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A cyberpunk "La Femme Nikita", adapted from one of Japan's hottest new SF authors, is out on DVD in English at last.
One of the main reasons Anime.about.com exists is to give people new to anime some sense of where to start, and how not to get lost along the way. To that end, I'm starting a new series of articles, starting with "Anime 102" for beginners.
(The only reason I didn't name it "Anime 101" was because we already have an entire subdivision of the site with that name, and the Department of Redundancy Department would have sent me a sternly-worded memo.)
The first season of Spice and Wolf introduced us to a memorable pair of characters through an unusual premise: a walking tour of the economy of a medieval society. Based on the light novels of the same name, the adventures of merchant Kraft Lawrence and the wolf-goddess Holo made for an intriguing and off-beat show.
Now comes the second season, where Lawrence and Holo glean that many more details about Holo's village of origin and finds themselves tempted on all sides by unanticipated possibilities.
I'm currently working on some new pieces about where to begin with anime -- a common-enough question, and one that most people answer by simply throwing out a list of titles. I'm trying to take a more nuanced approach, but one of the things that did come up was how many existing anime watchers are brought into the fold by a fellow fan. If anything, that seems to be the preferred way to do it.
What's the most efficient way to make a feature-length anime production from a TV series that's itself an anime? Make a standalone episode of the show and spin it out to feature-film length. After all, it worked for Cowboy Bebop, Naruto, One Piece and many others, so why not Trigun as well?
That seems to have been the motivation for creating Trigun: Badlands Rumble, despite the fact the original show aired in 1998 and nothing new has been produced for it on TV since. But the show (which is excellent, by the way) was recently resurrected on DVD courtesy of FUNimation's continuing relicensing and reissue campaign for Pioneer/Geneon's back-catalog titles, and so it seems the creators and rights-holders decided there was market enough for a standalone film.
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