Tag: books

May 4, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. In his new book on visions of Japanese cities, William O. Gardner explores the “ruins of the future”, in particular the ideas of the Metabolists, a group of Japanese architects obsessed with the integration of cities with the human being – the creation of new metropolises on reclaimed land, and urban design […]

April 23, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. Ask anyone about the state of contemporary Japanese cinema and the one name that is sure to come up is that of the subject of Linda Ehrlich’s The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema, surprisingly the first book-length focus on the director. For well over two decades, Kore-eda has enjoyed widespread […]

April 20, 2020 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Kathryn Hemmann’s new book, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, quotes an incident oft-cited in discussions of fandom – Anne Rice’s complaint that critics of her vampire novels were “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.” Rice was famously furious that many of her readers disapproved of the direction her books were […]

April 14, 2020 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. In the introduction to their latest collaboration, Animating the Spirited, Tze-yue G. Hu, Masao Yokota and Gyongyi Horvath recall the discovery that they were all separately working on papers on the “spiritual aspects of creative work,” and their joint decision to pool their resources. I’m not sure, however, that they necessarily agreed […]

April 11, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Donna Kornhaber’s new book on animation and war begins with an electrifying account of an afternoon in 1899, when the Ladies Welfare Committee for Soldiers and Sailors staged the premiere of Arthur Melbourne-Cooper’s one-minute “Matches Appeal.” The Empire, in Leicester Square, was the venue at which the world’s first recorded screening of […]