Author: Jonathan Clements

November 20, 2016 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Your Name is the new animated film by director Makoto Shinkai. For some readers, the story of a Tokyo boy, a country girl, and what happens when they start to swap lives, will be their first taste of Shinkai – all Shinkai’s films are self-contained, and can be enjoyed in any order. […]

November 17, 2016 · 0 comments

By Roxy Simons. Let it not be said that Hirokazu Koreeda doesn’t know a thing or two about creating emotional family dramas. It’s a topic he has been fixated with for over 20 years and is a genre that he has proven time and time again to be the master of, and his latest project […]

November 14, 2016 · 0 comments

Helen McCarthy on Ouran High School Host Club. It’s a criminal world: J.K. Rowling has been taken to task for selectively appropriating the mythologies of America’s First Nations into her universe, and for sanitising the Government-sanctioned genocide that followed the colonisation of North America. Another foreign invader packaging an alien history for creative gain… something […]

November 8, 2016 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. It’s often reported how first-time visitors to Japan find themselves dumbfounded by the cacophony of new colours, sounds and symbols that greet them. What does the jumble of neon-lit hieroglyphs on that building mean? Why is that woman wearing traditional kimono on the metro? Why are there stone statues with little red […]

November 2, 2016 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. “You know how our world values ideas but tends to eschew writing for having little use? Just like a wise man once said, ‘I cannot see why living knowledge should be recorded by a lifeless medium such as writing – pictures are more befitting the attempt.’ But go to the human world, […]