2005 Year in Review

Closing Editorial

Well, that's it for the 2005 Year in Review, thank you for reading. Originally we had 2 more articles planned, a look at the year in books and academia, and a feature on the various artbooks and novels.

The artbooks and novels feature ended up being incorporated into the already posted manga feature, and 2005 was a relatively quiet year in terms of books and academia. The only major anime-related academic event to take place in North America was the Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits lecture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in September. However, 2006 is already looking to be a much more interesting year for the academic study of anime; several books are planned for publishing in early and mid 2006 and we've already written news articles about several upcoming events related to the academic study of anime. Personally, I'm looking forward to reading about them as they happen, and in review at the end of the year. It's one of my favorite subjects because it reinforces my belief that anime is more than just pulp entertainment.

With 2005 now completely behind us, its time to look at 2006. For Anime News Network, I am expecting that 2006 will be another banner year, we already have plans underway for numerous new features that will improve our core content, and other features that will expand the site into some very different and interesting directions. A few of the new features are things we've been talking about for a long time, things like blogs for example, that will finally be launched in the early part of this year. Others are completely new features that we hope to surprise you with. All in all though, our focus remains the same, we want to provide the best anime news and editorial content possible to an ever expanding and evolving group of readers.

Off the website, the other big project the ANN staff worked on in 2005 was Protoculture Addicts. We're very proud of what we achieved with the magazine in 2005, but for 2006 we want to take it much further. We've decided to take a quality over quantity approach; as such, we're only releasing 2 issues in 2006 but we're committed to making them the best 2 issues that Protoculture Addicts has ever released, by a big margin. With the learning experience of those two issues behind us we'll be returning to a regular publishing schedule. In a few days we'll be making an announcement regarding Protoculture Addicts Issue #88, so keep your eye out for it.

In terms of anime, 2006 should be an interesting year. The misery of late 2004 and early 2005 are now behind the North American anime industry. The effects of that misery were made very clear at Anime Expo 2005 when 10 new licenses were announced — compared to 35 the year before. But in the later half of 2005, the industry sorted itself out and is now firmly set on what appears to be a steady course. Certainly there have been some more pitfalls, particularly the bankruptcy proceedings at Media Play, but overall, the Industry appears to be in a much healthier state than a year ago. I'd be surprised to see 35 new licenses at Anime Expo this year, but I'd also be surprised to see fewer than 15. As for what's actually going to be coming out in 2006, several companies already have some great new titles scheduled for release. Yes, 2006 will be a good year to be an anime fan.

And 2007 could be even better, with over 35 new TV series launching in Japan this spring, the wealth of new shows available to American fans via fansub and on DVD in 2007 will be impressive. The only problem is that the North American market might not be able to support licensing all those shows.

So there you have it, as a fan of anime, I'm very optimistic about what the coming year promises, both for anime itself, and for this site.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for all your support over the past year, without you, ANN wouldn't be here.

Christopher Macdonald
Editor in Chief
Anime News Network