Largest Japanese Anime Database “Anime Taizen” Opens to the Public Today
crunchyroll.com> "Anime Taizen" Opens to The Public Today, Basic information on about 15,000 registered anime works is covered.
In comparison, according to [1] MyAnimeList has 17′868 entries.
Wikipedia states that "As of 2008, the site claimed to have 4.4 million anime and 775,000 manga entries" - this has to be an error.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-animes-are-in-the-world [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyAnimeList
It should be noted that MyAnimeList--as many sites do--splits an anime up into its separate seasons, specials, and sometimes individual cours.
Which means, for example, Attack on Titan/Shingeki no Kyojin doesn't count as only one entry. It counts as at least 6 entries based on seasons/cours alone, and more if you count OVAs, specials, and recap movies.
MAL Search Result for Attack on Titan/Shingeki no Kyojin: https://myanimelist.net/anime.php?cat=anime&q=attack%20on%20...
> cours
I know weebs go nuts for for "just according to keikaku" *keikaku means plan but this one is just baffling to me.
Why use a loan word that itself is a loan word that just comes back to season?
Because Shirobako was popular.
Well, or rather, consider the following (Ascention of a Bookworm S3): a 26 episode series airs in fall and winter, making it a two-cour anime; it's not a two-seaon anime because it's actually the third linearally related show.
We could call it the second sequel instead of the third season, but this doesn't seem to happen.
> Because Shirobako was popular.
It's been widely used long before Shirobako. But otherwise yeah. It's the subdivision of a season of a show (group of episodes produced together) that fits within a season of television (around 12 weeks). The options in English are too clunky or not specific enough for the context in which people say "cours".
I always get a kick of hearing people hesitate when deciding whether to pronounce it French-like, English-like, or Japanese-like.
The Japanese word comes from French, FWIW. It's also not specific to Anime. It's a term commonly used in the Japanese TV industry. It's kind of fascinating that "cours" is the more seasonal term (as it refers to a period of time matching seasons), and that none of the original terms (クール and 期) are literally related to seasons (as opposed to English where season is used for periods that nowadays have nothing to do with seasons).
“cour” in anime can be distinct from “season” because it sometimes refers specifically to a 13-episode run which airs weekly over the spring/summer/fall/winter, even if two or more cours get logically grouped into a single “season” according to the episode titles.
It wasn't part of some nefarious linguistic plot on my part, it was just a mistake I made out of habit since it's a commonly used word within the context of the thread.
I think that "Entries" is not talking about "Works", but rather "Relations", i.e. each episode director, soundtrack artist, animator, etc would be a "relation" to a work.
> "Since 2015, The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) has been promoting the "Anime NEXT_100" project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japanese animation. As a major initiative of the project, this database was first released on a trial basis on October 22, 2021, and after confirming functionality and operation, and making improvements and updates, it has now been released to the public."
For all their "improvements and updates" Anime Taizen doesn't seem to be holding up very well against the traffic.
I was curious about the 100 year claim. It's likely anime existed much longer but Namakura Gatana is often considered the oldest surviving Japanese animation and it's on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jybHrUxO78g)
I would trace the history of animation in Japan further back. I believe its roots are in a form of street performance art called "kamishibai".
> Kamishibai (紙芝居, "paper play") is a form of Japanese street theater and storytelling that was popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the post-war period in Japan until the advent of television.
> Kamishibai were performed by a kamishibaiya ("kamishibai narrator") who travelled to street corners with sets of illustrated boards that they placed in a miniature stage-like device and narrated the story by changing each image.
The oldest surviving clip of Japanese animation from 1917 (which was delightful by the way, thanks for posting the link) - I think we can recognize that there's already a visual language established, the way the characters are drawn. It's crude, but there's surprising sophistication, which seems to imply a historical context of trial and error over generations.
> Kamishibai has its earliest origins in Japanese Buddhist temples, where Buddhist monks from the 8th century onward used emakimono ("picture scrolls") as pictorial aids for recounting their history of the monasteries, an early combination of picture and text to convey a story.
anidb[0] is definitely larger, while not for profit.
Yeah, a quick skim of the anime list comes up above 75,000 entries (2,500+ pages of 30 results).
anidb is a (truly wonderful) monster.
From main page under "AniDB Statistics":
> 13898 Anime
The new site does seem to have more entries, but I haven't checked what the differences are exactly (e.g. are some things counted in one but not in other). For example the table shows 36 movies from 1910s, in AniDB there is only 26 (search with start time between 1.1.1910 and 1.1.1920, the only entries are movies).
Huh. Maybe they have a row for each translated name too? 5x more due to that wouldn't be crazy.
Likely. Do you have "hide synonyms" on or off? With it on I saw 2301 pages of results (last item being #69055), with it off the number I found 12479 entries. Not sure what that ~1400 difference compared to stats is though.
That's the porn. There's a separate option to show/hide 18+ shows.
There's something not obvious because it requires login... it has entries for several files for each episode.
The files are fansubs/rips/etc. Each file has hashes and information about container and the streams in it (codec, resolution, bitrate for video, also the language for audio and subs). Also whether the ep is censored if applicable, whether it's a dvdrip/bdrip/streamrip... a ton of information.
Their statistics in homepage doesn’t claim they are bigger than Anime Taizen. They said they only have 13898 animes (title?). And then they mentioned that it is not only for Japan anime but China and Korea as well.
The information available for each series seemed rather sparse for the few series I checked.
anidb.net and cal.syoboi.jp seemed more complete with cross references.
"We have over 404 pages but not the one you're looking for"
15k sounds like a lot, but I bet it's just the tip of the iceberg.
That's over 9000 anime.
Doesn't list Shitcom. Literally unusable.