Steam is reportedly cracking down on "scantily clad cartoon women" in its online gane platform. Publishers of adult-themed anime visual novels say they've been told to remove offending titles or leave town.

"It's an anime titty holocaust," HuniePot, the developer of HuniePop, a match-3 puzzle game where players also chat up busty anime girls, said in a tweet. Thursday night, HuniePot tweeted that it received an email from Valve, the company that operates Steam, saying that HuniePop, "violates the rules & guidelines for pornographic content on Steam and will be removed from the store unless the game is updated to remove said content."

MangaGamer, a company that localizes and publishes several Japanese visual novels, told Motherboard in an email that it received a notice from Valve Thursday morning for its game Kindred Spirits.

Steam is, in other words, panicking and excluding a genre from its platform without explanation. It's allegedly warned at least one publisher over material they don't even publish on Steam.

These seems to be a general unwillingness to directly address two facts at hand:

1. Much of the material in question depicts childlike characters in sexual contexts.

2. Some of the people selling it are misogynists and some of the adjacent fandoms are tinderboxes of rage and entitlement.

Instead, we have vague objections to vague policies. This enables Steam to push out anything superficially similar, a pattern that could later be used to push out sexual and political minorities and anything else that might make trouble in the serene walled gardens of content. Read the rest

Probably the best cyberpunk anime ad for stout ale in the world. [via Tim Soret] Read the rest

Anime floppy disks is dedicated to collecting depictions of floppy disks in anime, but offers occasional special treats such as magneto-optical disks in anime.

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Released in Japan in 1989, Amada Anime Series: Super Mario Bros is a series of three fairy tale animations starring the Super Mario characters. From the Mario Wiki:

The series contains: Super Mario Momotarō, Super Mario Issun-bōshi, and Super Mario Shirayuki-hime‎. The two former episodes in the series are retellings of fairy tales of the same name, while Super Mario Shirayuki-hime is a retelling of the Western fairy tale Snow White

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The fine folks behind the series CrapShots did this very funny short clip called The Shipping, on the inevitable outcome of the race for faster packing shipping speeds. Read the rest

The following are pioneering animator and Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki's (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.) top ten favorite books for young people:

1. The Borrowers -- Mary Norton

2. The Little Prince -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

3. Children of Noisy Village -- Astrid Lindgren

4. When Marnie Was There -- Joan G. Robinson

5. Swallows and Amazons -- Arthur Ransome

6. The Flying Classroom -- Erich Kästner

7. There Were Five of Us -- Karel Poláček

8. What the Neighbours Did, and Other Stories -- Ann Philippa Pearce

9. Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates -- Mary Mapes Dodge

10. The Secret Garden -- Frances Hodgson Burnett

"Hayao Miyazaki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books" (via Kottke) Read the rest

Your Name is the highest-grossing anime feature ever, knocking Spirited Away to the number two spot. Tofugu has a feature story about Your Name, which includes an interview with director Makoto Shinkai.

Without giving too much of the twist away, let's just say the film arcs from the careless fantasy of Freaky Friday to the sci-fi esoterica of Sense8 after Taki's impactful revelation. It's a surprising plus that Your Name invites comparisons to such a broad spread of body-swapping, mind-melding fiction at different turns. Even when venturing into stranger territory, it keeps a brisk pace and a spring in its step – exploring deep thoughts without brooding on them.

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Tofugu (where my wife Carla is exec editor) has a great article about the 20 best anime movies not made by Studio Ghibli (Totoro, Spirited Away).

19. REDLINE

Often times, "anime" is defined by its lack of motion. Redline punches this "limited animation" concept in its motionless face. It's easily the busiest, most overstimulating animated film we've ever seen.

A daredevil speedster named JP enters the Redline, a high-stakes, weaponized space race that nearly took his life. But first, he's gotta get back into racing shape to challenge the best in the universe with pure speed and guts. Along his comeback trail, JP meets Cherry-Boy Hunter, a young female competitor who unearths old memories. Can JP return to form in time for the Redline? Is Cherry-Boy Hunter friend or foe? Can JP survive the intergalactic conspiracy that saturates the race?

Sure, Redline's plot plays like a giant stone soup of anime tropes: space, vehicles, aliens, and giant pompadours. Check, check, and check. The film took seven years and 100,000 hand drawings to create, all that hard work paid off. Down to its pop-art presentation, Redline is anime pulp fiction at its best. What it lacks in depth, it makes up for with an adrenaline-fueled circus of speed and action.

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Legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki "fails at retirement again," writes Amid Amidi. He's taking the helm again at Studio Ghibli to direct a new full-length feature film, Boro the Caterpillar.

The news of Miyazaki’s pending return to feature film was the subject of an entire NHK TV special that aired in Japan on Sunday: Owaranai Hito Miyazaki Hayao (The Man Who Is Not Done: Hayao Miyazaki). In the show, Miyazaki not only discussed his current project—a 12-minute CG animated short Kemushi no Boro (Boro the Caterpillar) that will debut at the Ghibli Museum in 2017—but floated plans for a follow-up feature film.

Miyazaki is 76 and evidently far from done; the infamous quote often attributed to him in the image accompanying this post is deliberately mistranslated from a more nuanced, but no less damning statement:

Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!.

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Drew Mackie's video above, remixing the homoerotic glory of 80's anime Saint Seiya, is your shot. Meg Elison's short story at McSweeney's, "If women wrote men the way men write women", is your chaser. (Previously) Read the rest

What if UNO were rebooted? JelloApocalypse's If UNO Was An Anime gives the mundane classic all the hackneyed tropes and stock characters of card game tie-in toons. Read the rest

Imagine a mix of modern animation and 1960s marionette show Thunderbirds and you still won't quite capture how awesome Thunderbolt Fantasy is. It's an example of glove puppetry, a form of folk art dating back centuries.

Set in an Eastern fantasy setting, Dān Fěi and her brother, guardians of a sword known as the Tiān Xíng Jiàn, are pursued by the evil Xuán Guǐ Zōng clan, who seek to obtain the sword for their master, Miè Tiān Hái. While her brother is defeated, Fěi, who possesses the sword's crossguard, manages to escape off a cliff.

The full series is on crunchyroll. Read the rest

San Diego Comic-Con International has concluded for 2016, but these amazing photos of dedicated cosplayers at the event will live on. Read the rest

Mansun, who blogs at Omocoro.jp, constructed an "auto licking machine" to lick cartoon girls. [via] Read the rest

Republican strategist Rick Wilson, appearing on MSNBC, spoke thusly last night of the online contingent of Trump's racist, sexist support base: "childless single men who masturbate to anime".

The full @TheRickWilson trolling the alt-right on their porn habits: pic.twitter.com/uQD9QJ9wZg

— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) January 20, 2016

The growing association between the Alt Right and anime (previously: how anime avatars became a warning) is pretty weird, isn't it?

The "sociology" seems obvious—a generation of angry, badly-socialized adolescent men letting their nerddom and sexuality curdle in public—but that's the too-easy answer.

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Jen Yamato of The Daily Beast describes Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Belladonna) from 1973 as a "long-forgotten X-rated psychedelic animation gem about one woman’s violation, persecution, and sexual awakening produced over four decades ago by the makers of Astro Boy." Read about the film here and watch the NSFW "psychedelic orgy of sexual liberation explode" in the clip above.

Now Belladonna of Sadness has been brought to vivid new life by a group of L.A.-based cineastes who have given the 1973 gem a 4K restoration and added eight minutes of explicit footage back in. After its unveiling late last week at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, Belladonna will be released stateside for the first time next year.

The stunning rediscovery, adapted by anime veteran Eiichi Yamamoto more than 40 years ago from Jules Michelet’s 19th century French proto-feminist text La Sorciere, tells the tragic tale of a blissfully happy peasant bride in feudal France.

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Having watched Attack on Titan, I enjoyed this video of a live action fight over a slice of pizza at a party, edited anime-style. Every line of dialogue is delivered as a seething throaty whisper or a confused angry shout. There are close-ups of throbbing eyeballs and trembling fists. One second glimpses of complex infographics. Slow camera sweeps over static scenes. They nailed it.

[via] Read the rest