Cinema 120
Books: Animated Encounters
By Jonathan Clements. In her new book, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s, Daisy Yan Du argues against the way that Chinese animation wants to see itself, so often presented as an entirely local, inwardly focussed realm that pays no heed to foreign markets. Particularly in the period under study, you might be […]
Books: The Monstrous Feminine
By Shelley Pallis. In the midst of a British media panic about “Momo”, a slit-mouthed Japanese woman who supposedly exhorts children to commit crimes, there’s never been a better time to investigate the world of dangerous Japanese ghost-girls. Barbara Creed’s landmark book The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) kicked off an entire subgenre of writing about Monstrous Wombs, […]
Mifune: The Last Samurai
by Jeremy Clarke. Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) is director Akira Kurosawa’s iconic star of his samurai movies Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. He’s the subject of three time Oscar-nominated documentary film maker Steven Okazaki’s useful documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai (2015). As narrator Keanu Reeves says in voice-over, without Mifune there would have been no Magnificent […]
Japanese Box Office in 2018
By Jasper Sharp. The Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren) has just released its annual overview of the financial facts, figures and trends for the Japanese film industry for last year. For filmo-watchers, the 2018 statistics yield few surprises, but still merit further contemplation.
Before We Vanish
by Jeremy Clarke. Part relationship drama, part love story, part comedy, part science fiction, Before We Vanish is the latest movie by Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa to hit UK Blu-ray and may be his strangest ever film. This is saying a lot for a director whose filmography includes horror movies like Pulse (2001), ghost stories […]