How to Download Anime

Disclaimer: you should probably buy your anime legally but hey what the heck everyone really wants to just download it. There are several ways to download anime, you can either use the ever-popular bit torrent which can be kind of a pain sometimes finding torrents that are the right ones and fast. Or you can sign up with a direct-download site, possibly by paying a monthly fee, and get your anime more reliably. Personally I actually do both, since I care about getting anime fast and cheap. (Not that I don't buy anime dvds when it is a really great series and I really want to support the artists.)

Bit Torrent There are many different bit torrent clients, but some of the most popular are uTorrent, Azureus, and Bit Tornado. You can just google bit torrent and download any of these bit torrent clients. Then you need to find the .torrent files to start downloading the file! My favorite sites for finding torrents are torrentz.com, which lists other torrent sites' torrents, and mininova.com. Look for torrents that have large numbers of seeds and good health or ratings. Also pay attention to whether the torrent is subbed, dubbed, and in the right language! I've accidentally downloaded Italian or French anime dubs and even though they're subbed in English it can be weird/annoying to listen to. If you are looking for Bleach/Naruto then dattebayo.com is the biggest most reliable source for those torrents. Plus they're funny.

Direct Download There are some free sites where you usually sign up to be a member and then can download slowly, but easier and possibly faster than torrents. This is usually a fan site for a popular show like Bleach or Naruto. Also you can sign up for a pay site because it has a much wider selection of shows, and better quality. For example narutofan.com used to just provide free naruto, but now they have a $5/month anime plan where you can download lots of different anime shows, especially the new spring season shows.

Streaming Of course there's also streaming. But youtube is not very reliable and the quality is terrible. Another option is crunchyroll and 2chan.

Hope this helps you find the anime you're looking for!by Susie Q

Give anime a try!

Many people don't know what is, or they think it is like cartoons that only kids watch. But in fact anime is a genre just like any other form of entertainment, which can express a wide range of emotions and appeal to any demographic. There is anime for kids, like the pokemon shows that most of the U.S. thinks of when they hear anime, but then there are also anime series that are mature in their themes and sophisticated in terms of artwork, storytelling, and complexity.

Shows like 'Serial Experiments Lain,' only released officially in Japan but available subtitled by fans on the internet, explores the darker side of the human psyche and studies the influences of cyberpunk and internet influences on modern urban life. Series like Death Note, which has been dubbed and is actually growing in popularity in the U.S., examine the ideas of justice, ego, and obsession in a fast-paced mystery-suspense detective show.

So if you've never watched any quality anime before (and no Dragonballz and Pokemon do not count), you should give it a try you might find something that's entertaining and makes you think about the world in a new way.by Susie Q

Japanese Horror Films - The Top 10 Best Movies

In honor of the month of October, here are my top 10 horror films from Japan. Watching these 10 films is absolutely mandatory, not just for Asian horror fans but really horror fans in general. Also, yes, yes, I know, where the fuck is Ringu? Great, by far one of the better new wave J-horror films, but too overexposed. Juon? Not a big fan. Why doesn't this include horror films from other Asian countries? Haven't seen enough of those to make a top 10 list. So without further adeau, I present what I personally are the 10 greatest horror films to come out of Japan, not objectively, but more based on my personal taste.

10. Evil Dead Trap (1988) Evil Dead Trap is an absolutely top notch 80s J-horror film. The film, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, is heavily influenced by such Italian masters as Argento and Fulci and really shows it in it's nicely slick style. The music even, as Michael Weldon of Psychotronic once noted, sounds like Goblin. From the absolutely wince inducing snuff film opening to the creepy shock ending, Evil Dead Trap is one of those kind of films that never lets up in it's intensity and insanity. The whole action ark takes place in an abandoned military base which makes for a nice, eerie backdrop for the gruesome killings and general weirdness that soon follows. Highly recommended for those with a strong stomach.

9. House (1977) Where does one even begin when writing about Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 horror cult masterpiece? According to the wonderful source of information that is Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion, all Obayashi was asked to do was make a horror film that would sell well with youth. Obayashi did do that, but he did so much more, using every avant garde cinematic technique you could think of to create what resembles a horror themed music video 10 times better than Michael Jackson's Thriller. This is no doubt the strangest thing ever to greenlit by Tomoyuki Tanaka himself and boasts an insane, completely erratic feel and numerous absolutely arresting visuals.

8. Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968) Now, thanks to Quentin Tarantino, this is best known as "that movie where the blood red sky in Kill Bill came from" but is still sadly unreleased on R1 DVD and underappreciated in the West. I first saw this film when I was the tender age of 11 and it scared the ever living fuck out of me. Basically an apocalyptic sci-fi/horror hybrid and modern day vampire tale heavily influenced, stylistically, by the films of Mario Bava but also boasting a very unique "Japaneseness" with a heavy anti-war element and surprisingly gorgeous cinematography. It's a pretty depressing, unsettling movie in actuality. Particularly unsettling is the film's somewhat infamous "possession" sequence, in which a blue alien blob enters the skull of the film's main villian, a white suited terrorist, through a vagina shaped gash in his forehead. That, my friend, is cinema!

7. Wicked City (1987) The only anime film on this list, this is no doubt one of the roughest, coolest horror-themed anime around and one of all time favorites in the genre. Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri from a novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi (Vampire Hunter D), Wicked City is a surpremely badass film with everything you could ever hope for, from spider women with snapping sharp tooth vaginas, grisly demonic transformations and loads of sex and violence, bringing the film up to easy NC-17 terrority. Fuck anybody who calls this a hentai, however, as the graphic sex in this film is hardly the main attraction. Kawajiri would later give us the almost equally good Ninja Scroll, another anime work that nicely mingles the worlds of sex, violence and the supernatural.

6. Jigoku (1960) Jigoku (or Hell) is an absolutely fucking incredible film from Japanese horror master Nobuo Nakagawa, the man who, prior to this, gave us Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (or Ghost of Yotsuya) his own unique, Hitchcockian vision of the famous Japanese Yotsuya Kaidan legend. For this film, Nakagawa goes way further, taking us into, where else, but the depths of Hell itself. After an amazing intro, the film actually plays it pretty subtle for it's first half, with everything simply playing out as a drama. However, no sooner does it start to get boring than does, literally, all Hell break loose as the main characters are all mercilessly sent down into the infernal depths of Hades, where they, for the next thirty minutes, wander around eerily lit landscapes and breathtaking sets that would have made Mario Bava jealous and are subjected to various grisly tortures that predated H.G. Lewis' Blood Feast by three years.

5. Chushingura Gaiden Yotsuya Kaidan (1994) Speaking of the Yotsuya Kaidan legend, here's our next selection, one of the later films of Kinji Fukasaku, one of the greatest directorial geniuses to come out of Japan. Fukasaku was no stranger to Japanese literature, having adapted the Chushingura (47 Ronin) legend in 1978 as The Fall of Ako Castle and the Satomi Hakkenden legend twice as Message From Space and Legend of the Eight Samurai. For this film, not only was he taking another shot at Chushingura, but he also combined it with the Yotsuya Kaidan story, an idea he had wanted to do back in 1978, making Iuemon, the main character of Yotsuya Kaidan, one of the loyal 47 retainers. From the film's almost Kubrick-like use of Wagner's O Fortuna to sharp editing and fine direction, the film is, as usual with Fukasaku, one of the finest, most entertaining examples of it's genre.

4. Audition (2000) No doubt the best film the otherwise rather overrated Takashi Miike has made and likely ever will make. What starts out as a simple, almost dull drama gets creepier and creepier, until, in the last, grotesque, hyper disturbing, sadomasochistic reel, the film gives you what is the cinematic equvalent to a drop kick in the nuts. Whether it's more of a fucked up drama and less of a horror film I'm not sure, but that does not change the fact it is likely the scariest thing to come out of Japan, making Ringu and Juon look like The Adventures of Milo and Otis and it's easily twice as gnarly as Hostel.

3. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988) Tetsuo is the breakout film of Japanese cyberpunk director Shinya Tsukamoto and is, to me, quite frankly a fucking incredible piece of experimental cinema, like Kafka's The Metamorphosis on crack. It's also far more a horror film than sci-fi, as there is no real scientific explanation for the goings on. The film's got loads of gnarly gore, nightmarish imagery a plenty, a superb use of pixelation animation, a thundering metal score by Chu Ishikawa and yes, the film's infamous "power drill penis" sequence which you really have to see to believe. The B&W 16mm cinematography, interestingly enough, is surprisingly beautiful and the whole film is quite insanely entertaining.

2. Matango (1963) In terms of my favorite classic Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya film, I frequently go back and forth between Gojira (Godzilla) and this film, once best known as Attack of the Mushroom People, which I could best describe to anyone unfamiliar with it as a Japanese Gilligan's Island on shrooms. That said, it's a lot deeper than that, if Gojira was Honda's own warning against atomic weapons, this is Honda's own warning against the dehumanizing effects of narcotics and it's hell of a lot more scary and effective (not to mention far more entertaing) than say, Reefer Madness. It's got some of the best production design and cinematography around in a Toho flick and was as some of Tsuburaya's best, most subtle FX work and film's titular "mushroom people" are some of the creepiest monsters to come out of Toho's FX workshops. It also features some of the best performances of such veterans as Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno, Yoshio Tsuchiya and company.

1. Onibaba (1964) Onibaba is an absolutely amazing piece of cinema, a genuinely fucking scary film with vague but very much present horror elements. It's a stunning work of art directed by the ingenius Kaneto Shindo with absolutely amazing B&W cinematography and is a gritty, stark, highly sexual film boasting with some of the eeriest, loveliest monochromatic images you will see in a film from the terrifying visage of the film's hanya mask to the corpse filled hole to the swaying reeds that look almost unreal. It's a truly arresting piece of cinema and totally deserves it's number one spot. Kaneto Shindo's next foray into period horror: Kuroneko, well not quite as powerful, would be nearly as good.by The Butcher

Uchiha Sasuke's Sword of Kusanagi - Does It Really Exist?

Uchiha Sasuke's sword made its debut in the popular manga Naruto Chapter 308 and the blade's name was highly debated among fans worldwide. In that chapter which was titled "Sasuke's Strength", Yamato Taichou tried to stop Uchiha Sasuke's sword with his kunai but failed. Instead his kunai was cut in two by Sasuke's sword. Sasuke later quoted "You see, the sword of Kusanagi I hold here is a little special. It's the kind that can't be blocked". This caused some confusion because readers who have followed the manga since the beginning would know that Orochimaru also had a sword of Kusanagi when he battled it out with the 3rd Hokage, only difference is Orochimaru's Kusanagi looked more like a katana.

Sasuke's Sword of Kusanagi is a chokuto which is a straight Japanese sword. The chokuto's design was originally from China and Korea. It was developed before the Japanese blacksmiths discovered differential heat treatment which later gave birth to the best martial arts weapon ever - the Japanese katana. The chokuto is easily distinguished by its straight blade which is a rare feature in most Japanese swords these days.

The Kusanagi or more popularly known as Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi (Sword of Kusanagi) actually had its origin from a Japanese myth. Legend has it the Japanese god Susa-no-o had an encounter with Ashinazuchi, the head of a family with eight daughters. Ashinazuchi previously lost seven of his daughters eaten by a giant eight-headed serpent called Yamata-no-Orochi. The serpent was coming back to feast on his last daughter Kushinade-hime. The desperate Ashinazuchi begged Susa-no-o to save his daughter which the Japanese god agreed in exchange for Kushinade-hime's hand in marriage.

Susa-no-o devised a plan and instructed Ashinazuchi to prepare eight vats of sake, each placed separately behind a wall with eight gates. The giant serpent came and took bait, slithering each of its eight heads through each gate. In an instance, Susa-no-o emerged and severed all eight heads before turning to the serpent's tails. Susa-no-o later found a sword inside the Yamata-no-Orochi's slain body which he named Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi or "Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven". He then presented the sword to the goddess Amaterasu to settle an old grievance. The sword's name was later changed to Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi.

In the Naruto manga, Orochimaru calls out the Kusanagi sword from a snake's mouth (the snake's head juts out from Orochimaru's mouth). Orochimaru's character which is skilled in snake jutsu is actually drawn from the serpent Yamata-no-Orochi. In chapter 392, Orochimaru broke free from Sasuke's control and used his Hydra technique to reappear as an eight-headed giant serpent. But unlike the story in the myth, Susa-no is the name of the ultimate jutsu that Uchiha Itachi used together with the Sword of Totsuka to seal Orochimaru in an illusion genjutsu for all eternity. The jutsu Susa-no took on the form of a giant spirit with sharp nose, jagged teeth and three hands - one holding a shield, one carrying a container and the remaining hand wielding the Sword of Totsuka when it is released from the container.

Was that an interesting story for you? Many anime and manga titles use Japanese myths as reference to create amazing stories, keeping readers enthralled and coming back for more. An excellent channel to learn more about Japanese cultures and history, don't you think?by Jason Liew

10 Most Lovable Animation Movies

Animation is the speedy display of a series of images of 2-D artwork in order to create an illusion of movement. One of the most common ways of presenting animation is a motion picture or video program, although several other forms of presenting animation also exist. Because of the highly entertaining value it has, animation has been used in films as it has the capacity to attract an audience of various age groups, from 8 to 80.

The use of animation in films probably began in the year 1890. J. Stuart Blackton was the first man who put animation in his film titled 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces'. The film featured a cartoonist drawing faces on a chalkboard, and the faces actually coming to life. After that many filmmakers and producers started using various animations in their films that apparently brought life to their pictures.

Soon, the stage came where the audience gradually got the chance to see films or movies where each and every character was animated. Those are full fledged animated movies. If we take a look at the list of the block bluster movies, we will be surprised to find that animation movies are equally contributing to this list.

Movies like The Lion King, Shrek, Monsters, Toy Story, Aladdin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Ice Age, Tarzan, A Bug's Life, etc. are considered as the top 10 animated movies both by the viewers and critics. Giant entertainment companies like Walt Disney, Pixar, Fox Entertainment, Dream Works, etc. have invested millions of dollars behind these animated movies and their profit was also up to the expectation.

The Lion King produced by Walt Disney Feature Production is one of the most thought provoking animated movies. It was originally titled the King of the Jungle. In order to achieve perfection the animators who worked on this movie studied the activities and the movements of real life animals too. In fact the filmmakers were such perfectionists that they went to Kenya to study the natural habitat that is used as a background in the film. The film featured green grass, the smoke from the fire, and the waterfall, all presented in perfect animation. The characters were built using 3D computer programmes that looked perfect.

Shrek is based upon a fairy tale picture produced by Dream Works. Though the film is meant for children, the theme has also attracted adults. The plot of the movie is simple and humorous. In fact this movie became so popular that computer games were made on Shrek.

Aladdin, the animated film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation, is based on the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp of Arabian Nights. The character of Aladdin was drawn by keeping in mind the faces of various Hollywood heroes and at the end it was decided that he would look like Tom Cruise. Special computer animations were used to develop some scenes of the movie. Some such instances are the full view of the palace, the magic carpet, the breaking up of the cave, etc.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, produced in 1937 by Walt Disney, is considered as one of the first commercially successful animation films. The film is a pioneer in many ways. It took three years to make this film because at that time the animations were not developed. They used many techniques that were in the primary stage of development at that time. They used animations to create rain, lightning, water, reflections, sparkles, magic, etc.

Toy Story, produced by Pixar Animation Studio is an animated movie that is fully created on computer. The story revolves around the toys of a nine year old boy and the story of the film is told from the toy's point of view.

A Bug's Life, again produced by Pixar Animation Studio and released in 1998, tells the tale of ants which think that they are warrior bugs and they have the courage to fight with the greedy grasshoppers. John Lasseter directed it. The story is based on the famous Aesop's fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper.

One can see that most of the animation movies are meant for children. But elders also equally enjoy these because these animation movies have various layers of meaning. With the rapid developments in various animated software, one can surely expect a solid future in producing animation films.by Victor Epand