Category: Features

April 16, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Rent-a-Girlfriend is a risqué romcom about a young man going online and… It’s as the title says. College student Kazuya is smarting after he’s dumped. That’s when he finds a website offering rental girlfriends. (“For just 5,000 yen per hour,” says the site, which was about £35 when the series was broadcast […]

April 13, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The feature film Venus Wars has a special nostalgic cachet in Britain and America, at least among fans who are old enough to remember when Akira was a “new” thing. Following the release of Otomo’s film, Venus Wars was among the first batch of SF-action anime to be marketed as anime in […]

April 10, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. One way you could pitch the anime series We Rent Tsukumogami would be to describe it as Miss Hokusai meets Bagpuss. Bagpuss, if you’re too young to remember it, was a vintage British animation about a shop that collects lost objects, dolls, carvings and the like, which come alive and talk among […]

April 4, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. My Next Life as a Villainess is one of those handy anime titles that effectively tells you the story. It opens with a hugely spoiled aristocratic little girl called Catarina being introduced to a potential future husband, a prince no less. They’re strolling around the gardens outside the family mansion when Catarina […]

April 1, 2024 · 0 comments

By Zoe Crombie. Anime has taken inspiration from Western cultures throughout much of its history, from Astro Boy’s Disney-inspired aesthetics to the gorgeous European locales of films like Howl’s Moving Castle, and one of the most important productions in this vein is the World Masterpiece Theater series of adaptations of Western children’s books. Bringing new […]