Japan 433
Period Pieces: Mai Mai Miracle
By Andrew Osmond. The story of Mai Mai Miracle takes place in a very specific time, 1955, with some excursions back a millennium into the past. The film’s setting is Hofu, a coastal city in Yamaguchi prefecture at the bottom of Japan’s main island, Honshu. As the script mentions, in previous centuries the area used […]
Books: Anime Supremacy!
By Andrew Osmond. Anime Supremacy!, a translated Japanese novel published by Vertical, takes on the real-life side of the anime industry, more frantic and quirky than any 2D antics. The author, Mizuki Tsujimura, is not an anime pro, which would seem to reduce the book’s interest greatly. But wait! The last pages have an impressive […]
The Best of Impossible Worlds
By Mitchell Lineham. After the global success of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, virtual reality is back in style, but in the anime world, it never really went away. While Spielberg’s movie appeals to fans for its deep-seated references to pop culture, Japanese animation offers plenty of virtual reality stories that resonate more with today’s […]
Re: Zero
By Andrew Osmond. Re: Zero takes one of the most familiar templates of recent anime, then bends it into a phenomenally twisty series. It starts with a high concept – Sword Art Online meets Groundhog Day. One moment our hero, who’s your common or garden teen boy gamer, is in the “real” mundane world, shopping […]
Rokka
By Andrew Osmond. The fantasy drama Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers makes a very interesting comparison with another Anime Limited release, Grimgar: Ashes and Illusions. Although they’re dissimilar in tone and characterisation, they both begin as familiar kinds of fantasy stories that we, the audience, associate with epic-length adventures. But then Rokka and Grimgar […]