- Genocide in the first degree: J-novelist Project Itoh's Harmony and Genocidal Organ are apparently getting animated feature-film adaptations to be released in 2015. The books are among the finest SF from Japan in a long time and deal with the horrors of an over-medicalized world; the author himself died of cancer at the age of 34. Given the pedigree of the source material, stick this at the top of your list of things to wait for with bated breath.
- Middle east meets far east: Anime is now making inroads in Lebanon. There's precious little at all in English about anime in the Middle East, so this makes for intriguing reading.
- Robotics notes: "Japanese government study on robot anime now available in English." Title says it all, I say, but an English translation is available.
- Aa! Is This Finally Over After 40+ Volumes?: Ah! My Goddess manga is finally drawing to a close. The running gag is that the series will conclude with the characters finally sharing a chaste kiss, but didn't they do that once back in Volume 1 anyway? (And then hastily backtracked from that, it seems.)
- If you're going to steal, steal big: Did Frozen cop from another anime the way Lion King copped from Tezuka? My vote is "not really"; it looks like the two have at most a few vague character design concepts in common. (Disclaimer: I have yet to see either Frozen or Saint Seiya.)