The Anime Encyclopedia 3rd Revised Edition A Century Of Japanese Animation

Working With The Anime Encyclopedia 3rd Revised Edition

I keep returning to The Anime Encyclopedia 3rd Revised Edition A Century Of Japanese Animation because it remains the most practical starting point when someone asks me about the history of Japanese animation. The first edition came out in 2001 and the third revision pushed the coverage through 2007, which matters if you are doing serious research and need entries that go past the early twenty-first century. It is not the only book on the subject, but it is the one most people reach for first. The book is organized into three main parts. The chronological section runs from the earliest surviving animated shorts around 1917 through to 2007, with studio histories, director profiles, and show listings grouped by decade. The second part contains essays on broader topics like the economics of production, TV formats, and the relationship between manga and animation. The third part is a directory of major studios and companies. Entries are generally short, two to six paragraphs, and they include production dates, staff credits, and a brief evaluation of each title's significance. Here is how I use it in practice. When someone emails me asking for recommendations on where to start with Mecha anime, I do not just toss out a list. I pull up the encyclopedia, check the chronological entries for 1960s through 1980s mech series, note which titles are cited as foundational, and then cross-reference with the studio directory to see which producers and directors appear most frequently. That process usually takes me about eight minutes. Trying to piece that together from scattered web sources takes considerably longer and often produces incomplete results.

The most useful thing about this reference work is that it forces you to confront the sheer volume of what exists. A lot of people assume anime history is mostly three or four iconic franchises. The encyclopedia shows you the actual breadth, including a lot of material that never received an official English release. It also highlights patterns that are easy to miss otherwise, like how many late Seventies and early Eighties productions were direct video releases that have since been reissued. Those OVA entries alone are worth the price of the book. There are limitations you need to account for. The coverage ends in 2007, so anything from 2008 onward is completely absent. If you are researching anything after Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex or Code Geass, this book will not help you. The entries are also deliberately concise. You will not find detailed episode breakdowns, exact frame counts, or financial data. It is an encyclopedia, not a production archive. Another problem I ran into while compiling a reading list for a colleague was that some entries omit alternative English release titles. I was looking up Mawaru Penguindrum and could not find it under the romanized title until I tried the original Japanese title. The workaround is to search by director name instead. Kunihiko Ikuhary's entry lists his works in order, and that gets you to the title faster than fighting the alphabetical system. The studio directory at the back is where I spend most of my time. It gives you a quick sense of which companies survived across decades and which ones appeared briefly and disappeared. Gainax, Production I.G, Sunrise, and Madhouse all have substantial presence. Smaller studios like Group TAC or Artland get shorter treatments, and some minor rental-video distributors get a paragraph. This is where the book earns its keep for researchers. You can trace a animator's career path across multiple studio entries and see who worked where and when, which is genuinely useful information that is not always easy to assemble from other sources.

If you are trying to use this for academic citation, be aware that some of the factual claims in the entries have been superseded by later research. The authors did their best with available information at the time of publication, and a few details about early anime history have shifted as new material has surfaced. I always cross-check significant dates against the Nihon Anime Gakkai publications when I need precision. For casual reference or general orientation, the encyclopedia is more than adequate. For a thesis or peer-reviewed paper, treat it as a starting point, not a final authority. A good way to approach the book is to start with whichever decade interests you most and read the chronological entries straight through before jumping to the essays. The essays are valuable but they assume you already know the landscape. The chronological section builds that foundation. Read the Sixties entries, then move to the Seventies, and you will start noticing how TV serialization changed what shows could attempt compared to theatrical releases. That insight does not come from any single essay. It comes from reading the entries in sequence and comparing them. I have also found the appendix entries on live-action tokusatsu helpful, even though the book is about animation. The overlap between anime and tokusatsu production techniques in Japan is substantial, and Clements and McCarthy cover that intersection adequately enough that it adds context without derailing the main focus.

You can find the book used on Amazon, AbeBooks, and eBay fairly consistently. The ISBN for the third revised edition is 978-1-932897-89-6. New copies sell for around forty-five to sixty dollars depending on the seller. Used copies in decent condition are usually available for fifteen to twenty-five dollars. The physical copy is still worth buying rather than using a digital version because the layout makes it easier to scan entries quickly and flip between related titles. A PDF of the same content exists in various forms online, but the formatting makes navigation slower and the page references in related materials become harder to follow. The real value of The Anime Encyclopedia 3rd Revised Edition A Century Of Japanese Animation is that it gives you a structured map of a medium that otherwise feels overwhelming. You open it to any page and something about that era or that studio or that director becomes slightly more legible. That is enough reason to keep it on your shelf.