Features 438
Testament of Sister New Devil
By Andrew Osmond. In a memorable podcast by the BBFC from a few years ago, examiner Emily Fussell complained that anime could be deceptive. “Sometimes you are thrown complete curveballs. So you will think that you are watching a series about a bunch of schoolchildren fighting aliens… and then one of them will stick their […]
Books: The Anime Boom
By Jonathan Clements. In The Anime Boom in the United States, Michal Daliot-Bul and Nissim Otmazgin summarise several key issues in modern anime, including an overview of its entrepreneurs, the long-term influence of Japanese governmental cultural policies, and the effects of anime stylistics on contemporary American cartoons. They promise a “top-down” perspective on the business […]
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Family Values
by Jeremy Clarke. Three recent Hirokazu Kore-eda movies I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2016) finally arrive on UK BD/DVD. Most of his art-house feature work has secured a release here, much of it (including these three titles) initially in cinemas. Kore-eda has been described as one of the […]
Books: The Ninja Myth
By Jonathan Clements. I’d been sceptical for a long time, but I didn’t step out of the shadows until about ten years ago. I hesitated for a long while because I was sure I had to be missing something. Surely that many people could not all be fooled by the same fake news…? But by […]
Have a Nice Day
by Jeremy Clarke. Set in an unnamed provincial town in South China, director Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day is a bleak vision of a brutal society fuelled by naked self-interest. It’s hard to think of anything in animation or the wider world of cinema quite like it. The plot suggests a gangster film, but […]