Andrew Osmond 53
Mirai
By Andrew Osmond. Mamoru Hosoda’s Oscar-nominated film Mirai is a time-travel fantasy that might look like Hosoda’s own journey into his past. After all, his breakout film was another time-travel yarn. But whereas 2006’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time featured a familiar kind of anime protagonist – a mishap-prone schoolgirl with some confused feelings […]
Interview: Naoki Urasawa
By Andrew Osmond. “I have been told that the UK is one of the countries where manga hasn’t really been culturally assimilated,” declares the manga giant Naoki Urasawa. “I couldn’t quite grasp why the country which had the Beatles, who loved rock music, couldn’t understand manga.”
Martian Successor Nadesico
By Andrew Osmond. Martian Successor Nadesico is an epic space opera, running 26 parts and the better part of ten hours. It’s also a farcical comedy, targeted knowingly at fans of epic space opera. Its trick – which defies physics in ways to give any Scot spaceship engineer conniptions – is to continually have its […]
Manga: My Brother’s Husband
By Andrew Osmond. The manga My Brother’s Husband is a family drama, like some of the best-known Japanese films. Like Tokyo Story, it centres on an absence, a family member who’s died, and on characters bonding round the missing person. Like many Kore-eda films (and Hosoda’s The Wolf Children), it’s about an alternative family, not […]
Manga at the British Museum
By Andrew Osmond. The case against putting a Manga exhibition in the British Museum was made in three papers – The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times – on the morning I visited it. Actually, one argument was effectively made before the exhibition was announced. In 2017, the Independent newspaper ranted against the British Museum […]