Next Club Meeting:August 15, 2026,at the Fountaindale Public Library in Bolingbrook from 11:00 am - 5:00 pm
The Animatrix Network is an anime & manga fan club located in the Southwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. We usually meet on the third Saturday of each month (except when holidays or conventions coincide). The meetings are free and open to the public. Join us for a day filled with anime.
This site provides news, reviews, commentaries, and previews of the world of anime and everything it inspires in today's pop culture, such as live-action films, comics, music, art, and other weird things to enjoy and contemplate.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
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One Summer of Girlhood
San and Mayu attend an all-girls school on a warm and tranquil island. When war reaches their shores, they are ordered to help nurse the wounded in a military hospital hidden away in a cave. Amidst escalating death and brutality, the friends struggle to find solace in their fragile lives.
Based on the manga by Machiko Kyo, cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood is the debut feature from Yukimitsu Ina and animation studio SASAYURI, founded by former Studio Ghibli animator Hitomi Tateno. The project brings together legendary veteran animators like Akihiko Yamashita and Shinji Otsuka, known for their work on PRINCESS MONONOKE and THE BOY AND THE HERON, with a new, young generation of animating talent. Featuring a stirring score from kensuke ushio (A Silent Voice, Chainsaw Man), the film is a devastating yet beautiful plea for peace.
The story follows an orphaned girl named Riko, who finds and befriends a part-robot boy named Reg, and descends with him into the titular "Abyss" that leads deep into the Earth, in hopes of exploring it and finding her mother.
Check out the Special Look Trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, the next ensemble Avengers film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, distributed by Marvel Studios. Get a new look at the impending doom in Avengers: Doomsday in theaters on December 18.
In this 19th century, supernatural comedy, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America's greatest fur trapper when he loses his whole operation in a fire and is stranded in the wilderness. Now facing starvation, he must survive in a surreal winter landscape surrounded by Hundreds of Beavers - all played by actors in full-sized beaver costumes. Using nothing but his dim wits, he develops increasingly complex traps to battle the beavers and win the hand of a mischievous lover.
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Anime fans, we need to talk because some seriously unexpected new and returning anime have just been announced. In this Anime Dungeon countdown, we're looking at 10 upcoming anime for 2026, including highly anticipated sequels, major franchise returns, new anime adaptations, anime release dates, studios, genres, and where to watch.
From mystery and supernatural anime to fantasy, isekai, sports, martial arts, action, time travel, VRMMORPG and legendary shonen franchises, this list covers some of the biggest anime coming in Fall 2026.
Original TV Anime Series by Akiko Nogi and Takashi Katagiri
Premieres in Spring 2027!
Director Takashi Katagiri who attracted attention with the theatrical release of SPY×FAMILY CODE: White has teamed up with Akiko Nogi, screenwriter of numerous hit titles such as Unnatural, MIU404, and The LAST MILE, to produce the original TV anime LONA.
Posuka Demizu, the acclaimed manga artist and illustrator famous for The Promised Neverland, will be in charge of the original character designs. A star-studded team of top creators from across various media has assembled for the project, including Hiroko Sebu, who has composed music for countless films. Animation production will be handled by WIT STUDIO, the studio behind Attack on Titan and SPY×FAMILY. Kazuki Yamanaka, known for his work on SPY×FAMILY and Bubble, will serve as the animation producer. WIT STUDIO will take the helm as production committee, overseeing both the planning and production of the anime.
A neuroscience adventure series depicting researchers confronting their world by connecting with the unresolved emotions left behind by the deceased.
A broken world in the not-so distant future.
Humanity is facing a new incident.
"We’re being attacked by humans who should be dead."
The government has decided to request a specialized organization to deal with this situation. The Laboratory of Optics and Neural Analysis, commonly known as "LONA."
Researcher Ao and her apprentice Sango will try to get to the bottom of the mystery by analyzing the brains of the dead.
What do people think of, and what do they leave behind before they die? Countless memories engraved in the neural circuits. What did they see in those deep depths?
Lara, a mermaid princess who is beloved by her father, the Sea King, and her sisters, enters into a forbidden love with a human prince and aspires to live with him on land. She drinks a potion created by Grace to become a human and lives with the prince, while being warned the potion expires if she fails to experience true love. However, the prince rejects Lara after learning she is a mermaid, and she vanishes into foam due to the potion's effects and discovers her kingdom has collapsed. Lara is resurrected in Lake Biwa two hundred years later under a trial set by Grace, and she sets out to find true love again and rescue her kingdom.
When Mamoru Oshii was offered the opportunity to adapt Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in the Shell". At first, the assignment held little appeal. A cyberpunk police thriller seemed an unlikely vehicle for his interests. But as Oshii immersed himself in Shirow's premise, he recognized something more compelling beneath its genre framework: an opportunity to examine how the rapid expansion of digital networks and information technologies was beginning to reshape the boundaries of human consciousness and identity.
As Oshii and screenwriter Kazunori Itō developed the adaptation, they quickly concluded that Shirow's irreverent sensibility was fundamentally at odds with the film they envisioned. The original 1989 manga balanced its philosophical ideas with manic comedy, punctuating tense action with slapstick, fourth-wall jokes, exaggerated chibi caricatures, and the playful antics of the Fuchikoma spider tanks. Nearly all of these elements were removed.
The most profound transformation was reserved for Major Motoko Kusanagi herself. Shirow's heroine is impulsive, outspoken, and often disarmingly playful; Oshii and Itō reconceived her as a figure defined by stillness, introspection, and profound existential isolation. Her emotional reserve became an extension of the film's central inquiry into the uneasy relationship between body, mind, and machine. Oshii reinforced this conception through the animation itself, instructing his artists to minimize Kusanagi's blinking, lending her an almost uncanny stillness that subtly underscores her distance from ordinary biological life. Oshii transforms what might have remained a conventional science-fiction thriller into something far more reflective: a meditation on memory, mortality, and the increasingly fragile distinction between the human soul and the digital systems that surround and ultimately redefine it.
