Japan 505
Charlotte
By Andy Hanley. Charlotte is not a person. Charlotte is a comet that swings close to the Earth once every 75 years, seeding the local orbit with dust particles that can change the biology of pre-adolescent children. Some of them develop paranormal abilities, although how they use them differs widely. Be honest: if you found […]
Interview: Shoji Kawamori
By Andrew Osmond. Shoji Kawamori is best known as one of the main creators of the Macross franchise, as well as having a plethora of creative credits on other anime. I interviewed him when he visited London in September as a guest at the Barbican’s “Anime’s Human Machines” season. While I focused particularly on Kawamori’s […]
Books: The Last Children of Tokyo
By Jonathan Clements. The kids are not all right. The kids are sickly and enfeebled, some of them barely able to walk, with brittle bones and dozens of allergies. They have been raised on poisoned milk and contaminated food, in a Japan without Tokyo – Japan’s capital city having been rendered uninhabitable by a disaster. […]
Books: Puppets, Gods and Brands
By Jonathan Clements. The latest book in the Asia Pop! Series, Teri Silvio’s Puppets, Gods and Brands, is a surprising, vivacious and convincing anthropology of animation, which places animation ideals and fannish philosophies at the very centre of modern times. For Silvio, the idea of imparting life into inanimate objects – of animating them – […]
The Museum of Poo
By Andrew Osmond. Tokyo already has a Poo Building, unofficially at least. It’s the long-standing nickname for the Asahi Beer Hall at Asakasa, where the big yellow lump on top is meant to represent a frothy head of beer, but people just won’t see it that way. But now there’s a rival to the title, […]