User Reviews

Extremely superficial. Feels like a Netflix promotion of their anime productions.

Bottom line, I got more about the insights of manga and anime from the first 5 minutes of the Transformers episode of The Toys That Made Us and those 2 minute segments the Space channel use to have.

This laughable excuse of a documentary had no direction at all, and seemed to glaze over Japanese culture and its association with anime.

Plus no early anime like the 1960's Astroboy -- let alone Namakura Gatana from 1917. It's mostly disjointed interviews of modern producers of anime with editing effects that hurt the whole thing, and seemingly random vids of Japan.

They should have taken a few notes from Trekkies or something to make it watchable -- let alone explore.

This would be miserably disappointing even as a first draft to a documentary about anime. How did this even get made?

Please do not waste your time watching this, for the following reasons:

1.) It is not informative or entertaining. The documentarian/narrator is clueless on the topic and offers no meaningful insights. 2.) It is artless garbage, with editing so poor that it is close to physically painful. 3.) Its condescending oversimplifications of Japanese culture are extremely embarrassing to have to hear. 4.) It isn't even a documentary, its mainly a promotion, as the majority of the shows discussed are recent "Netflix Originals" rather than iconic or well-known series.

So please don't watch it, if too many people do than Netflix might get the wrong impression and make more utterly unforgivable rubbish like this. A true dumpster fire.

I felt so insulted watching this spot made by idiots who ignore everything about anime (or Japan) that I just had to revenge and post a dumber review. I love Netflix but everyone involved with this documentary should get fired. What a poor way to talk about anime and to put images together.

Love anime, this movie made me wanna shoot my brains out after 15 minutes.

This documentary expends most of its time on random monologues narrated by the author, most of it bring no information about the subject of anime or japan. The fact that the person doing the documentary states knowing nothing about anime also doesn't help, simply because the questions you may be interested are never asked. The interviews are mostly a waste of time for the professionals, the pace is cringe, and you will not learn anything new even if you have never seen anime. Gladly its short.

You could make a drinking game out of all of the times the narrator curses for no valuable reason or how many times she says she doesn't know/still doesn't know anything about anime.

As others have said, this feels more like an hour long commercial than any sort of actual documentary. It has absolutely no value to anyone that is familiar with anime and even less for people wishing to dive into the medium.

She tries to portray these artists, producers, etc. as eccentric, otherworldly characters instead of real people. She jabbers on and on about things that really don't seem like actual coherent thoughts.

She knew nothing about anime, and now, as a life-long viewer of anime; I feel like I know less than I did when I started. That's how bad she is.

My disgust for this title pushed me to reach for my laptop, sign up to IMDB and type a review for the very first time. That is how much anger I felt towards Netflix's horrific, cringe-worthy piece of garbage. I wish I could say anything constructive, but this is a superficial view of what anime is or how it started and it's real reflection of Japanese culture and imagination, it's vehicle for fantasy and the language of its people. I hated the narrator I thought I didn't care for her initial "I knew nothing about anime" and "i should google what is anime" intro or the lame childish voice-over script of "japan is this!" -insert visual- "and this" -other visual-, and "that's cool right?". The very first person she hosts (i'm not sure why in the world would any documentarian start with non-japanese anime producers in LA) Is the producer of castlevania (which is not a bad... "anime-inspired" animated series) and everything he utters out of this mouth makes you feel like he's a pretentious idiot, "oh i picked up the phone and this guy was like, hey I'm kanye", and "I'm a time traveller". Just. God. Awful.

Maybe further in the film there's some useful piece of information, but this did not grab me enough to want to continue and reach that part.

Being nearly 40, and an anime fan for 30 years(ish), I thought I'd give this a bash. Oh God.

It's so bad, it'd make GCSE Media Studies student blush.

Tania tells us she doesn't know what anime is, and she's going to find out! Oh boy. She then fleeces Netflix for a free trip to Japan, and the following happens:

1)She doesn't actually investigate or explain what anime is. 2)She starts roping in random bits of things she sees in Japan. Oh a Lolita goth! Dancing Elvis! Music! Food! It's all a bit cliché and grasping. 3)It's really flimsy on detail. At one point, she says she still feels like she doesn't know what anime is, so "time to call in the big guns". This translates as learning what some guys favourite colour, food and so on is. Wow. 4)We learn what some of the directors would be of not in anime... Which we don't need to know. 5)It's one big advert for Netflix Original anime. Let's face it, most of these are "ok" at best.

I thought it may be better as a series, but then realized that would just be a pile of fresh hell.

Do yourselves a favour, try to find The South Bank Show anime/manga special from about 10 years ago; it's a great overview of anime/manga/Japanese culture.

TL:DR: Clueless lady fleeces Netflix for a free trip to Japan, fails to discuss anime, advertises Netflix own mediocre offerings.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. I made 4 coffees during this and it felt longer than 58 minutes.

I really enjoyed this fun journey into the anime world. I love the cinematography and the way the story was told! I hope there is more to come this was such a cool doc especially for anime and Japan lovers!

I really like how it was filmed ! And particulary, the '' instagram's story like'' moment which gave it a personnal view and fun approche of the subject in a way that it does go with its time (come on ... how many of us spend their time on snapchat and sort ?!).

On the other hand, I can easily understand why otaku (manga nerds) would be disapointed. You cannot reduce such vast subject easily into an hour long documentary and cover everything (it's like describing the Renaissance... way too vast !!). And in any case Hardcore Fans are always disappointed whatever the subject is and how it is treated !

Personally, I just wished they talk a bit more on where does they come from. On how after WWII japanese try to get their moral and pride up again. but then again we talk here about a very large subject, that is anime. Which is a medium of expression differnt of traditional manga, even if they are related. In the end, it is a documentary for neophytes who don't know anything about it and try to understand what all this fuzz is about, approched in a genuine and personnal way.

Lost me when she called anime a medium. one giant netflix ad either way. no real thesis to the "documentary" either, just rambles on and on eith no point.

If this was a true anime exploration and understanding documentary then where is Naruto, Detective Conan, Full Metal Alchemist and most importantly One Piece. Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece, is one of the top most hard working people in the anime/manga industry.

All the anime featured in this movie are animes exclusively only from Netflix. The girl that made the movie was so unqualified in making it. At first I thought oh its refreshing because it's a new perspective. But what the heck happened?! It was all just advertising the Netflix anime series. I understand how hard you make a movie. But this was just trash. Pure advertisement. Label it correctly.

I watched anime for a couple of years now and also read quite a lot of manga so I think i know enough about the subject. This documentary doesn't really help with learning about the industry except for a few interviews with some creators and people that are involved on the industry. I also disliked the editing and the fact that it's pretty much a giant advertisement for Netflix.

That's not a documentary, but the promotional video made by ignorants

This is so bad it made me sad. From cringe interviews, sorry, in the grand scheme of things what is Castlevania? I do not even categorize it as anime. I don't understand the point of this film apart from being free add for Netflix productions (as most reviewers already said). As an anime fan I was really disappointed, I would hope they would take it down after the bad reviews, this is awful.

This feels like a interviewer who doesn't know anything about Anime culture is making a giant Netflix commercial, by coincedentally only interviewing people who are making Netflix Anime and especially the ones who make anime nobody really likes with a few small exceptions. It also is really interesting that the interviewer constantly refers to American Cartoons, which are influenced by Anime as Anime and to Manga as Comic Books, which will have every Manga reader screaming out of the top of their lungs. When I see this Movie I cant help but have a great Idea for a new Netflix documentary: A catholic Preacher making a documentary about the Porn industry.

I'm pretty sure that in addition to Googling "What is Anime," the narrator also had to WikiHow "How to make a Netflix commercial," because that's all this is. Next up, the YouTube documentary "Enter the Journalist" featuring and narrated by PewDiePie.

This is Netflix advertising itself on your dime. They tasked a director with that already had a deal in place with Netflix, do make a documentary about the anime that is available on Netflix. There's no context, no explanation nor objective view on the subject of anime. Same on you Netflix

Do not watch it if you are already an anime fun, it is not a show aimed for you, but neither of you are not. I'm okay with the show being aimed to newbies to the genre, but that shouldn't mean you can make such an uninformed and disrespectful documentary (anime is sold as something for crazy-minded people that now had become kind of "cool"). Furthermore, its only fuction seems to be promoting Netflix original anime, I could be okay with that, but don't make it this obvious. Even some of the titles promoted are some of the worst anime that came out recently and are sold like gold, this way you won't conviene anybody. It is so embarrassing, Netflix should just delete it from its libabry.

Loved the film and editing! It's very entertaining. Didn't know much about anime before.

For someone like me who is a seasoned anime watcher, it's so refreshing to see something like this be made as it means that anime is becoming more and more widely accepted. This fits with netflix's new age doco style and is definitely worth a watch.

I think Netflix should just remove this documentary and we all should just forget it ever happened like some kind of embarrassing thing from last night.