Features 556
Yuri!!! on Ice
By Roxy Simons. Throw an imaginary rock at the anime industry and it won’t take you long before you hit a sports anime. There’s a series dedicated to almost every sport out there, and even in the current season there are at least three sports anime that come to mind. Are you only interested in […]
Japan Foundation Tour 2018
By Jasper Sharp. Mere days before Christmas, the Japan Foundation has announced its annual batch of seasonal goodies to get us film fans through the dark and gloomy post-festive doldrums of early 2018. This year’s nationwide touring programme, running from 2nd February to 28th March, comes packaged under the characteristically all-encompassing tag of “(Un)true Colours: […]
Mai Mai Miracle: The Origins
By Andrew Osmond. In 2009, Mai Mai Miracle’s director Sunao Kutabuchi released an unusual adjunct to his film, a self-published free magazine called The Days Blown By Mai Mai Miracle. It included his account of the origins and development of the story. As the director explained, Mai Mai Miracle had several starting points. One was […]
Books: Chinese Animation… Again
By Jonathan Clements. As its subtitle suggests, Wu Weihua’s book Chinese Animation: Creative Industries and Digital Culture delves into two specific elements of cartoons in China – the effects of disruptive transitions on a struggling business, and the massive transformations wrought by computers. Both these areas are under-represented in previous studies of the medium, and […]
Sword of the Stranger
By Andrew Osmond. If you saw the film title Sword of the Stranger without knowing anything else about it, you might guess it was a no-nonsense action flick, perhaps with a Man With No Name hero and a great many bladed weapons. And you’d be right. It’s also an anime by the Cowboy Bebop studio, […]