Tag: gainax

December 17, 2023 · 2 comments

Jonathan Clements on some of the battles behind The Wings of Honneamise. Nobody knows who it was who walked into a Tokyo coffee shop, one summer day in 1984, and ordered a mix of Assam and Darjeeling, known in Japan as a Royal Milk Tea. But there was a cluster of earnest young men at […]

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 […]

August 18, 2023 · 3 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Speaking at 2014’s Tokyo Film Festival, Hideaki Anno mentioned that he once watched a rerun of his series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and was pleased how well it held up. “I was really impressed… The young me was really enjoyable!” He was right. Nadia is more than enjoyable. At best, it’s superb, an […]

August 12, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. The title of the fifth episode of Gunbuster derives directly from Robert Heinlein’s 1973 novel Time Enough for Love, which ironically had very little to do with time dilation. It was, in fact an exploration of, among other things, immortality, longevity, incest, polyamory and time travel, but ultimately kept returning to romance […]

August 6, 2023 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. There’s a moment in Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle (2021), early in the film, where his heroine is standing on a giant floating whale loaded with huge speakers, belting out a song as she drifts through a future city. It looks suitably iconic, and I was sure that it was a reference to Macross: […]