One Japanologist's blog: Animania

Animania is an anime and manga magazine that was published by Artline Studios and Pro Films in 2009. It, unfortunately, has only 6 issues, because there wasn't much interest in it (again). Yes, anime and manga things here tend to die very easily... I guess that's because the first 5 issues were somewhat expensive (8 lv, about 4 euro), because they came with a DVD with 4 episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist and they weren't very big (about 40-60 pages). Issue number six, thought, was perfect. It was bigger, without DVD and at the very reasonable price of 5 lv. There was supposed to be issue number seven, but it never came out.

In every issue there were news about what's happening with the anime industry in Japan, reviews of all the new and popular anime, review of anime studios, articles about Japan and articles on popular culture that has nothing to do with anime. Every issue included a poster and had a certain major theme:

Issue number one's theme was Naruto.

Issue number two's theme was Fullmetal Alchemist.

Issue number three's theme was Code Geass.

Issue number four's theme was Cowboy Bebop.

Issue number five's theme was One Piece.

Issue number six's theme was Ghost in the Shell.

I think that they started with Naruto, because they wanted to catch the attention of the audience, since Naruto is very popular here (as in everywhere in the world), not only among anime and manga fans, but among normal people too.

In issue number two they introduced two new sections - Otaku Culture and Anime Versus. In Otaku culture they talked about cosplay, fan art, doujinshi and things like that. I personally really liked the Anime Versus section, because it was always really fun to read different opinions on different topics like Japanese animation versus Western animation or Originality versus Cliche and so on. They also started talking about Japanese games and movies and started doing manga reviews.

With issue number three they started to include collectable cards. I had all the cards that had come with the magazines, but my deck wasn't completed, because they stopped publishing the magazine. And then I got lucky. One of the publishers contacted me and said that they will send me the rest of the cards, because they knew that I was buying and reading the magazine, since I had commented on every new issue. So, that's how I got the completed set, which I will be showing below :)

I really liked this magazine. It had various interesting content and it was fun to read too. It's really too bad that it didn't last for long, it would have been great.