Tag: Japan
May 29, 2022 · 0 comments
Books: Japan’s Carnival War
By Jonathan Clements. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the boggling weirdness of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, that animated oddity in which the child-hero from Japanese school textbooks is reimagined as a patriotic general, leading animal marines in an assault on foreign devils. But its not just the premise of Sacred Sailors that […]
May 26, 2022 · 0 comments
Totoro on Stage
By Helen McCarthy. When the Barbican and the Royal Shakespeare Company announced the stage adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro, with a new orchestration of Joe Hisaishi’s iconic score by Will Stuart and a hand-drawn title by Toshio Suzuki, it was obviously an iconic event in the annals of British theatre. What nobody could have predicted […]
May 23, 2022 · 0 comments
Love, Death & Robots S03
By Andrew Osmond. I’ve previously reviewed seasons one and two of Netflix’s anthology series Love, Death and Robots, and found it an interesting if erratic mix of adult animation and real SF. It was at its best when it transcended its origins as a sex and violence shocker. Standout episodes included “Zima Blue,” a post-human […]
May 17, 2022 · 0 comments
To Sleep So As to Dream
By Tom Wilmot. After her daughter, Bellflower (Moe Kamura), is kidnapped by the shady M. Pathé company, Madame Cherryblossom (Fujiko Fukamizu) reaches out to private investigator Uotsuka (Shiro Sano) for help. Along with his assistant Kobayashi (Koji Otake), and a whole load of boiled eggs, Uotsuka embarks on a seemingly endless hunt for the missing […]
May 14, 2022 · 0 comments
Books: Spirit Chronicles
By Shelley Pallis. Yuri Kitayama’s Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles has several different beginnings, and to be frank, I am not sure that it has stopped beginning yet, even as I get to the end of the first novel. Sometimes it’s a sprawling political saga about feuding nations, and sometimes it’s a path to power of […]