Author: Jonathan Clements

July 22, 2023 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. In the spring before her first year of high school, the shy Yuna feels lost when her best friend moves away. However, it isn’t long before she’s thrown into the company of Akari, a spritely girl who has moved into the same apartment building. To begin with, the two couldn’t be more […]

July 19, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. In 2008, The New Yorker ran an epic article on Hayao Miyazaki to accompany the release of Howl’s Moving Castle. Beautifully written by Margaret Talbot, it was a celebration of the director. But one criticism in it was telling, made by Ghibli’s other legendary director. “With Miyazaki, you have to totally believe […]

July 16, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Noriko Takaya, the leading lady in Gainax’s Gunbuster, gets her first unwelcome taste of battle in the episode “First Love, First Sortie.” But as the title implies, she also finds something else, in the form of her brief encounter with the handsome American pilot Smith Toren.

July 13, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the future director of Arriety, When Marnie Was There and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, was in at anime’s deep end. It was 2000, and the 26-year-old was Ghibli’s baby, the studio’s youngest key animator. He’d joined Ghibli four years before, dropping out of a commercial drawing and advertising class […]

July 10, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. This summer sees the resurgence of Studio Ghibli, as Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live? opens in Japanese cinemas on 14th July. Ghibli articles, understandably, tend to be laudatory verging on hagiographies, running through the studio’s great moments of whimsy and poetry. But one part of Ghibli’s history gets pundits’ lips curling […]