Tag: cinema

February 18, 2022 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. Yokai have been a point of fascination for film fans for many years. The word Yokai in very general terms means “strange thing”, and is used to label creatures that have, according to folklorists, been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. These bizarre creatures have popped up in video games, […]

February 12, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Rushed into production in the wake of the 1976 US King Kong remake (and originally intended as a King Kong movie, before the rights proved less in the public domain than the film-makers expected), Mighty Peking Man’s original title in Chinese translates as the much simpler Ape King. And to be fair, […]

February 6, 2022 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. In 2019, the architect Eric Wong was invited to make a world; the cyber-world of U in Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle. For Wong, that led to months considering twilight skies, linear spaces, and how to arrange sound speakers on the back of a flying whale. He discussed these questions with Hosoda online, but […]

January 24, 2022 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. When people think of the new masters of Japanese cinema, the same roster of names continues to crop up. Hirokazu Koreeda, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Takashi Miike, among others, tend to be the usual suspects as far as international acclaim goes. However, there is another director whose consistently introspective, vibrant, and brutal work […]

November 30, 2021 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Animated characters are made out of ink or pixels, not flesh and blood, but that doesn’t mean the audience can’t feel their pain. There’s a moment in Perfect Blue where a character bellyflops on a shard of glass that still makes me wince. So does a scene in The Girl Who Leapt […]