Japan 607
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
By Andrew Osmond. Early in Jin-roh, a young girl who’s more child than woman slumps against a wall in a sewer, a dark limbo of brick and water. She’s been running a long time, but there’s no escape. She looks up to see a soldier watching her, with infra-red eyes in a metal helmet. The […]
Mariko Miyagi (1927-2020)
Mariko Miyagi, who died on Saturday from malignant lymphoma, supposedly left her acting career behind in the 1980s, but remained prominent in the public eye for many further decades. A teenage vaudeville performer in the dying days of the Second World War, she swiftly rose to media stardom in the post-war era, initially as the […]
Interview: Yui Ishikawa
By Andrew Osmond. One of Yui Ishikawa’s voice-acting roles tends to overshadow the others. We’re thinking about the taciturn giant-killer called Mikasa Ackerman. Ishikawa has voiced the character since the anime version of Attack on Titan debuted in 2013, and she’ll certainly be with her to the story’s end. But as Ishikawa reveals in the […]
Anonymous Noise
By Andrew Osmond. Anonymous Noise is a love-triangle teen melodrama, and a music drama, and it’s very much in the tradition of girls’ (shojo) manga. That’s hardly surprising; the source strip, created by Ryoko Fukuyama, was serialised in the venerable girls’ manga magazine Hana to Yume, which was also home to the popular Fruits Basket. […]
The Vision of Escaflowne
By Andrew Osmond. Thirteen years ago, when I was writing about Vision of Escaflowne for a non-specialist magazine, I claimed, “The best way to describe Escaflowne is as the closest thing to a ten-hour Hayao Miyazaki film.” As crude as that description is – and Escaflowne is no mere Miyazaki imitator – it still holds […]