Category: Features

May 15, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. The robustly-designed and impressively laid-out new tome On Kurosawa: A Tribute to the Master Director by Peter Tasker inevitably prompts the same questions I raised a year ago in my review of Paul Anderer’s Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Does the world really need another book on this director, and what exactly is it about […]

May 12, 2019 · 0 comments

by Jeremy Clarke. Teenage high school movie Blue Spring (2001) centres on the leader of a violent boys’ gang in their final year at school. The nonchalant Kujo (Ryuhei Matsuda) has befriended Aoki (Hirofumi Arai in his debut role) since the latter first joined his class in their infancy: these days Aoki is Kujo’s number […]

May 11, 2019 · 0 comments

Makoto Ogino, who died of renal failure on 29th April, spent his whole life preoccupied with the wheel of karma. On the day of his very first sale, his father, an education officer responsible for censuring unsuitable books, pleaded with him not to become the sort of manga creator whose works would get denounced in […]

May 9, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. A fandom, writes Aaron Schwabach, “is the most powerful marketing tool a work of fiction can have.” Grow the right kind of grass-roots support, and authors can discover that works advertise themselves, that word-of-mouth becomes stronger than paid advertising. But fandoms can develop a sense of entitlement to the stories they read. […]

May 6, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Masami Toku’s collection International Perspectives on Shojo and Shojo Manga: The Impact of Girl Culture might contain a couple of doubtful inclusions and off-the-wall tangents, but still outperforms many similar books in terms of its sheer usefulness and educational value.