where the authors incorrectly state that the Crescendolls are rescued by a female pilot (when, in the anime, the pilot character is very obviously male).

Another issue I had with the book is that the authors insisted on using the titles that the properties were released under in the United States, rather than English translations of the Japanese titles. As a couple of examples, you can only find Space Battleship Yamato under Star Blazers, and you can only find Yu Yu Hakusho under Poltergeist Report. Also, when writing the descriptions for the properties, the authors tended to talk about the American version first, and then explain the differences between the English and the Japanese versions. As this is supposed to be a guide for Japanese animation, the authors definitely show more of a bias toward the English versions.

I also had problems with how inconsistently the authors handled some things. The biggest gripe I had with inconsistency comes with how they treated shows that were popular in the United States that were comprised of more than one show. In the book, you can find separate entries for Robotech, Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. However, for Voltron, there are not separate entries for Beast King GoLion or Dairugger XV.

This encyclopedia is also filled with quite a few snarky comments. The worst case of the snarkiness is the entry for Pure Love, where the entire description of the property is a snarky comment. While the snarky comments can be amusing at times, I felt they were overused by the authors. When reading the book, it felt as if the authors tried early on to be level-handed, but as they got further into the book, they started showing their biases more and more, which is illustrated by the fact that the amount of snarky comments goes up as the book progresses.

Overall, the authors did a decent job with the historical aspects of anime. However, I do have to complain that in the section about "Censorship and Localization," they never mentioned the editing of innocuous Japanese references from properties that was rather prevalent in the 1980's (such as calling rice balls other kinds of food if they appear in a shot, and cutting away from Japanese text as quickly as possible).

While I may have a number of issues with The Anime Encyclopedia, I have to say that its most redeeming value is that it provides titles for various anime shows and how they inter-relate. However, I'm not sure that this book in and of itself is worth the money it takes to purchase it. In this day and age of the internet, you are more likely to find more information (not to mention more accurate information) on the fanpages for the various anime properties included in this book. Before putting down any money to purchase The Anime Encyclopedia, try to locate a copy through your local library first and sample it that way.

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Less opinionated than the last few editions

While I love my encylopedia to tatters, I will give the average reader some warnings about this book & a bit of history. In the past this encyclopedia was a bit lambasted for having a ratings scale, which not all fans agreed upon. (Because hey... just because I think that one anime is terrible doesn't mean that it actually is.) Then there were "weasel words" tucked into other reviews, which was far from being as unbiased as an encyclopedia should be. (I have to admit, I didn't see them until someone else pointed them out to me.)

In any case, most of this has been addressed. There's still some opinions in the reviews, which I dislike, but it's not as overly blatant as it was in the past. The average reader will have to be careful to take some of the reviews with a grain of salt, as like I said above- just because one person didn't like it doesn't mean that you won't. (Even if that person is writing an encyclopedia.) That being said, the book is far more efficient than it was in it's first few incarnations. You'll have to keep an eye out for errors, since there are some entries that apparently don't match up with the proper info such as episode numbers & such. (This actually isn't all that terrible, as many series start off saying they'll have X episodes but then are either cut or lengthened to X episodes.)

I recommend this for most anime fans out there. The die-hards probably won't need this, but this should be a nice addition for the new anime fans out there!

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Bigger and better! Our first edition rocked the anime world with its in-depth entries on anime famous and obscure and its superb index/film finder. Now this fantastic book is 40 percent larger-with all-new entries on hundreds of anime released after 2001, updates on older entries, and over fifty thousand words on anime creators (like Tezuka and Otomo) and genres ("Early Anime," "Science Fiction and Robots," etc.). An absolute must-have for every anime shelf!

"If I only had space on my overcrowded shelf for one book on anime, this would be it. If I had no space on my shelf I'd select two books at random and drop them into the bin, just to make room-- it's that indispensable."-- Paul Jacques, Anime on DVD

"While you may not agree with their opinons on a given anime, they are informative and entertaining, especially when skewering a really bad anime." -- Frames Per Second

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