This week in anime, Lucas and Chris dive into the long history of AMVs (anime music videos) and their evolution from the early days of the internet through to today.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Chris, I'm happy to share with you and our readers that we're writing this column on the evening of my 30th birthday! After spending the prior weekend catching up with family and friends in Las Vegas, I can't think of a better way to spend my actual birthday than by getting a bit nostalgic and taking a stroll with you through a niche of an artform that's hyper-specific to the anime community: AMVs.
With a popularity that's waxed and waned just as much as anime has over the decades, animated music videos are proof of the anime community's latent creativity and multifaceted interest in culture and broader media. I didn't even know the AMV scene was a distinct subculture within the anime community until I got to college, and have had so much fun in going down the rabbit hole of current, retired, and long lasting AMV creators in preperation for this column!
Chris
It's the right time for it, too, as we find ourselves smack in the middle of convention season! Catching showcases of AMVs in con video rooms, and even having contests for the creations, is a key component of that social nerd experience. It makes sense, sitting at the intersection of anime itself and fan creations that the community is host to. As you said, it's a distinctive art form that's undoubtedly cultivated skillsets and launched longer, dedicated editing careers for many creators, and arguably deserves its celebration in this fan space.
Anyway, after all that, this is the part where I confess that I've never really been one to "get" AMVs, myself. But we here at TWIA have never been ones to let differences in perspective dissuade us from enlightening discussion. Let's see if the delights you found digging into that rabbit hole can turn me around on these funny little movies, Lucas!
Getting you into AMVs would certainly be the best birthday gift I could ask for, and I'll do my best to be convincing!
Off the cuff, Studio Hawk's Mr. Morioh Nice Guy has long been my answer to the nerdy ice-breaker question, "What's your favorite YouTube video under 100k views! This AMV feels like it was tailor-made to delight me specifically, considering it's both a lavish tribute to one of the strongest parts of JoJo and a reminder of actor Will Smith's on-and-off-again rap career!
As someone who knew of the Fresh Prince when he was still crossing over between music and acting, I can appreciate the throwback element. Especially since I still associate AMVs with that older, "classic" era in anime fandom I came up in.
Your initial example does a good baseline job of detailing the technical elements of AMVs that can impress me (the editing including lip-synching is all very impressive) while still leaving me with a bit of a shrug, it reminds me that Diamond Is Unbreakable is cool, but no more in a way I wouldn't get from just watching the anime itself, or a slickly edited trailer.
That vibe of "Neat trailers for series the target audience already watched" has always been what hung around AMVs for me. It's enhanced by official channels getting in on the action themselves, as Toonami did with their own music videos back in the day.
I remember thinking these custom Toonami promos were cool as a kid, but as a working adult, I realize how crazy impressive they are now! You can't make an AMV like this one without being extremely familiar with both the themes and clips of those Toonami anime. This shows how much that team cared about anime. Especially with anime being more of an interchangeable product in today's media landscape, I appreciate how much Toonami did in establishing the tone and aesthetics of this community.
Toonami's approach to anime was rooted in "getting it" and making their own AMVs absolutely spoke to that! You can see how it cultivated the kind of long-term fan respect they still enjoy. Getting an anime's themes and expressing your understanding of them is an element of the AMV craft I can get at, especially in show-snapshot form. In my run-up to this column, I turned to my social media to ask people for their favorite examples of "classic" AMVs, and got some enlightening responses!
Longtime Aniskitter presence and friend of ANN, Nate Ming, for instance, dropped this one for Hajime no Ippo, a personal favorite of his. I've not seen the series beyond the first couple of episodes and couldn't hope to name the various boxing boys within. I love Orange Range as much as the next guy and can feel the scrappy tones of rising and pushing oneself present in this punch-fest. Also, shout-out to the little text credit intro and the DivX logo in the corner. Even if I never cared for or about AMVs, that's still the kinda nostalgia that can take me back to this era.
"Condenses an entire show down to the length of a music video" is a very particular slice of the AMV pie, but when it works, it works. Even with just my passing appreciation of Hajime no Ippo, I can instantly tell that this is excellent!
I saw your post and a response to it from ladybloof; and wanted to thank her for once again putting cool shit in front of me! I've never watched Princess Tutu nor listened to "Håll Om Mig" by Nanne Grönvall before watching this AMV, but Marisa Panaccio of Tidirium Studios' mashup of the two made me want to check out more of both!
I understand and respect your point earlier about AMVs more or less being fan-made advertisements, and while I
agree with you on a technical level, there's a level of enthusiasm in a lot of these that I can't help but find endearing.
I'd have been remiss if I hadn't brought up that multiple people recommended that Princess Tutu vid to me. That says something. Granted, for me, that something is "What the hell goes on in Princess Tutu?! I thought this was a show about ballet!"
If what I "got" out of the experience was more of a push to check out this always highly recommended anime, fair enough. But I do wonder what this does for established fans of the source material, apart from give them a way to enjoy and engage with it when they want to, but only have 3-4 minutes, like some hypertime upgrade of a series compilation movie.
I'm so glad you raised that point, Chris! I'll return to AMVs based on some of my favorite series when I need to get hyped up or have a craving for the particular headspace they put me in. Case and point, anime fan community titan Scott "KaiserNeko" Frerichs' recent One Piece AMVs!
When I watch these, I feel like I'm experiencing a condensed version of everything that makes the modern One Piece anime so appealing. Stylish visuals, characters with distinct looks and attitudes, and unreasonably good fight choreography all compacted into something I can watch while waiting for a pot of coffee to boil! I'd even make the argument that the more over-produced visual direction of One Piece works better as an AMV, as the quicker cuts obfuscate the excessive number of after effects on screen at any given time.
(Also, I discovered the hip hop duo Joey Valance and Brae thanks to the One Punk Tactics video. As their music single-handedly got me through the last Anime Expo I attended, that AMV will always hold a special place in my heart.)
Gear 5 Luffy certainly lends himself to bouncing along to beats in an AMV, I'll give him that.
Scott's vids there also work as a good example of the interplay between AMV creation and video editing overall. This is a guy who worked as part of TeamFourStar to cut together the famous "DBZ Abridged" parody videos, after all, so there's going to a lot of skill crossover.
This loops back to the appreciation I can have for the technical aspects of AMV creation and the more ambitious splice-togethers some people have come up with over the years. Even if the "humor" inherent to some of these mash-ups rings a bit "eh" to me at this point. Shout-out to fellow Chris 'Invalidname' Adamson for recommending this complex example to me, among many others.
I can see where you're coming from on the humor in a lot of these videos not having broad appeal. It can often be early 2010s internet meme, and that style of humor is best left in the past. However, I think that's where AMVs that drop the "music" part of that moniker come into play! Scudgreen's submissions to the latest AMV Hell are some of my favorite of the lot, with this Yuri!!! on Ice/Pride of Orange mash-up with the Spike TV show Blue Mountain State being one of my favorites.
First off, it delights me to no end that another human is on the planet besides myself who's aware of all three of those media properties! Second, it's 2025, and short-form video is king across major social media platforms. I can appreciate AMVs evolving and branching off to succeed in this newish format.
Mark me down as someone else shocked that anybody remembers Pride of Orange. I reviewed that show, and I don't know how much I could tell you about it aside from the inexplicably attempted-to-be-explicated idol song-and-dance numbers.
You also nailed the point about "funny" AMVs I was going for. A lot of these burn through their One Joke pretty quickly, and all the solid editing in the world can't alleviate the feeling of dragging by the time the second chorus kicks in.
At least that "NERVana" reference is a pretty good gag. That's why I did appreciate the "AMV Hell" format catching on back in the day, borrowing the rapid-fire channel-changing stylings that had us still thinking Robot Chicken was funny at the time, and using that quick-hit approach to get looser with what constituted an "AMV", especially for comedic purposes.
Thanks to TikTok (which I don't recommend people use, but recognize the impact it's having on digital culture), those short-form and gag-focused AMVs don't even need to drop in a compilation format to pop off on an algorithm!
Take Reinhart.amv's We Both Reached for the Gun - Trigun Edit video. It was one of the last things I watched on that platform that I remember enjoying before deleting the TikTok app, and it feels like something that could only exist on that platform due to its brief runtime and hyper-specific subject matter.
The advent of short-form video has catered to those kinds of funny, AMV-Hell-esque interstitials, as well as more concentrated bursts of character-centric appreciation editing (I believe the kids call them "FanCams"). Lord knows I have more tolerance catching something like that in my feed compared to spending time downloading a mash-up over DirectConnect that I'd watch in place of a show I couldn't afford. I do lament the bygone-ification of longer-form gags. Kids today barely have the context, let alone the attention span, to appreciate something like Lord of the Yen.
I cannot overstate how much mileage AMV editors got out of Azumanga Daioh back in the day.
Azumanga Daioh is such a cultural totem in the anime community that I forget that there was ever a time before it came out.
To hear it told, the show is STILL being used in new AMVs to this day! Let it rest, guys!
I can also sympathize with your nostalgia for older AMVs and the kinds of internet videos/posts/gags that we used to see on a more burgeoning version of the internet. Nowadays, it feels like so many people are focusing on making something that's popular or profitable, that it's hard to find stuff with a weird and personal feel to it.
The AMV and Abridged Series crossovers continue apace, I see.
Haha, I think we'd be hard pressed today to find something similar to this AMV by Martin "LittleKuriboh" Billany; who functionally invented the abridged series format with Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged. This is an AMV that's based on his version of the YGO characters singing Styx's Come Sail Away, where he sings every line; and it's so weird and specific that I can't help but love it.
Even if the humor doesn't carry them or I'm not getting the fandom-energizing appreciation for the series they're showcasing, I can appreciate older AMVs as a capsule of the times and places they're from. It's interesting to load up a recommendation I've never seen and be like, "Ah yes, I see we were post-Haruhi by this point, and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was popping off in fandom spaces."
To say nothing of how some aspects have aged interestingly in ways apart from how cultural senses of humor grow, as in this classic, my sister graciously reminded me of.
It's just very amusing to see Asuka opining about wishing she were a lesbian, now given her apparent situation with Mari in the Rebuild movies.
I understand where you're coming from, and as AMVs are fundamentally repurposings of other pieces of more established media, they have a baked-in nostalgia factor, and it makes sense that we Anime Oldheads would gravitate towards older works in the medium.
I guess the only compliment I have left to give newer AMVs is that, on a technical level, I think they're quite a bit stronger than the older AMVs they're iterating upon. Take, for instance, NinjaristicNinja's CHU CHU LOVELY | CHAINSAW MAN 137 x MAXIMUM THE HORMONE.
The amount of work that had to have gone into turning a sequence from the Chainsaw Man manga into an AMV is incredible, and I'm shocked at how great it looks all things considered!
Amazing innovations are being made in Manga Music Videos. Maybe it helps that this one's entirely canon to the source material? The rising technical prowess of these fan creations is also interesting to see as the medium comes up alongside the fandom itself. That Chainsaw Man vid is an incredible utilization of just a few manga panels. Meanwhile, I saw several mutuals disappointed a bit ago when the official music video for recent seasonal darling Kowloon Generic Romance's great OP "Summer Time Ghost" dropped and was just a glorified AMV.
The compounding difference in effort is kinda astounding.
They slotted text into the sides of the frame and did very little else with this one!
Even if I'm not the biggest Kowloon guy, I can recognize that this music video is a bummer. A lot of AMVs are graded on a curve, since they're often young fans doing editing and other aspects of production in a hobbyist capacity. This is lazy even by AMV standards, and that's sad to see from something that's supposed to be an official, professional-caliber release.
As I brought up earlier with Toonami, there is precedent for this sort of thing. For instance, the OG Bubblegum Crisis released "Music Video Specials," which worked to do what classic AMVs always did: Showcase the coolest animated parts of the show alongside some sweet tunes.
It worked well in this case, given BGC's music is some of the best in the biz. It helped to squeeze out some more sales in an always-uneven OVA release schedule. As we've detailed here, times have changed, and something like Kowloon doesn't get that sort of benefit of the doubt. Best to leave this sort of practice entirely to the fans these days.
To that point, I don't think I want or need official acknowledgement of AMVs from corporate entities or anime rights holders. A big part of what makes them appealing to me is that they're so clearly a product of the eclectic anime fan community, and not things that are principally made to make money.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for people who make AMVs to go on to work on media that they're passionate about, similar to how there's a bit of a pipeline for scanlators to become official translators. However, I'm mostly watching AMVs because they're fun and stupid on a human and personal level, and I don't think I'll ever get that itch scratched by a company.
For instance, a company would never put the work into securing the rights and allocating the resources to create an AMV of Zoro from One Piece set to Papa Roach's Last Resort, and yet there are DOZENS of videos with that premise available online right now. That's both incredibly stupid and just plain incredible.
I'm glad to see a new generation find their equivalent to those Linkin ParkDragon Ball Z videos. For my part, talking through this topic and seeing some fresh examples has reinforced my appreciation for the technical aspects of AMV assembly, as well as getting an explanation of what the enjoyers enjoy about them. Even if they're not always something I dig, it's important to appreciate that these were made by fans for funsies, didn't cost any money, and certainly didn't hurt anybody as they helped aspiring editors polish their skills. Lord knows the hellscape of anime production today could use more harmless fun.
I still don't know if I get it, but I get it, you get it?
I'm picking up what you're putting down. AMVs aren't for everyone, but they do have a little something going on, and it's clear that a lot of people find joy, entertainment, and community in them. We don't yuck people's yum here on ANN's TWIA column, and we also don't chastise people for not being into something.
Right! And the nature of this topic means I'm sure folks in the comments section will have a ton of their own AMV recommendations. What better way to bridge the generational gap than by sharing your examples of a classic? Or inflicting some absolute chaos on unsuspecting audiences, the choice is yours.
You must recreate that experience of wandering into a con viewing room at 1 a.m. and being roundhouse kicked by something somehow.
You heard the man, readers! Get in those comments and drop some AMV recommendations! With AX and the start of the summer season less than a week away, it's the busiest time of year here at ANN, and we could all use fun distractions!
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