Features 547
Mirai
By Andrew Osmond. Mamoru Hosoda’s Oscar-nominated film Mirai is a time-travel fantasy that might look like Hosoda’s own journey into his past. After all, his breakout film was another time-travel yarn. But whereas 2006’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time featured a familiar kind of anime protagonist – a mishap-prone schoolgirl with some confused feelings […]
Natsuzora
By Jonathan Clements. Natsu Okuhara is an orphan girl raised on a dairy farm in the Hokkaido countryside. She overcomes loneliness and adversity, eventually gaining acceptance with her adoptive family, before deciding to set out into the big wide world to seek her fortune. Which is all par for the course in an NHK morning […]
Welcome to the Ballroom
By Andrew Osmond. The Production I.G series Welcome to the Ballroom may be an anime about competitive dance, but it also has much in common with anime sports shows (I’ll stay out of the debate about if competitive dancing actually is a sport). In one scene in the series, an elementary school-aged little boy shows […]
Interview: Naoki Urasawa
By Andrew Osmond. “I have been told that the UK is one of the countries where manga hasn’t really been culturally assimilated,” declares the manga giant Naoki Urasawa. “I couldn’t quite grasp why the country which had the Beatles, who loved rock music, couldn’t understand manga.”
Martian Successor Nadesico
By Andrew Osmond. Martian Successor Nadesico is an epic space opera, running 26 parts and the better part of ten hours. It’s also a farcical comedy, targeted knowingly at fans of epic space opera. Its trick – which defies physics in ways to give any Scot spaceship engineer conniptions – is to continually have its […]