Tag: Japan
September 29, 2020 · 0 comments
SAO: Alicization
By Andrew Osmond. Sword Art Online: Alicization is much more than a new SAO adventure. It’s an epic new phase of the franchise, an audacious statement that the saga is only getting bigger. In print form, the Alicization story stretched over nine books by series creator Reki Kawahara. Meanwhile, the studio A-1 Pictures announced Alicization […]
September 26, 2020 · 0 comments
Turn A Gundam
By Andrew Osmond. The shortest way to describe Turn A Gundam is as the steampunk Gundam. It doesn’t start in a space war, nor on a futuristic Earth. Rather, the setting seems to be Earth of a bygone age, around the start of the twentieth century, with airships, period costumes, and vintage planes and cars. […]
September 23, 2020 · 0 comments
Books: Spirited Away
By Jonathan Clements. The BFI Film Classics list has had a number of ups and downs in its lifespan. I remember the original releases in 1992, which attracted real heavy-hitters like Salman Rushdie writing about The Wizard of Oz, and then a series of seemingly random and often contradictory directives, as it bounced from the […]
September 20, 2020 · 0 comments
CG in Anime
By Andrew Osmond. Last year, the film magazine Little White Lies interviewed Shoji Kawamori, famed for his creative role in Macross. He was asked what future he saw for hand-drawn animation in anime. His reply was blunt. “I imagine,” Kawamori said, “that in about ten or twenty years, (hand-drawn animation) will be heading in the […]
September 17, 2020 · 0 comments
Birthday Wonderland
By Andrew Osmond. Keiichi Hara’s feature film Birthday Wonderland plays like a very traditional family fantasy, which seems to be part of its point. Given that the film tells the story of a Japanese girl travelling into a magic world, it inevitably raises thoughts of Spirited Away – which was, among other things, a plea […]