Features 447
Amanchu!
By Andrew Osmond. Amanchu! is a portrait of female friendship; or, if you prefer, it’s one of the sub-genre of anime depicting “cute girls doing cute things.” It should be said that the first category of anime doesn’t collapse into the second, even if anime fans sometimes speak as if it does. You can like […]
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
By Jonathan Clements. Mars is under siege! Just before Halloween 2071, a terrorist bomb destroys a tanker truck on Highway One, close to a densely-populated crater city. There are casualties up to half a mile from the blast – 500 killed or injured by what appears to be a biochemical weapon. The reward for the […]
K: Missing Kings
By Meghan Ellis. You might remember K Project as the best skateboarding anime that’s not actually about skateboarding. Or for its gratuitous use of stained glass backgrounds and chromatic phenomena. But since the series and its associated projects are an exploration of how to tell a story in colour, this indulgence is something we can […]
Gundam 00
By Andrew Osmond. The first thing to stress about Gundam 00 is that newbies can most definitely start here. While it’s technically part of the venerable Gundam franchise, it’s also a “new” series, with a new world and characters. Indeed, 00 was perhaps made deliberately to draw in viewers, Japanese and foreign, who hadn’t seen […]
Books: Debating Otaku
By Jonathan Clements. Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan: Historical Perspectives and New Horizons will prove to be a vital core text in understanding the history of anime and manga fandom. This is not merely for its incisive analysis of the transformations of the word otaku over the last thirty years, but also for its detailed […]