Category: Features

October 6, 2016 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Whether they’re from the east or west, animation studios know you can’t beat a good mascot. It could be a giant mouse, a plasticine dog, or a box-shaped robot trash compactor. It’s the same story in Japan. Studio Ghibli has Totoro; Production I.G. has the cyber-warrior Kusanagi; Gainax has the Evangelion. The […]

October 3, 2016 · 0 comments

By Hugh David. In the future, humanity has invested in public health as the key way to offer individual citizens their best life experience, reducing the sort of concerns that lead to unrest. This includes constant monitoring, alerts and reminders by way of embedded biotech and retinal displays, as well as offering whatever treatments are […]

September 30, 2016 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. Who would have thought that one of the talking-point animated releases of the year would be an obscure title made in Japan over 40 years ago? Hailed as “One of the great lost masterpieces of Japanese animation”, Belladonna of Sadness (also known as Tragedy of Belladonna) was originally released in 1973 as […]

September 24, 2016 · 1 comment

By Andrew Osmond. Makoto Shinkai’s film Your Name, to be released in British cinemas on 24th November [2016], is news in Japan already. As of writing, Your Name is poised to become the most successful non-Ghibli anime film ever released in cinemas. It’s fabulous news for the industry, and a leap up for Shinkai, whose […]

September 19, 2016 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Japan’s first animated feature was a masterpiece of propaganda film-making, uncompromising in the bile it directed at the enemy, romantic in its evocation of home and hearth and of imperial Japan’s Pan-Asian aspirations, and still unsettling today in its depiction of the mindset of the Japanese military. Its survival to reach modern […]