Tag Archives: myanimelist

Adventures in Sound Direction: Your Folk Blues Are Real

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So a while ago I wrote about veteran Sound Director Katsuyoshi Kobayashi’s wizardly handling of Space Brothers’ audio. At the time, I had to look up his name on ann, but I didn’t check his specific creator page. The other day, I went back and finally did. It turns out this isn’t the only anime-of-the-decade candidate* he’s worked on with a director named Watanabe. In celebration of this individual who’s handled a number of sublime auditory anime experiences and yet has to date zero comments or favorites on his myanimelist page, I’m going to spend this column by talking about the musically crafted battle sequence to trump (almost) all others, the last 6 minutes of Cowboy Bebop.

(This post contains obvious ending spoilers for a 15-year-old show that you either have watched or will find yourself watching the moment you inform someone who has that you haven’t. So there.) Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: The Churning English-speaking Anime Fandom

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I recently finished a mission that’s taken me combing through mountains of data grains and getting them all lined up in neat sacks. After writing this article, I’ve wanted to do more large-scale data/stats work with anime. But pulling up the stats I need for each anime every time I need it is a huge pain. So, over the past couple of days, I took the data I needed for all (closer to 85-90%, in actuality) of the anime that aired over the past eight years. If you want more details, or a look at the spreadsheets, they’re available in the relevant tab. Suffice to say that, for me, this database is more valuable than a giant toybox full of gold.

The first thing I want to use this data to address is the idea of “churn” in the English-speaking anime fandom; the idea that most anime fans are fairly young, old fans tend to be less involved in the community, and some old classics can get lost as a result. A more thorough expression of the idea can be found on this podcast, the major impetuous for this article.

So what’s my take on the idea that English-speaking fandom is mercilessly churning out the old and frail? Read on to find out.

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Fun With Numbers: License to Spend

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Ever wonder how much it costs to license anime? Well, thanks to this article on ADV’s bankruptcy proceedings, we now have some idea of what the costs are.

A more interesting question is this: where do those costs come from? Is there some factor that predicts how much companies are willing to shell out?

Using this page to compare with per-volume Japanese sales (22 of the 29 titles are listed there), we can get some idea of whether American and Japanese anime markets actually overlap.

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Fun With Numbers: 10 vs. 110

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One of the many controversial features of sites like myanimelist and aniDB that allow users to list their anime is their inclusion of toplists. What’s the proper way to weight scores? Should sequels (which have an intrinsic advantage in 10-point averages) be counted normally? Is there a point to having one at all when it invites as much vitriol as it sometimes does?

Though actual discussions over topics like these tend to descend into unglorified hoopla fairly quickly, these toplists and rankings can be very interesting subjects for study. Especially if you dig a layer below the top and start to look at what they really measure.

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Fun With Numbers: The Second Season is Better!

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One statement I find almost as irritating as the ubiquitous “well, in the manga…” in anime discussions is the assertion that “_ gets better in the second season!” Now, sometimes this is actually true, but it’s important to understand that the act of making this statement implies a hefty bias.

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