Curated playlist
Anime series based on manga
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (TV series)Ufotable announced the anime adaptation of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba in June 2018. Director Haruo Sotozaki and producer Hikaru Kondo led the project. Character designer Akira Matsushima shaped the visual style for the series. The…
- Berserk (2016 TV series)Berserk, Kentaro Miura's sprawling dark fantasy manga, returned to Japanese television screens on the 1st of July 2016 with a new anime adaptation that picked up a story left dangling since 1997. The question hovering over that premiere…
- Dragon Ball ZDragon Ball Z premiered on Fuji Television on the 26th of April 1989, and from that first episode it was chasing something its predecessor never quite reached. The creative team behind it had been drafted from Saint Seiya, a different show…
- Berserk (1997 TV series)Berserk, the 1997 anime television series, opens not with a hero's journey but with a survivor's rage. Guts, a lone mercenary warrior, is shown already scarred and relentless in a flash-forward before the story proper begins. He has lost…
- Fist of the North StarFist of the North Star opens with a single phrase that would eventually conquer the internet decades after anyone first read it: "You are already dead." Kenshiro, the series' stoic warrior hero, delivers that line to enemies just before…
- The Rose of VersaillesThe Rose of Versailles arrived in Japanese readers' hands on the 21st of May 1972, and it asked something no shojo manga had dared ask before: what if the commander of the Royal Guard at the Palace of Versailles was a woman? That woman is…
- Sailor Moon (TV series)Sailor Moon first aired in Japan on the 7th of March 1992, and within three years the franchise had generated $1.5 billion in merchandise sales. A show built around a clumsy, overemotional 14-year-old who would rather sleep than save the…
- Attack on Titan (TV series)Attack on Titan is a Japanese dark fantasy anime series that began as a manga by Hajime Isayama in 2009 and became, by nearly any measure, one of the most watched television programs on earth. On the 7th of April 2013, the first episode…
- Black ButlerBlack Butler, the manga series written and illustrated by Yana Toboso, opens on a single night in Victorian-era London that changes everything. A twelve-year-old boy named Ciel Phantomhive stands at the center of a summoning ritual…
- Crayon Shin-chanCrayon Shin-chan is a Japanese manga series created by Yoshito Usui, and from its first appearance in 1990, it has never quite behaved the way anyone expected a children's series to behave. Its hero is five years old, lives in the city of…
- Monster (manga)Monster opens with a choice that changes several lives at once. Kenzo Tenma, a neurosurgeon at Eisler Memorial Hospital in Düsseldorf, West Germany, is engaged to Eva Heinemann, the hospital director's daughter. Then fraternal twins Johan…
- Tetsujin 28-goTetsujin 28-go arrived in 1956, the creation of Mitsuteru Yokoyama, and it asked a question that would echo through decades of Japanese popular culture: what happens when a child inherits a weapon? The premise is stark. A ten-year-old boy…
- Tokyo RevengersIn February 2020, Tokyo Revengers had three million copies in circulation. By September 2021, that figure had climbed past forty million. By June 2024, Ken Wakui's manga had exceeded eighty million copies worldwide. That kind of trajectory…
- Claymore (manga)Claymore is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Norihiro Yagi, and it opens on a world where the line between human and monster is drawn in silver. On a fictional medieval island, shapeshifting creatures called Yoma prey on…
- Blue ExorcistBlue Exorcist opens with a teenager pulling a sword from a scabbard - and discovering he is the son of Satan. Rin Okumura does not learn this quietly. He watches the man who raised him, Father Shiro Fujimoto, die to protect him. Then…
- Cobra (manga)Cobra, the manga series by Buichi Terasawa, opens not with a hero striding across a starfield, but with an ordinary office worker named Johnson who is bored. One Sunday morning, Johnson's robotic servant Ben suggests he visit the Trip…
- Aim for the Ace!Aim for the Ace! began as a single story in a Japanese girls' magazine in January 1973, and it never really stopped. Sumika Yamamoto's manga about a high school student named Hiromi Oka and her obsessive pursuit of tennis greatness would…
- Bastard!!Bastard!! is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kazushi Hagiwara, and it is named after its own irreverence. The title alone signals what it contains: a dark wizard named Dark Schneider, a world built from heavy metal band…