Japan 608
Gundam’s Top 10 Easter Eggs
By Andrew Osmond. Gundam has been going over forty years, and in that time it’s had loads of little nods and references to make viewers go “Eh?” Granted, the franchise may not have as many pop-culture references as Cowboy Bebop or Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Even among mecha anime, it’s doubtful any individual Gundam series has […]
Tsukamoto: Three Films
by Jeremy Clarke. Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest feature, the samurai movie Killing comes to UK Blu-ray in a two-disc edition, along with two fascinating shorts: the Super-8 epic The Adventure of Denchu Kozo and the later masterpiece Haze. All three feature informative audio commentaries by Tom Mes, author of Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto […]
Books: Kore-eda’s Elemental Cinema
By Jasper Sharp. Ask anyone about the state of contemporary Japanese cinema and the one name that is sure to come up is that of the subject of Linda Ehrlich’s The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema, surprisingly the first book-length focus on the director. For well over two decades, Kore-eda has enjoyed widespread […]
Books: Manga Cultures & the Female Gaze
By Shelley Pallis. Kathryn Hemmann’s new book, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, quotes an incident oft-cited in discussions of fandom – Anne Rice’s complaint that critics of her vampire novels were “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.” Rice was famously furious that many of her readers disapproved of the direction her books were […]
Ajin 2
By Andrew Osmond. If you know about Ajin: Demi-Human already, then rejoice for the wait is over! The second season of the series drops onto Collector’s Blu-ray and DVD, and there’s some pointers about what to expect from it if you scroll down this article. If you’ve not encountered Ajin before, then the first series […]