Tag: Japan

July 13, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the future director of Arriety, When Marnie Was There and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, was in at anime’s deep end. It was 2000, and the 26-year-old was Ghibli’s baby, the studio’s youngest key animator. He’d joined Ghibli four years before, dropping out of a commercial drawing and advertising class […]

July 10, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. This summer sees the resurgence of Studio Ghibli, as Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live? opens in Japanese cinemas on 14th July. Ghibli articles, understandably, tend to be laudatory verging on hagiographies, running through the studio’s great moments of whimsy and poetry. But one part of Ghibli’s history gets pundits’ lips curling […]

July 7, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jeremy Clarke. Teenage romance, parallel worlds and dysfunctional families are the main ingredients of The Relative Worlds, Yuhei Sakuragi’s uneasy cross between a mawkish teenage romance boy and a sci-fi action picture in the James Cameron mould. The romantic, emotional parts are gentle and almost hesitant. The science fiction, fantasy and action parts are […]

July 4, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. As long as new fans are stepping tentatively into anime, there’ll always be a need for an up-to-date guidebook, helping them tell their moe from their mecha. There’ve been a great many English-language guides in the last three decades. At one end, the mammoth Anime Encyclopedia encompasses the whole medium. At the […]

July 1, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. The writer and producer Toshio Okada wrote in his memoirs about the experience of announcing Gunbuster: Aim for the Top at a press conference, in which the journalists all looked shocked, and then disappointed, and eventually sidled away, because they were hoping for something serious, and instead were getting pitched this thing […]