July 7, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jeremy Clarke. Teenage romance, parallel worlds and dysfunctional families are the main ingredients of The Relative Worlds, Yuhei Sakuragi’s uneasy cross between a mawkish teenage romance boy and a sci-fi action picture in the James Cameron mould. The romantic, emotional parts are gentle and almost hesitant. The science fiction, fantasy and action parts are […]

July 4, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. As long as new fans are stepping tentatively into anime, there’ll always be a need for an up-to-date guidebook, helping them tell their moe from their mecha. There’ve been a great many English-language guides in the last three decades. At one end, the mammoth Anime Encyclopedia encompasses the whole medium. At the […]

July 1, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. The writer and producer Toshio Okada wrote in his memoirs about the experience of announcing Gunbuster: Aim for the Top at a press conference, in which the journalists all looked shocked, and then disappointed, and eventually sidled away, because they were hoping for something serious, and instead were getting pitched this thing […]

June 30, 2023 · 4 comments

Well here we are again, on the cusp of another month, and indeed the second half of the year! There’s a lot still to enjoy from our 2023, not least the release of the Annecy award-winning The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes hitting UK cinemas on July 14th, so before we continue make […]

June 28, 2023 · 0 comments

The late Kinji Fukasaku is most fondly remembered for his hold-no-bars yakuza flicks, characterised by their hard-as-nails anti-heroes and brutal action. However, in the late 1970s, the director began to expand his cinematic palette, first by dipping into the jidaigeki genre with Shogun’s Samurai (1978). Also known as The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy, the film starred semi-frequent Fukasaku collaborator Shinichi […]

June 26, 2023 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Suzushiro might seem a little bit old to be doing a paper round, but he’s a college student on a “newspaper scholarship” who needs the money. Well, everybody needs the money – Japan is on the skids after an “unprecedented disaster”, that might be covid-19, or might be whatever the next jackpot […]