An Anime Primer, Part 2 – A Buyer’s Guide

Following on from An Anime Primer, Part 1 – A Brief Introduction To Anime, this article offers some practical information which will help you unearth and safely purchase good quality anime with a minimum of hassle. Since everybody has different tastes, I’ve avoided specific recommendations in favour of general advice, which will provide you with the wherewithal to do your own research and make your own decisions. Hopefully, this will point you in the right direction while giving you the freedom to choose the anime you want to watch. One last thing before we get started – please resist the temptation to download pirated anime. The various ways in which this damages the industry are explained in Alexander Jones’ interview with Manga Entertainment UK representative Jerome Mazandari.

"If you enjoyed Spirited Away, then you will probably also appreciate the other works of director Hayao Miyazaki and the rest of the Studio Ghibli catalogue."

First of all, it is normally far easier to find anime online than in a local retailer. Secondly, online prices tend to be better. So while you should find out if you can buy anime in your nearest comic book store or film library, be prepared to carry out most of your search from a computer. The one thing to be said for going into an actual, brick-and-mortar shop to buy anime is that you will find real people there, who might know an awful lot about the genre, and with whom you can have a proper conversation. This is an obvious advantage over virtual shopping, and you can discover some great titles this way, but remember that you should compare the price of anything you find with those available online before you commit to a purchase.

When hunting for bargains or a certain theme, entering the terms ‘anime + cheap’ or ‘anime + samurai’ into Google Search is definitely the long way to go about it. A better place to start is Amazon, where you will find a huge selection of anime at very reasonable prices. Amazon also makes customer reviews available for all of its products, so you can see what other people think of any titles you might be considering. Normally, anything you like the look of will also have a Wikipedia page and a trailer on YouTube, which will allow you to preview it even further.

After all of this, you could head over to Anime-On-Line to compare prices. This is an online anime store which does not support product reviews, but generally has cheaper prices than Amazon, free postage within the UK, and a similarly broad range of titles. These are not the only websites you can use; anime reviews can also be found here at subtitledonline.com or on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and great deals can also be occasionally found on Play and eBay. I can recommend using all of these based on personal experience, but they are by no means an exhaustive list. Also, please note that as a UK resident, some of the websites I suggest may be of limited value to people living in other countries. You will discover plenty of other useful sites if you take the time to look, and you can check the legitimacy of any sites you find by entering ‘the website name + review’ into Google Search.

Whatever combination of sites you choose to employ, make sure that at least one offers product reviews. Apart from being important indicators of quality with respect to animation and plot, they can also provide clues regarding the standard of subtitles and dubbing. Keep your eyes open for any reviews which mention irritating voice actors or discrepancies between subtitled and dubbed conversations. In foreign films that support both types of dialogue, independent translations are sometimes used, which essentially results in two separate scripts and two very different viewing experiences.

Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo's lesser celebrated Steamboy.

Other things to look out for when reading reviews are fan service and artefacts. Fan service is one of the peculiarities of anime; completely gratuitous and seemingly random nudity, and upskirt and cleavage shots. This might not bother you, but many people find that repeated fan service cripples the dramatic tension from scene to scene and can ruin the mood of an entire film or series as a result. Artefacts may also significantly compromise an anime; these are distortions in audio or picture quality resulting from data lost during compression when a film is encoded on DVD or Blu-ray. As long as you pay attention to the accompanying host of angry, one-star reviews, anime which suffers badly in this regard is generally easy to avoid.

If you liked Akira, there would be little point in trawling through all the other titles released by TMS Entertainment in an effort to find comparable anime.

It is also necessary to check the region code of any anime before you buy it, which should be listed on the product information page. The Playstation 3 is region-free, and there are other DVD and Blu-ray players which can circumvent regional-locking, but it is still a good idea to examine this carefully before you reach the checkout. European readers should bear in mind that all Anime-On-Line DVDs are Region 2 only, but Amazon sells Region 1 American imports along with Region 2 products.

Once you find something you like, it is tempting to search for anime with a related theme. However, there is no guarantee of quality with this approach. Rather than returning to Google Search and entering ‘anime + more samurai’, a better option is to look for other work by the same director or animation studio. The anime recommended in An Anime Primer, Part 1 provide a good example of this. For instance, if you enjoyed Spirited Away then you will probably also appreciate the other works of director Hayao Miyazaki and the rest of the Studio Ghibli catalogue. Since Miyazaki founded the company in 1984, he has worked exclusively with Studio Ghibli and, in this case, barring Miyazaki’s earlier films, a search for one or the other will produce similar results.

However, if you liked Akira, there would be little point in trawling through all the other titles released by TMS Entertainment in an effort to find comparable anime. This is a long established animation studio with a very broad and varied catalogue, so you would be much better served by looking for subsequent productions involving Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo. Such a method will invariably save you time, immediately narrowing down your search to anime with a close link to whatever it was that originally piqued your interest.

I hope you’ve found this article helpful, but although you may now feel well prepared, a short disclaimer is perhaps necessary before we close. If you are trying to find out more about anime, it is fairly safe to assume you aren’t a native of Japan. If you are browsing this particular website, it is also likely, although not certain, that you are a native English speaker. So, whether you’re American or Australian, Irish or British, it is a good idea to remind yourself that anime is the product of a foreign culture which is very different to your own. Despite our innate curiosity, we have a natural wariness around the unfamiliar – no matter how exciting our first experiences of other countries’ language, music and food may be, the lack of a recognisable frame of reference can also leave us feeling slightly adrift. In the same way, anime can initially appear very alien before you develop a taste for it.

A comparison with sushi is actually quite apt – when you try raw fish for the first time, you are not sure what to expect either. If you followed my earlier suggestions and watched Akira and Spirited Away, then you have already taken your first few tentative bites, but before you start slathering wasabi over anything with tentacles, I have one final piece of advice. Like sushi, anime is designed with the Japanese palate in mind, and as a Westerner, with little experience of the genre, there may be some things that you just won’t ‘get’ to begin with. So, be patient, use the above suggestions to help you make informed decisions about what you buy, and watch as the world of anime gradually opens up before you.

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By Christopher Reed

Christopher Reed graduated from Edinburgh Napier University with a first class
honours degree in Sport & Exercise Science. In order to repay the enormou…

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