Summer Days with Coo
By Jonathan Clements.
Koichi Uehara (Takahiro Yokokawa) is the only kid in town who isn’t going somewhere exotic for the holidays. His friends are off to Hokkaido and Bali, but he’s stuck in boring old Tokyo. Even a trip to the grandparents’ place is hardly exotic, as they only live a few miles away in Saitama. But just as My Neighbor Totoro was a virtual vacation for a latchkey kid, Summer Days with Coo delivers a magical experience for the Tokyo teen stuck looking out the window all through July. Koichi finds a rock by the river, which turns out to contain the hibernating body of a kappa – a Japanese water sprite. He brings the beaked, turtle-like creature home...
Cyber City Oedo 808
By Jonathan Clements.
With three hundred years to serve in consecutive life sentences, three hardened criminals in the 29th century are given an offer they can hardly refuse. If they are prepared to take on dangerous law enforcement cases, they can knock years off their sentences. But if they disobey orders or try to run, they will literally lose their heads.
Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990-91; UK 1994-95) focusses on just three of the crooks-turned-cop in the Cyber Police, the anti-social hard-nut Sengoku, the boxer-turned-hacker Gogol, and the androgynous master-thief Benten. From the opening shot, in which the camera pulls back from the view in Sengoku’s orbital prison cell, the production is marked out unmistakeably as a work by director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, much beloved by foreign audiences in the 1990s for his moodily lit, flashily shot works of urban gothic, and who would go on to make the fan-favourite Ninja Scroll.
Anime Gift Recommendations
By Andrew Osmond.
If you’re buying anime as a present for someone this Christmas, here are our recommendations!
Books: Christmas Recommendations
By Shelley Pallis.
Over the last five years, amid our blog coverage of anime and manga, we at Anime Limited have also reviewed more than a hundred books related to animation, Asia and anything else we feel like, and as the gifting season approaches, we take this opportunity to make a few recommendations from our more recent coverage.
Books: My Heart Sutra
By Jonathan Clements.
Early in the evening on 12th November 2019, on his way home from an interpreting job in Silicon Valley, Frederik L. Schodt was hit by a moving car. It was a moment that could have easily deprived this world of the author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. “A car suddenly ploughed into my lane,” he writes, “sending my motorcycle and me on two completely different vectors.” He was rushed to the hospital with a broken clavicle and three broken ribs, “but when waves of pain and dizziness washed over me in the ambulance, I began to worry that my luck might have run out completely.”
And so he began to chant a Buddhist scripture that had been with him throughout his life: “Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness.”
“I found that it helped to stabilise my mind,” he writes, “to concentrate, to stay conscious” and to remind himself of what the “emptiness” part meant – that there should be no fear. But this was just one of a thousand encounters that Schodt has had with the Heart Sutra in his life – the single most commonly recited scripture in Buddhism, said to have been carried from India to China, and thence to Japan. Continue Reading