Charlotte Part Two
By Andrew Osmond.
As we explained in our write-up of Charlotte’s first volume, the series tells the story of teenage boy Yuu, saddled with superpowers and forced into secret battles fought over people like him. The early episodes set us up for what seemed a lightweight series; highlights included Yusa, a singing idol with a Jekyll and Hyde double personality. Then… well, if you’ve seen Charlotte’s first volume, you’ll know things take a very hard turn in the last couple of episodes, slapping us down with tragedy. Continue Reading
Shinkai on Stage
By Andrew Osmond.
As Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You comes to cinemas, Andrew Osmond talks to director Alexandra Rutter about adapting Shinkai’s film The Garden of Words in a new stage play by the British company Whole Hog Theatre, which will come to London this summer. Continue Reading
Reconguista in G Movie 2 Blu-ray [IMPORT]. Limited Edition Blu-ray [IMPORT] available to pre-order now at AllTheAnime.com.
Following on from us taking pre-orders for the Reconguista in G Movie Part 1: Go, Core Fighter "Perfect Pack" Blu-ray import Blu-ray set last year, we know some of you were wondering if we'd be taking pre-orders for the next film, Reconguista in G Movie Part 2: Bellri's Fierce Charge "Perfect Pack" Blu-ray. Well today we're here to tell you that you have the opportunity to order this import Blu-ray set from our AllTheAnime online shop.
Now to be clear from the outset, and to reiterate as this is the case for all Import products we make available to order: this is not an All The Anime / Anime Limited product. This is a Japanese release, what we refer to as an “Import” product, produced by Bandai Namco Arts that we are taking orders for at our shop; once the stock is delivered (expected to be April 2020) it will be shipped accordingly.
We are taking orders for this Reconguista in G Movie Part 2: Bellri's Fierce Charge "Perfect Pack" Blu-ray [IMPORT] set from right now until 5pm (UK) on Wednesday 12th February 2020!
This blog will detail what you need to know about this. So if you haven't pre-ordered an import product from us before all the information you need ahead of taking pre-orders will be detailed below. Continue Reading
Interview: The Inland Sea
By Jasper Sharp.
Almost fifty years ago, Donald Richie, the author and cultural critic who introduced Japanese cinema to the West, embarked on an epic odyssey of self-discovery amongst the island communities between Shikoku, Honshu and Kyushu, resulting in one of his most personal and highly-regarded books, The Inland Sea (1971). Two decades later, filmmaker Lucille Carra lyrically evoked the exterior and inner mental landscapes described by the author in the 1991 documentary of the same name.
With a new 4K scan of The Inland Sea released on DVD and Blu-ray by Criterion, I caught up with Carra and cinematographer Hiro Narita, who oversaw the transfer, to pose such questions as to how the film project came about, how much have the area and its people – “the real Japanese people, the originals” according to Richie – really changed over the intervening decades, and where was the dividing line between the real Richie, the first-person persona he created in his writing, and his contribution the film. Continue Reading
Books: Japanese Influence on Kids’ TV
By Jonathan Clements.
“What was Saturday morning?” Dr Gina O’Melia asks innocently, upending a whole can of worms for young, millennial scholars who cannot see the resonance of those words. These days, with streaming, narrowcasting and pocket screens, every single waking moment can be “Saturday morning” if you want it to be. The idea of a free, untrammelled time, alone with the telly and without chores or obligations, has a note of twentieth-century nostalgia – O’Melia observes that “Saturday morning”, as Generation X remembers it, ceased to exist in 2014.
But, in its glory days, she describes it as a great, invisible unifier of American children, “the only guaranteed time when television was especially their own,” a grand, nationwide block of programming that all could share, love and obsess about. She parses such unity not only in geographical terms, but across generations – sometimes the same old junk was still being repeated two decades later, creating common ground for parents and their children! But this is all a preamble for O’Melia’s main attraction: the arrival post-1993 of Japanese content that would radically alter the nature of children’s programming in America, starting with Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
Her book, Japanese Influence on American Children’s Television: Transforming Saturday Morning, argues that in the two decades before its demise, Saturday morning kids’ programming became increasingly dominated by Japanese and Japanese-style programming, “...not a novelty like Godzilla or merely a niche product, but something that was able to keep a grasp on American children’s media for almost half of Saturday Morning’s entire airing history.” O’Melia is interested primarily in the phenomenology of these shows – like Liliane Lurçat, the first academic to write about Japanese TV abroad, her focus is on how they appeared in this context, dubbed and cut, not how they may have originally appeared in Japan. Rather sweetly, she apologises for this, as if she had already endured the complaints of one too many anime fan in her classroom for not talking about the original version of CardCaptors or Pokémon. Continue Reading