Category: Features

December 17, 2023 · 2 comments

Jonathan Clements on some of the battles behind The Wings of Honneamise. Nobody knows who it was who walked into a Tokyo coffee shop, one summer day in 1984, and ordered a mix of Assam and Darjeeling, known in Japan as a Royal Milk Tea. But there was a cluster of earnest young men at […]

December 14, 2023 · 0 comments

By Zoe Crombie. Kaiji Ito has fallen so far on hard times that he is reduced to stealing the logos off cars and slashing tyres. Japan is in the middle of a recession, and there are no opportunities for a new arrival in Tokyo… until he is made an offer he can’t refuse, about a […]

December 11, 2023 · 0 comments

By Hugh David. Tatsumi is a self-acknowledged country bumpkin who is nonetheless a well-trained fighter. He and two companions leave their remote village to head to the Imperial City to find a way to relieve their friends and family from ruinous taxation imposed by the authorities. Yet the Imperial City is filled with unimaginable amounts […]

December 9, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Kids on the Slope was the first collaboration between director Shinichiro Watanabe and composer Yoko Kanno following the iconic Cowboy Bebop. The new anime proved to be an enormously entertaining teen love-triangle drama, with a great central trio and some of the best music set-pieces ever created in anime.

December 7, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Anime is often compared to live-action cinema. If so, Flowers of Evil is the cultish indy film, whose moody images sing with the torments of alienated schoolkids. It has dollops of black comedy, moments of painful lyricism, and a real human sympathy under the cruelty. Few other anime feel so likea live-action […]