The Anime Encyclopedia can be seen as the third part of a trilogy begun with 1996's Anime Movie Guide, written by Helen McCarthy, and continued with 1998's Erotic Anime Movie Guide (a wider-ranging book than the title suggests), co-written by McCarthy and Jonathan Clements. The earlier volumes were published by the London company Titan; the Encyclopedia is published by Berkeley's Stone Bridge Press, also responsible for Frederik L Schodt's excellent books on manga and McCarthy's guide to Hayao Miyazaki. The first two books offered increasingly in-depth overviews and analyses of anime, but the Encyclopedia goes several steps further. Far bigger than its predecessors, and exponentially more ambitious, its 500-odd close-typed pages, cover over two thousand anime titles ranging across every format and genre imaginable. Theatrical shorts like festival favorite Glassy Ocean and Miyazaki's On Your Mark rub shoulders with endless TV series Sazae-San (which, the writers note, "makes a mockey of The Simpsons' claim to be the longest-running TV show in the world"), one-off TV specials like the baseball-themed Hit And Run, video releases from Hello Kitty to Overfiend, and movies from Akira to Hakujaden (listed here under its U.S. title Panda and the Magic Serpent). In short, it's all here, or at least a sufficiently large chunk of the medium to keep any human busy for years.

The format of each entry is practical and consistent, given the space limits in such a work. The major creator credits are given (lead animators, music, directors, writers and designers), as well as company names, running times and -- if applicable -- number of episodes. Perhaps inevitably, the names of lead voice-actors are omitted; given the number of large character ensembles, they would have consumed much of the book. Rather than include extensive details of video availability, the book marks titles with asterisks to indicate a legal English-language release. This does not always mean a U.S. video exists, but in practice it usually does. The main text often contains information on this front, especially when there are multiple remakes of the same title (see below). When a franchise exists in several distinct series or formats (for example, in the many cases where a TV show spawned video and/or cinema spinoffs), the writers strive to present as much information as possible through notation. Thus "30 mins x 50 eps (TV1), 10 mins x 26 eps (TV2)" means an anime spans two TV series, one comprising fifty half-hour episodes and the other twenty-six ten minute episodes. The same notation uses (m) for movie and (v) for video. As one might imagine, this means entries for sprawling anime such as Gundam or Tenchi Muyo! resemble arcane algebraic formulae, but it works well once you're used to it. Each anime is listed under what the writers judge to be the "western title most recognisable" to readers. Sometimes it's hard to judge if they're right; how many buyers looked for Neon Genesis Evangelion before turning to Evangelion? Happily, the forty-page title index includes all variants, presented in a friendly, instantly useable format (unlike the fiddly system in Anime Movie Guide).