Features 738
Music: Masayoshi Yamazaki
By Jonathan Clements. The accident-prone Masayoshi Yamazaki always seems to be able to fail upwards, starting with the moment in 1991 when the twenty-year-old musician showed up to the wrong audition. Not realising it was not the same company as Kitty Records, he took his guitar along to an open call for Kitty Films, marching […]
Adapting Persona5
By Callum May. Adapting video games into anime is a challenge. In fact, when the producer and director of Persona5 the Animation stepped into Los Angeles’ Anime Expo in 2018, they were asked how they overcame that challenge during at least five separate interviews. This is something that was on the anime team’s minds from […]
Interview: Yoshiharu Tsuge
By Gianni Simone. For a very long time, and with just a few exceptions, foreign comic fans could only read Yoshiharu Tsuge’s stories in Japanese. The avant-garde artist, whose work became increasingly surreal and/or autobiographical in the heyday of arthouse manga, was often mentioned in manga histories, but rarely appreciated. However, English translations are finally […]
Books: Reading Murakami
By Jonathan Clements. Almost everything that is written about fiction is either reception (what the reader thought of the book) or production (an occasional making-of about the author at work). David Karashima’s book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami is dedicated to areas that hardly anybody ever talks about – the way that the […]
Yasuo Otsuka (1931-2021)
The animator Yasuo Otsuka’s death today at the age of 89 was announced by Toshio Suzuki, the former president of Studio Ghibli. That felt only fitting, for while Otsuka had no credits on Studio Ghibli’s films, he was fundamental to the anime leading up to them over more than two decades, from Lupin to Chie […]