I thought someone should mark the end of the Anim’Archive project, a collector’s effort to scan and upload their collection of anime ephemera. They kept methodically at this, on tumblr and Twitter, for six years and change—26 November 2014 to 1 January 2020—and they just announced that they’ve now covered everything they’d collected.
Laudably, they uploaded all sorts things beyond lavish colour magazine art: model sheets, voice actor interviews, adverts, and so forth. With a fair amount of text in some of their scans, their online collection might also sometimes serve as something worth checking for information, for those who can read Japanese.
I valued Anime’Archive’s posts as, so to speak, something new about something old. Such drip-drip-drip deliveries of scans from this site and others of its ilk (my links page notes a couple of others) offer little serendipitous prods to recall this or that title. They take us out of the narrow, often-fruitless hurly-burly of chat about this or that airing show, and bring in fresh air from the wide expanses of the past.
The site’s title includes ‘Archive’. Let’s hope that tumblr and its servers last (there’s a sentence you don’t hear people say every day), as I imagine not all of the material scanned necessarily exists elsewhere on the internet.
327 Robots 