Tag: Helen McCarthy

January 22, 2023 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. Art is a time machine; it shows us other versions of history. The ones we like least are usually the ones we need to remember. George Takei, who made his name in Star Trek as the original Mr Sulu and went on to devote his life to activism, has been time travelling […]

December 4, 2022 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. From the first episodes of the Revolutionary Girl Utena anime series, director Kunihiko Ikuhara delivers a format packed with new ideas and a number of classic riffs. As a girl, we are told, Utena lost her parents, but remembers being comforted by a gallant prince on a white horse. The impressionable child […]

October 12, 2022 · 2 comments

By Helen McCarthy. I’ve seen a Catbus live onstage not twenty feet away. I’ve watched Totoro fly over the heads of a packed audience, all gasping, laughing, cheering and entirely caught up in childlike acceptance of magic. I’ve seen the conventionally invisible puppeteers and their rods and strings and wind machines and skill and grace […]

April 26, 2022 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. A book can be a ground-breaking work of scholarship and still accessible to any intelligent reader. Language capable of being understood by the average well-read media fan is also capable of carrying the most challenging ideas. So, I’m always delighted to read new work that takes its subject and its readers more […]

April 14, 2022 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. Japan: Courts and Culture was originally scheduled to open in 2020. Like so many of that year’s best-laid plans, it had to be shelved. But the wait has been worth it. The exhibition is a refined, elegant and entrancing look at a centuries-long relationship between two island empires separated by “ten thousand […]