Category: Features

August 25, 2022 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Hapless lab assistant Nobuo Tanaka is working on a new ‘miracle drug’ at a research institute. Unfortunately for him, his harmless project turns out to have a military dimension, and when Tanaka mistakes a stray pill for a cold remedy he fails to realise he has just become the ultimate weapon. Now […]

August 22, 2022 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Speaking about his anime film Magnetic Rose, part of the Katsuhiro Otomo-produced anthology Memories, director Koji Morimoto made a bold proclamation. “The characters in the story had to escape the magnetic field,” Morimoto said, “so Satoshi Kon and I used to say we had to escape the magnetic field called Otomo!” Kon […]

August 18, 2022 · 0 comments

by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. A country opens up to the West and goes through a flowering of political and social liberalism before reactionaries force a backlash, democracy flounders, and a repressive regime takes the reins. This could describe Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, or Japan from the Meiji Restoration to the 1945 […]

August 16, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. So many things came to mind when I saw the title of Asumiko Nakamura’s Maiden Railways manga for the first time. And I thought, well, it’s probably a thing about girls who are trains, or trains who are girls, or a bunch of witches who moonlight as train conductors, but no. It’s […]

August 12, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. One of the carriages on the Kyoto shinkansen is a mauve hellscape of high-pitched voices and big eyes, devoted to the irritating but mercifully fictional anime mascot character Momonga. Every now and then the duelling assassins in David Leitch’s Bullet Train have to traverse it, subject to invasive entreaties to be someone’s […]