Category: Features
December 12, 2019 · 3 comments
Books: Otaku & Imagination
By Jonathan Clements. Patrick W. Galbraith’s Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan begins with an advert that depicts a man who is, in the words of Lawrence Eng, a “reluctant insider”, a slave of the rat-race who has an ace up his sleeve. Back in his bachelor pad, he has a virtual girlfriend […]
December 10, 2019 · 1 comment
Plastic Memories
By Andrew Osmond To shed light on Plastic Memories, it’s worth remembering a comment by Yasuhiro Yoshiura, who directed the android anime Time of Eve (and the gravity-defying Patema Inverted). “In the UK and US, robots are robots and they are completely different from human beings. There’s also a kind of Frankenstein complex where they […]
December 6, 2019 · 2 comments
100% Perfect Sunshine Girl
By Jonathan Clements. Teenage runaway Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo) is living hand-to-mouth in Tokyo, writing for a tabloid newspaper about conspiracy theories and the occult. One magical story seems to come true, when burger-bar waitress Hina (Nana Mori) is revealed to have the ability to control the weather. For a short period, in a limited space […]
November 30, 2019 · 0 comments
Books: Archiving Anime
By Jonathan Clements. Archiving Movements: Short Essays on Materials of Anime and Visual Media, edited by Minori Ishida and Kim Joon Yang, is related to a patchwork of international initiatives – an anime archiving project at Niigata University, an exhibition in Singapore, and a brief mini-conference in Stockholm. It seems to have been produced as […]
November 27, 2019 · 0 comments
Tokyo Ghoul
By Andrew Osmond. Good news, young man; your beautiful girlfriend wants to have you for dinner. It’s an old joke (especially for fans of cannibal superstar Hannibal Lecter) but it’s a fair summary of how Tokyo Ghoul opens. It’s set in what seems to be present-day Tokyo, with a big difference; the city is infested […]