Features 682
Books: Manga in Arts Education
By Jonathan Clements. Masami Toku and Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase’s newly published Manga! Visual Pop-Culture in Arts Education is one of the most pleasant surprises of 2020, sneaked out mid-pandemic by a Portuguese foundation that is literally giving it away. It is by no means the first publication to grapple with the joys and miseries of […]
Music: Wicked City
By Shelley Pallis. I confess, I didn’t really remember anything from the soundtrack to Wicked City until this album turned up on the in-tray. In my defence, it has been more than 20 years since I saw it. Whereas there are snatches of Masamichi Amano’s score from Return of the Overfiend that I can still […]
Books: Christian Sorcerers on Trial
By Jonathan Clements. It didn’t matter that some of the accused had already died in prison. When they were sentenced in 1829, the survivors were marched through the streets of Osaka, along with the salt-preserved corpses of their fellow believers. Then all, dead or alive, were crucified as devotees of the “pernicious creed” that worshipped […]
Books: How Geniuses Think
By Alex Dudok de Wit. The filmographies of Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, the two geniuses of this book’s title, stand as monuments to their creativity. But how do we weigh the achievement of Toshio Suzuki, the third man at the head of Studio Ghibli? Suzuki’s influence on Ghibli is hard to summarise because it […]
Konosuba
By Andrew Osmond. Konosuba, or to give its full name, Konosuba – God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World!, is a thorough piss-take of gaming and fantasy. It takes one newly deceased boy gamer, a dimwit goddess, a couple of loony girl followers, and some profoundly silly monsters. Anime has a heritage of funny fantasy, going […]