Recently, I walked the convention floor of Anime Central, the self-proclaimed largest anime, manga, and Japanese popular culture convention in my stomping grounds of Chicago. While I typically don’t stick around for the full weekend since I’m usually there for work, I always make it a point to see what hidden gems I can find from manga and home video distributors like the incomparable Discotek Media. Even though I didn’t fetch the Nana live-action Blu-rays I’d sacrifice my firstborn child for, on the off chance they didn’t sell out (they did), I for sure rubbernecked at the equally tempting copies of Memories and Robot Carnival—two of the greatest anime anthology collections of all time. Their presence not only tempted my baller-on-a-budget ass to make next month’s rent a problem, but they also refueled my desire to see what a renaissance of the format would look like today. Before you ask, yes, Memories and Robot Carnival have me deep in my “old thing good” bag more than I’d care to admit. Hell, I’ve referenced them whenever I write about anthologies that have nothing to do with them. How could I not? To me, they’re pure forms of creation I hold in high esteem as the metric to measure any that follows. Admittedly, leaving it at “they don’t make anime the way they used to” doesn’t fully capture my longing for anime anthologies.