Category: Features

September 9, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. It is difficult to overstate the impact of the author Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) on Japanese literature, and anime. He was still in his thirties when he died, a largely unknown poet living in provincial obscurity, and only really read outside local newspapers after the publication of a Complete Works a decade later. […]

September 6, 2019 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond One of the century’s great philosophers sang that everything you know is wrong, black is white, up is down and short is long. Patema Inverted, by director Yasuhiro Yoshiura, confines itself to Weird Al’s middle axiom, that up is down. The heroine Patema begins in an underground world, falling ‘down’ a chasm […]

September 3, 2019 · 1 comment

By Jasper Sharp. It is a ballsy act for a company to put out a four-film box set of titles made almost half a century ago that have never had any form of home video release outside Japan, all made by a director whose name is unknown outside the rarefied circles of Japanese film specialism. […]

August 30, 2019 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli’s Monster Princess functions as a 20th anniversary collection on one the most important anime of the late 20th century… but “important” to whom? Twenty years ago, Hayao Miyazaki’s film became an anime blockbuster, at least in Japan. In America and Britain, it had extremely limited cinema releases […]

August 27, 2019 · 3 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “Senpai” adores the Dark-Haired Girl hopelessly. She has no idea. So he follows her around, for a whole year, hoping she will notice him. He tells you his story, but she also tells you hers, as they are slowly brought together in a magical city that once spent a thousand years as […]