Tag: animation

June 23, 2017 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. Belladonna of Sadness, the last film from Osamu Tezuka’s groundbreaking studio Mushi Pro, crashed and burned soon after the studio itself. It failed at the Japanese box office, and made little impression on the world outside Japan. French film journal Les Cahiers du Cinema recently hailed it as “the hidden treasure of […]

June 2, 2017 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Mai Mai Miracle may be set in 1955, but it’s about the endless now of childhood: summer days that last forever, liminal worlds of the imagination. For the kids in the film, a wheat field is the sea; all caves hide monsters; fish are magic and the coolest friends are the ones in your head. Nine-year-old […]

May 30, 2017 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The stop-motion My Life as a Courgette is not an anime film, but has one of the chief fascinations of an anime like A Silent Voice. It tells a story in animation that you couldn’t imagine coming from one of the big Hollywood studios. Also like Silent Voice, the story acknowledges the […]

April 18, 2017 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Earlier this month, there was a snippet of news in the film press about the Oscars. At first glance, it seems a technicality, but it could be serious, very serious, for any fan of animation beyond Hollywood. It’s about the way the nominees for Best Animated Feature Film are chosen – the […]

April 9, 2017 · 1 comment

By Jasper Sharp. At the end of February, the National Film Center of Tokyo opened its ‘Japanese Animated Film Classics’ online archive to celebrate this year’s centenary of Japanese animation. The site, which features 64 films from the pre-war and wartime period, features many films with English subtitles. It is a wonderful initiative from the […]