Category: Features
March 2, 2024 · 0 comments
Somali and the Forest Spirit
By Andrew Osmond. Somali and the Forest Spirit is mostly soft and enchanting, the story of a little girl’s journey through a wondrous world, under the protection of her indefatigable non-human dad. And yet bits of the series are really tough. Anime often plays merry hell with Western expectations of animation and children’s media. The […]
February 28, 2024 · 0 comments
Books: Anime’s Knowledge Cultures
By Jonathan Clements. The subtitle of Jinying Li’s new book, “Geek, Otaku, Zhai” alludes to the rise of fandom and fans as movers and shakers in modern media and culture, tracking the Rise of the Nerds from a period, say, when only “losers” read comics in the eyes of the mainstream, to an age where […]
February 25, 2024 · 0 comments
The Rise and Rise of Mari Okada
By Zoe Crombie. As far as creators of anime go, Mari Okada has experienced one of the strangest rises to power from her humble origins to her current position as one of the most well-known writers and directors of the mode. There are only a handful of prominent female directors in anime, with Okada and […]
February 22, 2024 · 1 comment
Blue Thermal
By Jonathan Clements. Tamaki Tsuru ignores her mother’s complaints and applies to Aonagi University in That Fancy Tokyo, where she intends to make friends, fall in love and maybe do some studying eventually. Much more important is the selection of the right school club, because that will be the talent pool that supplies her future […]
February 19, 2024 · 0 comments
A Place Further Than the Universe
By Zoe Crombie. Kimari is a high school student teetering on the edge of experience, wanting to live while she’s young but needing the right push to do so. That extra encouragement comes in the form of Shirase, a fellow student whose belief that her mother, a missing Antarctic explorer, is still waiting her in […]