Tag: Andrew Osmond

December 7, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Anime is often compared to live-action cinema. If so, Flowers of Evil is the cultish indy film, whose moody images sing with the torments of alienated schoolkids. It has dollops of black comedy, moments of painful lyricism, and a real human sympathy under the cruelty. Few other anime feel so likea live-action […]

December 6, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Shirobako is an animated series about making animation. You might think it’s something only Japan could do, as anime can go so boldly into real life. Could you imagine someone going to a Hollywood studio like Disney or Pixar and pitching an animation about animators? Actually, though, Shiraboko has precedents in some […]

November 25, 2023 · 2 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Mamoru Oshii, the director of Patlabor the Movie, once described his 1989 film as pop entertainment. Any fan of Oshii, best known for Ghost in the Shell, knows that’s a huge undersell for what is an extremely complex, thoughtful film. But perhaps Oshii was referring to how Patlabor the Movie ticks a […]

November 19, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Many decades before Gunbuster, French director Jean-Luc Godard declared, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” In the 1980s a gang of Japanese geeks declared, all you need for an anime is a girl and a mecha… Okay, make that a girl and tons of mecha, in […]

November 13, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. War wracks you with terrible transformations, and turns you into a monster. To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts takes place in an alternate America, renamed Patria, and begins in the fire of its civil war. In this world, the Southerners are winning, their firepower reducing the enemy to bloody meat (it’s plain from […]