Category: Features
July 16, 2023 · 0 comments
Gunbuster Files: Smith Toren
By Jonathan Clements. Noriko Takaya, the leading lady in Gainax’s Gunbuster, gets her first unwelcome taste of battle in the episode “First Love, First Sortie.” But as the title implies, she also finds something else, in the form of her brief encounter with the handsome American pilot Smith Toren.
July 13, 2023 · 0 comments
The Art of Hiromasa Yonebayashi
By Andrew Osmond. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the future director of Arriety, When Marnie Was There and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, was in at anime’s deep end. It was 2000, and the 26-year-old was Ghibli’s baby, the studio’s youngest key animator. He’d joined Ghibli four years before, dropping out of a commercial drawing and advertising class […]
July 10, 2023 · 0 comments
The Art of Goro Miyazaki
By Andrew Osmond. This summer sees the resurgence of Studio Ghibli, as Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live? opens in Japanese cinemas on 14th July. Ghibli articles, understandably, tend to be laudatory verging on hagiographies, running through the studio’s great moments of whimsy and poetry. But one part of Ghibli’s history gets pundits’ lips curling […]
July 7, 2023 · 0 comments
The Relative Worlds
By Jeremy Clarke. Teenage romance, parallel worlds and dysfunctional families are the main ingredients of The Relative Worlds, Yuhei Sakuragi’s uneasy cross between a mawkish teenage romance boy and a sci-fi action picture in the James Cameron mould. The romantic, emotional parts are gentle and almost hesitant. The science fiction, fantasy and action parts are […]
July 1, 2023 · 0 comments
Gunbuster Files: The Easter Eggs
By Jonathan Clements. The writer and producer Toshio Okada wrote in his memoirs about the experience of announcing Gunbuster: Aim for the Top at a press conference, in which the journalists all looked shocked, and then disappointed, and eventually sidled away, because they were hoping for something serious, and instead were getting pitched this thing […]