Features 710
Books: Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary
By Jonathan Clements. Donna Kornhaber’s new book on animation and war begins with an electrifying account of an afternoon in 1899, when the Ladies Welfare Committee for Soldiers and Sailors staged the premiere of Arthur Melbourne-Cooper’s one-minute “Matches Appeal.” The Empire, in Leicester Square, was the venue at which the world’s first recorded screening of […]
Can Anime Keep Going?
By Andrew Osmond. The world can change so quickly. At the beginning of March, for example, it still seemed quite possible that the ExCel Centre would host the next MCM Comic Con London in London as scheduled. Now the news is full of sobering stories about NHS Nightingale, the 4000-bed field hospital set up in […]
Jay Benedict (1951-2020)
Jay Benedict, who died on Saturday from coronavirus complications, was not a well-known name, but a well-known voice in anime. As one of the few American actors resident in London in the 1980s and 1990s, he was called up on multiple occasions to provide voices on “midlantic” dubs. Most notably for viewers of a certain […]
Music: FLCL
By Andrew Osmond. One interesting thing about The Pillows, the alt-rock band which provided all the music for FLCL, is that its members didn’t think anime and music had much to do with each other. If you read about Japanese pop-culture, you learn about its obsession with the “media mix,” how a property can be […]
Books: Cinema is a Cat
By Jasper Sharp. Cinema is a Cat: A Cat-Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies, as its subtitle highlights, is less a scholarly survey of cats in the movies than a cat-led guide as to how to conduct cinematic analysis. Yes, you read that right. This is a book that casts a curious cat’s eye across a […]