Features 512
Japanese Box Office in 2017
By Jasper Sharp. As January brings its usual critics’ polls, award nominations and box-office rankings, the annual statistics review by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren) of provides us with our traditional glimpse over the trends and developments of another year. But with no domestic hard-hitters such as Your Name or a new […]
Monster Hunt
By Jonathan Clements. Hapless slacker Tianyin (Jing Boran) inadvertently becomes the surrogate father of Wuba, an orphaned monster prince fated to be the ruler of his race. Accompanied by Xiaolan (Bai Baihe), a hunter initially only interested in the bounty on their companion, he runs for the big city, unaware that Wuba is wanted not […]
Live Undead! Tokyo Ghoul
By Andrew Osmond. The 2010s have been the decade of dark transformations in anime. There were monstrous metamorphoses in the decade’s most iconic manga franchise, Attack on Titan, but such elements have also motored three more horror stories, fables of extreme alienation, which all start the same way. A youth living a normal life in […]
When the Wind Blows
By Andrew Osmond. “They say it’s the correct thing to wear white. People in Hiroshima with patterned clothes got burned where the patterns was and not so much on the white bits. Even the buttons showed up.” “Yes, but they were Japanese.” In the late 1980s, two unusual animated films were released aimed at adults; […]
Assassination Classroom S2
By Andy Hanley. Assuming you’ve made it through to the end of Keiji Gotoh’s Assassination Classroom’s first series in one piece, you’d be forgiven for needing some time to regain your composure after the tumultuous events that closed it. Having seen the octopus-like alien Koro-sensei come close to defeat at the hands of his students, […]