Category: Features
June 25, 2019 · 1 comment
Books: Women’s Manga etc…
By Jonathan Clements. Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities seems at first glance like a grab-bag of buzzwords assembled to attract the attention of search engines rather than humans. The introduction by Fusami Ogi gives up on defining what manga actually means, and her colleague Kazumi Nagaike announces that “…the […]
June 16, 2019 · 0 comments
Mirai
By Andrew Osmond. Mamoru Hosoda’s Oscar-nominated film Mirai is a time-travel fantasy that might look like Hosoda’s own journey into his past. After all, his breakout film was another time-travel yarn. But whereas 2006’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time featured a familiar kind of anime protagonist – a mishap-prone schoolgirl with some confused feelings […]
June 13, 2019 · 0 comments
Natsuzora
By Jonathan Clements. Natsu Okuhara is an orphan girl raised on a dairy farm in the Hokkaido countryside. She overcomes loneliness and adversity, eventually gaining acceptance with her adoptive family, before deciding to set out into the big wide world to seek her fortune. Which is all par for the course in an NHK morning […]
June 10, 2019 · 0 comments
Welcome to the Ballroom
By Andrew Osmond. The Production I.G series Welcome to the Ballroom may be an anime about competitive dance, but it also has much in common with anime sports shows (I’ll stay out of the debate about if competitive dancing actually is a sport). In one scene in the series, an elementary school-aged little boy shows […]
June 7, 2019 · 0 comments
Interview: Naoki Urasawa
By Andrew Osmond. “I have been told that the UK is one of the countries where manga hasn’t really been culturally assimilated,” declares the manga giant Naoki Urasawa. “I couldn’t quite grasp why the country which had the Beatles, who loved rock music, couldn’t understand manga.”