Features 554
Visions of Edo
Andrew Osmond takes a step into the past. Thanks to cinema and TV, some long-ago places can feel closer to us than most present-day countries. For British people, one of the closest is Victorian England, specifically Victorian London, home to Dickens dramas, Sherlock mysteries, Martian invasions and the gory mythos of Jack the Ripper. This […]
Gakken’s Art Animation
Jasper Sharp uncovers some animated treasures streaming for free. The word ‘anime’ only really entered the English lexicon at the beginning of the 1990s, whereas the history of Japanese animation taken as a whole stretches back at least 70 years earlier, its beginnings usually pinpointed to 1917. However, the immediate problem for curious viewers wishing […]
Manga: Kill la Kill
by Chris Perkins. Anime and manga have always had an extremely close relationship. Despite a recent increase in those based on light novels and videogames, a sizeable proportion of anime today are still adapted from manga, or at least conceived simultaneously. But what about those manga adapted from properties that started life as anime? It’s […]
Books: China Goes Global
By Jonathan Clements. At the turn of the 21st century, Lotus Lantern was the great hope of the Chinese animation industry, a lavish, big-budget musical conceived in blatant imitation of a Disney blockbuster. Needless to say, it was written off in Schoolgirl Milky Crisis as “a mess from start to finish,” although Chinese TV media […]
The Elegant Life of Mr Everyman
By Andrew Osmond. The Elegant Life of Mr Everyman is one of the oldest films screening in the current Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme; it was released back in 1963. Directed by Kihachi Okamoto, it’s an observational comedy, voicing the frustrations and neuroses of the ordinary working man when the shade of World War II […]