Animation 40
Japanese Box Office in 2016
Jasper Sharp crunches the numbers. On 25th January, the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, or Eiren, released the Japanese box office figures for 2016, affording us our regular annual opportunity to cast our eyes back with an anime-centric overview of the trends and developments over the past twelve months and predict what they might […]
Kubo and the Two Strings
By Chris Perkins. Stop-motion studio Laika – based in Hillsboro, Oregon – first burst onto the scene in 2009 with Coraline. Based on the book by the legendary Neil Gaiman, and directed by The Nightmare Before Christmas’s Henry Selick, their debut had quite the pedigree. The studio really began to forge its own way after […]
Aya Suzuki: In Her Own Words
By Andrew Osmond. The guests at this year’s London Anime and Gaming Con included animator Aya Suzuki, who has worked on a remarkable list of productions. Following a four year stint on Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, she worked on Satoshi Kon’s unfinished last film The Dream Machine, Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind […]
Cowboy Bebop: The Guide…?
By Hugh David. There has never been a better time to be a media fan. Commentaries and spin-offs, blogs and podcasts can open up entire worlds of fandom, even to the hopeless couch potato. Long gone are the days when fan publications relied on obsessive collections of memorabilia, and the need to remember details a […]
Books: Animation in China
By Jonathan Clements. Although the title of Sean Macdonald’s new book is Animation in China: history, aesthetics, media, it keeps largely to an account of the group of animators and facilities that formed the nucleus of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1957. He has plainly realised that a little coverage of the pre-war Wan […]