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Andy West's Animé

Catalog

For tapes, animé entries are subtitled unless otherwise noted. Animé on DVD usually come both dubbed and subtitled.

Videotape – Fansub

Videotape – Commercial

DVDs

Notes

• (ns) = no subtitles., (d) = dubbed tape.
• The DVD section has grown since 2005, as I work to convert my animé collection from tape to DVD. As of February 2007 all my favorites (VGAi, KOR both TV series and movies, Weathering Continent, Lain and the Miyazaki films) are on DVD. There are some I can't change over because they are not available (OZ) or no longer so (Spirit of Wonder). Others I just won't bother because they are pretty awful (Miyuki-chan, Golgo 13).
• Aquarian Productions ceased to exist as of the summer of 1999 because the majority of its fansubs have been licensed by commercial companies (mostly AnimEigo, ADV Films, and Manga Entertainment). The link to its extinct Web site has been removed.
• U.S. Renditions, a venerable early source of animé, went dormant after 1993 and no longer has a Web site.
• Geneon was Pioneer Entertainment (No Need for Tenchi, Lain) until late 2003 after a buyout of the parent company in Japan.
• Many of the tapes from AnimEigo, a venerable source of good animé, have been bought in 2005-7 before they disappeared from AnimEigo's list of available animé due to license expiration.
• Buena Vista, better known as Disney, is not provided with a Web link. It gets no link partly because it is not an animé producer, even though it tried its hand at making one (Atlantis: The Lost Empire) and is currently the U.S. distributer of Studio Ghibli films. Also, a lot of otaku are still angry at Disney over how it handled its 1994 film The Lion King, which is a little too much like Osamu Tezuka's Jungle Taitei (Kimba the White Lion). For those of you who are not aware of the controversy, I describe a popular otaku T-shirt with The Lion King's Simba looking into a mirror to see Kimba in the reflection and asking Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who created me after all?
• Imaginasian, formed in 2004, is not so much an animé distribution company as an Asian-American equivalent to the Black Entertainment Network or to Univision. Aminé forms part of its entertainment mix.
• Mainstream Hollywood studios (20^th Century-Fox, Columbia-TriStar) are not primarily animé distributors, and for that reason are not provided with Web links.
• Tapes with no source given are from the tape collection of my sister Vickie West, who at one time was an avid animé collector. She has picked up a lot of unusual animé over the years, some of which I have added to my modest collection.
• Rumik World: The Laughing Target was available when I ordered the other Rumik World tapes. This animé, however, is universally regarded as awful, so I felt it best to keep it out of my collection.
• Lupin III: The Miyazaki Episodes are the two episodes from the Lupin series produced by Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki's outfit. The episodes are Albatross: The Wings of Death and Adieu, Mon Cher Lupin.
• At one time entries that were ordered but not yet arrived were marked in beige. Also, I marked in grey fansubs that were kept either due to the presence of an otherwise unavailable fansub on the same cassette, or because the commercial version has flaws severe enough to justify holding on to the fansub. These practices have now been discontinued.
• Animated Classics of Japanese Literature is a packaging of nine tales: Botchan, The Dancing Girl, A Ghost Story, Growing Up, The Harp of Burma, The Izu Dancer, Season of the Sun, The Sound of Waves and Student Days

Legends

The genre and format codes are based on the fondly-remembered Anime Pocket Guide by Alan Takahashi. The tape quality codes were borrowed some time ago from the Ball State Japanese Animation Society and somewhat modified.