Anime Essentials: Every Thing A Fan Needs to Know by Gilles Poitras
Vandemar
Watching anime is fantastic, but sometimes you can’t. Like on the bus, for example. Carrying around a TV and DVD player is just impractical and if you don’t have a laptop, sometimes you have to turn to other forms of entertainment. Reading about anime seems to be the natural choice. Anime Essentials: Every Thing A Fan Needs to Know fills this “can’t carry a TV” gap with wordy goodness and it’s a pretty good read, though not the be-all, end-all of anime books.
It’s important to consider the audience first. The information in here is going to be laughably basic for any longtime anime fan, but it’s targeted more to someone just getting into the genre. Me, for instance, or that clueless parent who hears some alarmist news report about hentai and goes bonkers about anime. It’s a light-hearted introduction to anime, with a lot of useful background information on various series and things every fan should know.
Rather than an in-depth look at a specific topic, Anime Essentials covers just about everything in enough detail to get you started, then pats you on the head and points you towards other avenues to explore. It works well enough as an introductory text, but I wouldn’t make it my desert island book, if only for the lack of depth. The author’s voice is good and casual, enthusiastic without being creepy, and generally good and helpful without falling into the dryness of so much nonfiction.
While it has lots of useful background information, the book came out in 2001, so it’s very much on the dated side 4 years down the road. The discussion of videotapes and VHS will surely baffle a crowd used to Torrents and Internet Internet, and DVD is but a fledgling chick in this book, rather than being the king of the movie-watching genre. It’s not especially current, but as a background source, it works. I think an updated edition would be invaluable as a resource for the anime newbie.
The best part of the book, the real meat besides the genre overview, comes in a nice collection of anime titles at the back, profiled in little blurbs intriguing enough to make you purchase them (or add then to your RentAnime.com queue). Nothing new is on the list, because of the age of the book, but there’s a lot of classics and must-watches profiled, more than enough to give a would-be anime fan a good foundation in their new addiction. There’s some information on the anime scene in Japan that’s kind of interesting, but everything’s a mile wide and an inch deep.
This is one of those good news/bad news things. The good news is, it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than the Essentials, which are well-covered. Newbies to the genre will not be overwhelmed by tons of intimidating trivia, which is always good. Bad news is, those looking for a little more meat to gnaw on will probably be disappointed. As it is now, though, pick up this one if you’re new to the genre or want to give someone a basic overview and assure them it’s not all violent pornography. Hardcore fans might want to flip through it to see if there’s anything they missed, but won’t find too much they don’t already know in this slim little volume.
