Category: All Posts

June 22, 2023 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. What is nationality? That is the question at the heart of Go (2001), Isao Yukisada’s award-winning film adapted from Kazuki Kaneshiro’s 2000 novel of the same name. The movie explores the endlessly complex subject of nationality and ethnic belonging, via a coming-of-age story sprinkled with romance. A critical and box office success […]

June 19, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. In the film The Tunnel to Summer, The Exit of Goodbyes (which has just won a prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival), a modern Japanese boy and girl are caught up in a new version of one of Japan’s oldest stories. It’s a kind of time travel story; it also […]

June 16, 2023 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. “I have loved novels, films and animation since I was a child,” says scriptwriter Reiko Yoshida, “and I was hugely interested in the world of stories. But it was not until I graduated from university when I thought I would make a career out of it.” However, she wasted no time after […]

June 13, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andew Osmond. Anime’s first ever star was an A.I. character, Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. While the series stressed the boy bot’s Kryptonian-level powers – 100,000 horsepower, in Tezuka’s phrase – the anime also made clear his mind, his personality, compassion and principles are entirely artificial. Like most A.I. characters in anime, Astro Boy is […]

June 11, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. They meet one evening on a bridge in Kyoto, like those two samurai heroes of old, Yoshitsune and Benkei, but it has been 200 years since those legendary figures fought in the war commemorated in the Tale of the Heike. Now, in the 14th century, Kyoto is a gutted, ramshackle ruin, worn […]