March 30, 2023 · 1 comment

By Andrew Osmond. March comes in like a lion resists obvious categorisation. You could call it a “slice of life” anime, but that’s a pretty useless heading these days; Wikipedia’s list of such anime covers everything from Azumanga Daioh to A Centaur’s Life via From Up on Poppy Hill. Pinpointing March more, I’d say it’s […]

March 27, 2023 · 0 comments

by Jeremy Clarke. This animated feature based on six Haruki Murakami short stories comes not, as you might expect, from Japan, but rather from one of the few other countries that can reasonably be said to have an animation industry: France. Writer-director Pierre Földes, whose father Peter is an award-winning animator, further confounds expectations by […]

March 24, 2023 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Ironically, there is nothing new about the plot of Rootport’s Cyberpunk Peach John. Despite a media frenzy about the way it was created, a year’s worth of colour artwork assembled in just a couple of months by a pseudonymous creator using artificial intelligence software, the story itself is as old as the […]

March 21, 2023 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. It wasn’t so long ago that Gakuryu Ishii was a somewhat obscure figure in the West, despite being one of Japan’s most influential modern filmmakers. However, with the director’s seminal punk films Crazy Thunder Road (1980) and Burst City (1982) receiving stacked Blu-ray releases in recent years, Ishii is experiencing something of […]

March 18, 2023 · 1 comment

By Shelley Pallis. He was the greatest swordsman in the world. He advanced through every stage, mastered every trick, and learned every technique. He reached the highest possible levels of achievement, able to defeat elite soldiers without a sword, since he was just as handy with a bit of wood. He achieved a Zen nirvana […]

March 15, 2023 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Back in town for the summer vacation, would-be medical student Toto is reunited with his former middle-school bestie, Roma. In the intervening months, their roles have been reversed – Roma was once the sophisticated city-slicker transplanted to Hicksville, but now he’s just a farmer’s boy who has to muck out the cows, […]