The official Twitter account for the anime adaptation of Natsumi Eguchi‘s Hozuki no Reitetsu manga announced on Saturday that the anime is getting a second season that will premiere in October, and revealed a visual for the new season. An event held in Tokyo on Saturday originally revealed the news.

The official website for the anime had teased in December that the event would reveal the third work in the new anime project. The event itself was the second part of the project.

The first part of project is an original animation DVD (OAD, visual pictured at right) that will ship with a limited edition of the manga’s 24th volume on March 23. The event on Saturday screened the new anime. Hiro Kaburagi, who directed the previous television anime series, returned as chief director for the OAD. Midori Gotou also returned to write the script. Studio DEEN animated the OAD (Wit Studio animated the television anime and previous three OADs).

The manga inspired a 13-episode television anime series that premiered in January 2014. Crunchyroll streamed the anime as it aired, and Sentai Filmworks released the series on home video in February 2015 under the title Hozuki’s Coolheadedness. The manga also inspired three previous OADs that shipped with the 17th, 18th, and 19th volumes of the manga in 2015. Advance screenings of the three OADs were held in theaters in Japan in December 2014.

The dark comedy manga revolves around H?zuki, the fierce aide to the Great King Enma. Calm and super-sadistic, he tries to resolve problems that often occur in Hell.

Eguchi launched the manga in Kodansha‘s Morning magazine in 2011. Monaka Shiba launched a four-panel spinoff series titled Hozuki no Reitetsu ~Shiro no Ashiato~ (Hozuki’s Coolheadedness: Shiro’s Footprints) in Kodansha‘s Nakayoshi magazine in December 2015.

A stage panel at the “Dengeki Game Festival 2017 & Dengeki Bunko Spring Festival 2017 & Dengeki Comic Festival 2017” event in Tokyo revealed on Sunday that Katsuwo‘s Mitsuboshi Colors manga is getting an anime adaptation. The event didn’t specify the format of the anime. The anime’s staff have opened a website and launched a Twitter account for the project.

Tomoyuki Kawamura (AntiMagic Academy “The 35th Test Platoon”, Good Luck Girl!) is directing the anime at the studio SILVER LINK. Shogo Yasukawa (Hyperdimension Neptunia, Alderamin on the Sky) is handling the series composition, and Takumi Yokota (Pupip?!) is the character designer.

The anime will star Y?ki Takada as Yui, Marika K?no as Sacchan, and Natsumi Hioka as Kotoha.

Katsuwo launched the manga in Kadokawa’s Monthly Comic Dengeki Daioh magazine in 2014, and Kadokawa published the manga’s third compiled volume on October 27.

The manga takes place in a certain corner of a certain park in a certain Ueno area of Tokyo. In this corner exists the secret base of the “justice organization” called “Colors.” A group of three elementary school girls lead Colors, and the members of the group roam the park day and night (actually just until evening) to protect the peace of the park.

Recently, there was an online poll in Japan that asked folks which anime featured characters that all looked too similar.

According to Goo Research (via Excite News), over five thousand votes were cast. Here are the top ten choices of anime with a spitting-image cast:

10. Sword Art Online – 119 votes

9. Clannad – 124 votes

8. Love Live! – 139 votes

7. Attack on Titan – 187 votes

6. Sazae-san – 279 votes

5. Touch – 378 votes

4. Captain Tsubasa – 381 votes

3. YuruYuri – 403 votes

2. Mr. Osomatsu – 542 votes

1. K-On! – 564 votes

The reason many of these characters look the same (save for their hairdos and hair color) is because certain studios like Kyoto Animation have house styles.

Sometimes, there are different reasons for the similarities. Mr. Osomatsu, for example, isn’t only a gag animation, (and the similarity is part of the gag!), but these characters are sextuplets.

Back in 2013, Hayao Miyazaki retired from feature filmmaking, saying, “This time is for real.” Now, his long time producer says Miyazaki is coming out of retirement for another full-length movie.

Even though he had retired from features, Miyazaki continued to come into Studio Ghibli and work. After initially stepping away from directing features, Miyazaki began learning how to animate on a computer and was working on a CG short called Kemushi no Boro. As Kotaku previously reported last fall, Miyazaki wanted to make a new feature film.

Miyazaki pitched Suzuki the idea, but there was no official decision on whether or not the movie would be made. Nothing was official.

During an a pre-Oscars interview with Toshio Suzuki for The Red Turtle, the producer apparently confirmed that, yes, Miyazaki is now working on a new feature film.

According to the published Kyodo report, Suzuki said that Miyazaki has come out of retirement and was currently doing prep work. “Right now in Tokyo, he’s putting all his effort into making it [the feature].” Suzuki is producing the picture.

As reported previously, the idea was to have the film out before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Last December, we first got a look at upcoming Pokémon The Movie: I Choose You! The teaser made it seem like the flick was a reboot. The latest trailer confirms it, showing how Ash and Pikachu teamed up.

Their relationship doesn’t start out so great, but Pikachu eventually warms to Ash. (That is, even after the kid tied him up! But hey, he did say, “I like you.” Heh.)

If you’ve seen the anime’s first episode, you should know the story, but for a new generation of kids, which these annual movies are primarily aimed it, this origin yarn might be new.

Pokémon The Movie: I Choose You! will hit Japanese theaters this July.

If the point was to find actors who looked like the anime characters, then I guess the filmmakers did that!

Via Twitter user Nanazawa, here are how the real-life actors stack up to their anime counterparts.

The Gintama movie opens this July in Japan.

The original Ghost in the Shell voice actors will be once again reprising their roles in the upcoming Hollywood film’s Japanese language dub.

According to Natalie, Akio Otsuka will be voicing Batou as did in the 1995 Ghost in the Shell anime feature, its 2004 sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and Stand Alone complex. (Otsuka has also been the Japanese voice of Metal Gear’s Snake.)

Likewise, Koichi Yamadera will be returning as the voice of Togusa, while Atsuko Tanaka will voice Scarlett Johansson’s character.

Tanaka, of course, voiced Motoko Kusanagi in the 1995 anime feature as well as through Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Since Johansson’s character is apparently named “Mira,” Tanaka’s performance might cause confusion? Maybe not.

“It’s been a while since they’ve played these characters,” says Mamoru Oshii, director of the 1995 anime film. “I definitely want them to deliver performances they see fit. They’re all pros, so there’s nothing to worry about, and I can only say that this is something to look forward to.”

Movies get both dubbed and subtitled releases in Japan. But in the past few years, Japanese moviegoers have been increasingly complaining about the folks movie studios have brought in for dubs. Instead of hiring proper voice actors and actresses, distributors have brought in whichever celebrity is currently popular.

Because of this, the Japanese dub releases of some movies have suffered (The Avengers, for example), which is explains why Oshii says there is nothing to worry about and mentions how Otsuka, Yamadera, and Tanaka are all pros. That they are.

Recently, a game called Necrobarista caught my eye. It’s about a cafe the dead return to for one last cup of coffee, and it’s got an art style that screams Persona. That’s no coincidence. Necrobarista’s developers told me the game arose from their “love-hate relationship” with anime and visual novels.

“Back in the ‘90s, you had a bunch of very experimental shows,” lead developer Kevin Chen told me during an interview at GDC. “I’m not saying there aren’t any right now, but the industry at the time was still trying to find its place. That has slowed down in the past five years. Big companies have said, ‘OK, this is the best way to generate good, steady revenue.’ That’s led to a stagnation, I feel. Hayao Miyazaki commented on this. He talked about how it’s become a very circular, almost inbred kind of industry.”

“We’re big anime nerds, but we have this kind of love-hate relationship with anime,” he added. “We love stuff from the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Cowboy Bebob, FLCL, Gurren Lagann. We wanted to do something that was different—both a throwback to old stuff we love, but also with its own direction.”

Necrobarista is, at its core, a narrative game that owes a lot to anime and Japanese visual novels. Its main story takes place over the course of one night, beginning with a bit I got to play where three main characters bicker over the power in the cafe going out. Unlike many visual novels, however, the game is fully 3D, allowing for a dynamic camera, animated characters, and a general sense of style you don’t usually get from this sort of game. The scene I played was brief, but it was full of clever dialogue and intrigue.

It goes deeper than technical bells and whistles, though. The Necrobarista team wants to tell stories that are human first and foremost, with the fantastical element as more of a conduit for interesting, authentic moments.

“There are lots of series about power fantasies or fan service [in anime],” said Chen. “Those can be done well and executed well, but they’ve become over-saturated.”

“Our cast has a very diverse age range,” he continued. “Ashley’s a little girl in primary school. Mattie, our main character, is 23. We have other characters who are quite old, and others who are quite young. This is a setting that helps facilitate that. You get a lot of stuff you wouldn’t normally see in anime. We wanted to tell very human stories about real people in semi-fantastical backdrop.”

Oh, and about that setting: while Necrobarista is heavily inspired by Japanese media, it’s set in Melbourne, Australia, where the game’s development team is based. It might seem odd to set a game like this there, but Chen and co want the game to be rooted in a sense of time and place, ala Japanese games like Persona and Western games like Kentucky Route Zero.

“From the architecture to the way people dress and talk, even to the food they serve in the cafe—all of that is important,” said Chen. “When you play Kentucky Route Zero, you really feel like the creators of the game knew that region. You get narrative segments where you, like, walk into a fishing shop, and they talk about a little aquarium with a dead fish inside. There’s so much detail. That’s the kind of stuff we want to put into our game.”

The Necrobarista team is drawing on a pretty wide range of influences, but there’s no denying the promise of what they’ve put together so far. They hope that, when the game comes out later this year, it’ll strike a cord.

“I won’t be so presumptive to say that we’ll change [anime and visual novels], but as fans, we want to create content for other fans who want something different,” said Chen. “And we think there are anime fans out there with this same love-hate relationship.”