Tag: Andrew Osmond

February 1, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Shirobako opens… misleadingly, actually. Its first minutes show an animation high-school club where five close-knit girls are making their own anime mini-epic. Once that’s been done, they promise each other, they’ll join up again to make something else. And then… the story skips forward two and a half years. Two of the […]

January 29, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The film Blue Giant opens in UK cinemas this Wednesday. It’s a music drama about the fortunes of three teen boys in Tokyo – sax player prodigy Dai, haughty pianist Yukinori, and greenhorn drummer Tamada – trying to make it as a jazz trio. You can read more about Blue Giant’s story […]

January 17, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The film’s title card reads, “Patlabor Movie 3.” The functional name is in line with the previous Patlabor films – and at least this one has an extra tag, “Wasted XIII” – but it’s the most misleading part of the movie. Released in 2001, eight years after Patlabor 2, Wasted XIII isn’t […]

January 14, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The first Patlabor film is an excellent cerebral thriller. Patlabor 2 The Movie, though, is an artistic statement. Thirty years old, it’s still the anime that feels the most like live-action. It’s only tangentially a mecha film, with the title Patlabors on screen for a fraction of the running time. This is […]

January 10, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Great Pretender is a crime-caper series, not unlike Lupin III, but less cartoon-zany. This is a hardboiled show, with sex, drugs and real-world grit; it has bold, unreal colours without feeling lurid; and its character designs are by Evangelion legend Yoshiyuki Sadamoto.