Before going into greater detail, let’s take a look at the terminology. Anime is a Japanese word adapted to Western culture and used to describe Japanese animated movies. Manga is the word for Japanese comics on which most animes are based.
Animes have been popular in Hungary ever since the 1990s, when anime series such as “Sailor Moon” or “Pokémon” aired in the morning children’s TV programs. They started to become even more widespread in the 2000s. The Animax channel was introduced in Hungary in 2004, first under the name A+. Its airtime was from 8pm to 2am after Minimax’s screening ended. The channel stopped on 31 March this year and since then there has been no possibility for Hungarian fans to watch anime on TV.
However, this might not be such a huge problem. Much like with American TV shows, Hungarian channels only bought, translated and screened a small portion of animes. Ever since the internet has offered the possibility of watching videos online, more animes and other TV shows have reached Hungarian fans. Some of the animes are available in English but most are in the original Japanese with subtitles.
More and more animes are available with Hungarian subtitles as well. The biggest website for fans is Animeaddicts.hu. This hosts Hungarian descriptions of 8012 animes episodes, 4887 mangas and around 1500 visual and light novels, and games. The site does not have a fixed number of contributors; anyone can send in their descriptions.
AnimeAddicts also serves as a subtitle database. One can download Hungarian and various foreign-language subtitles for animes, but also the series themselves and their soundtracks. Translations are available for games, mangas, and visual and light novels as well.
As mentioned, since most animes are not available in Hungarian, subtitles are very important. Animeaddicts.hu houses 54 active translator groups and 153 individual ones. Even though some episodes and subtitles are available on the site itself, it also has a redirecting function. Inside the descriptions there are links that redirect people to other sites where they can either download it or watch it online.
There is another community relevant to this topic, the Hungarian Anime Society. It was founded in 2003 and its members are from all over the country. In their own words, their aim is to popularize anime and manga in Hungary and to abolish stereotypes surrounding them. Their further goal is to make the whole of Japanese culture better known and more popular in the country. The Anime Society also publishes and distributes mangas in Hungary. Finally, they organize animecons (conventions) as well.
There are several animecons in and outside Budapest but the biggest events for Hungarian otakus are the MondoCons. There are three each year, in spring, summer and autumn. The latest was in early October and many fans from all over Hungary visited the two-day event in Hungexpo. Róbert Puzsér, the critic, was a surprise guest and he participated in Saturday’s panel discussion. The star of the weekend was Japanese singer Haruka. Each MondoCon is organised by the staff of Mondo Magazine.
Although there are many misconceptions in Hungary about Japanese culture overall, especially anime and manga, they are continuously gaining popularity. There are many fans in Hungary calling themselves otakus and engaging not only in manga and anime but also Japanese language and art.
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