Features 566
Martian Successor Nadesico
By Andrew Osmond. Martian Successor Nadesico is an epic space opera, running 26 parts and the better part of ten hours. It’s also a farcical comedy, targeted knowingly at fans of epic space opera. Its trick – which defies physics in ways to give any Scot spaceship engineer conniptions – is to continually have its […]
Manga: My Brother’s Husband
By Andrew Osmond. The manga My Brother’s Husband is a family drama, like some of the best-known Japanese films. Like Tokyo Story, it centres on an absence, a family member who’s died, and on characters bonding round the missing person. Like many Kore-eda films (and Hosoda’s The Wolf Children), it’s about an alternative family, not […]
Maquia
By Jonathan Clements. Maquia weaves at her loom; she dyes the Hibiol cloth; she hangs the sheets to dry in the tall halls of her people, the elfin Iolf race. She’s not as assertive or brave as Leilia, the girl she idolises, but that probably explains why Leilia, not her, has attracted the attention of […]
Silver Spoon
By Meghan Ellis. Do you lie awake at night worrying about the ethics of agricultural practices in the 21st Century? If that doesn’t sound like you, watch Silver Spoon, a slice-of-life anime based on the manga by Hiromu Arakawa of Fullmetal Alchemist fame. Set in rural Hokkaido at Oezo Agricultural High School, you’d be hard […]
Manga at the British Museum
By Andrew Osmond. The case against putting a Manga exhibition in the British Museum was made in three papers – The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times – on the morning I visited it. Actually, one argument was effectively made before the exhibition was announced. In 2017, the Independent newspaper ranted against the British Museum […]