Tag: Andrew Osmond

November 2, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. If you want a soundbite that describes Paprika fairly well, an obvious one would be “Spirited Away for adults.” Okay, that’s patronising, as Spirited Away was perfectly able to appeal to adults too. A better tag for this similarly dazzling dream-fantasy would be “Spirited Away with adults.” That’s true both in that […]

October 26, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Vampire in the Garden is a girl-meets-girl story, set in a wintry wonderland. One girl is human, the other a vampire, but they share a longing to escape their world of war and death. It’s very plainly a girls’ love story, though some viewers may complain that it can’t fully speak its […]

October 24, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Mars: 2071. Spike Spiegel is a “cowboy” bounty hunter, loosely allied with cyborg ex-cop Jet, gambler Faye and female hacker Edward. Faye is tracking a criminal hacker called Lee when a tanker explodes on a highway, spreading an unknown virus that attacks the brain. With a record bounty on the perpetrators’ heads, […]

October 23, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Warner Brothers’ acquaintance with anime has twin foundations: a yellow rodent and a red pill. Warner Brothers’ handling of Pokémon and The Animatrix reflect the opposite ways that Western distributors sold anime abroad in the early twenty-first century: either conceal its Japanese origins, or else make them a selling point. Pokémon was […]

October 11, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Released twenty-eight years ago, Macross Plus: The Movie still dazzles now, a film that somehow manages to combine plane dogfights and space duels (think Star Wars meets Top Gun); a melancholy drama about former friends tormented by their ruined past; and an AI pop-goddess who seems far less fantastical in the age […]