For most of the medium's history, manga and anime were not reviewed — they were consumed. Critics who might devote column inches to an American superhero film or a European literary novel had no framework, no vocabulary, and often no access to Japanese popular culture. Fan communities filled the gap, developing their own critical lexicons in basements, at conventions, and eventually across the earliest message boards of the internet. What emerged was something unusual in the history of criticism: a field built entirely from the bottom up, by enthusiasts who loved the medium more than they distrusted their own subjectivity.
The Fanzine Era: Criticism Before the Internet
The first sustained critical writing about anime and manga in the English language appeared in fanzines — self-published, photocopied or mimeographed magazines distributed by hand at science fiction conventions and through the mail. In North America, publications like Protoculture Addicts (founded in 1987 in Canada) and the American Animag and The Rose provided the first venues for serious engagement with Japanese animation.
These fanzines operated under specific constraints that shaped their critical character: VHS tapes were expensive, rare, and often available only in unsubtitled Japanese, so reviewers were frequently working from incomplete understanding. The community that formed around these limitations was deeply collaborative — people shared tapes, shared translations, and developed collective interpretive frameworks for understanding cultural contexts very different from their own. This collaborative close-reading culture persisted long into the internet age and gives manga and anime criticism a participatory quality still distinct from mainstream film criticism.
In Japan itself, critical discourse was more institutionalised but equally passionate. The manga magazine culture produced a thriving ecosystem of secondary publications — criticism of serialised manga appeared in academic journals alongside populist rankings, and the genre of manga criticism (manga-ron) developed its own bibliography, with theorists like Fusanosuke Natsume and Takayuki Tatsumi publishing work that manga artists themselves engaged with.
The Internet Revolution: Usenet, Forums, and the Rating Database
The internet transformed manga and anime criticism by doing three things simultaneously: it provided free distribution for critical writing, it created real-time community discussion, and it enabled aggregated taste data at a scale no fanzine could match. Usenet groups like rec.arts.anime, active from the early 1990s, hosted some of the earliest extended critical arguments about works like Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, and Akira. The quality of discussion varied enormously — flame wars about dub versus sub remain a genre unto themselves — but the archive of these conversations represents a genuine history of how Western audiences initially processed Japanese animation.
The launch of MyAnimeList in 2004 introduced a new model: the community-rated database. Users could rate every anime they watched on a 10-point scale, maintain a tracked watchlist, and read brief user-written reviews. The aggregated scores became reference points that shaped what new viewers watched. A series sitting at 8.5 on MAL would be recommended; one sitting at 6.0 would be skipped. This democratised critical influence — no single authoritative voice determined canon, but the collective wisdom of millions of partially informed viewers did. AniList, launched in 2011, offered a cleaner interface, richer metadata, and an open API that allowed developers to build their own analytical tools on top of the data.
The Vocabulary Problem and Its Solutions
One persistent challenge for manga and anime criticism is vocabulary: the medium developed its own terms in Japanese for concepts that don't have exact Western equivalents. Nakama (found family / comrades with deep loyalty) is not exactly "friendship." Mono no aware (the bittersweet awareness of impermanence) is not exactly "melancholy." Gap moe (attraction to the contrast between a character's expected and actual personality) resists clean translation. Critics writing in English have generally done one of three things: borrow the Japanese term directly, attempt an approximate translation, or acknowledge the gap and explain both the term and its untranslatability.
This vocabulary problem has paradoxically enriched English-language criticism of the medium: the effort to explain Japanese cultural contexts for non-Japanese readers has produced some genuinely illuminating writing. Susan Napier's Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (2000) remains the benchmark academic introduction precisely because it takes the cultural-translation challenge seriously.
The Video Essay: A New Critical Form
The dominant form of anime criticism in the 2020s is not written but audiovisual: the YouTube video essay. Channels like Canipa Effect (which focuses on production analysis, tracking specific animators and their visual contributions across series), Gigguk, and Anime Literary have built audiences of millions with criticism that combines clips, music, careful editing, and spoken analysis. The video essay format suits anime uniquely well: the medium's visual and sonic qualities can be demonstrated rather than described, and the essayistic monologue is a natural vehicle for the personal, invested perspective that anime criticism has always favoured over false objectivity.
Professional outlets have lagged but caught up. Anime News Network has maintained professional reviews and columns since 1998. The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Atlantic now routinely review major anime releases with the same seriousness they apply to prestige television. This mainstreaming has changed the critical conversation: reviews for general audiences must now explain basic context that dedicated fan critics can assume, and the two communities do not always agree on what matters.
What Good Criticism Actually Does
The best manga and anime criticism does what all good criticism does: it tells you something about the work you couldn't have noticed alone, and something about the world the work emerged from. A review of Berserk that only rates its violence misses its meditation on the cost of obsessive ambition. A reading of Sailor Moon that ignores its revolutionary representation of female friendship and power misunderstands why it resonated globally. Criticism slows down consumption and asks why, and in a medium that produces hundreds of new series every year, designed for rapid weekly consumption, that slowing-down function may be the most valuable thing criticism offers: the reminder that what you watched deserves to be thought about, not just experienced and moved past.