Tag: Japan

July 5, 2021 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. By the mid-1970s, the decline of the Japanese studio system had led to the rise of pinku eiga, low-budget soft porn movies that were targeted at a male theatre-going audience. However, this transition towards films dominated by eroticism had already begun almost a decade earlier for auteur filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura. The director had continued […]

June 20, 2021 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. As three caramel companies, World, Giant and Apollo duel for market share, fresh-faced World employee Nishi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) assists his ambitious boss, Goda (Hideo Takamatsu) in making a star out of the rotten-toothed tomboy Kyoko (Hitomi Nozoe), who is to be the face of their space-themed campaign. As each company’s marketing drive […]

June 14, 2021 · 0 comments

Asei Kobayashi, who died on 30th May from a heart attack, was an unlikely candidate for musical composer, or actor, or game-show champion…. Pushed by his parents into studying to be a doctor, he transferred without telling them to the department of economics at Keio University, where his classmates included another future composer, Isao Tomita. […]

June 14, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. Alice in Wonderland remains a towering influence on fantasy, both in English and in Japanese. Europe-inspired fantasy lands can take on new meaning in a Japanese media fascinated with the strange and exotic West, where even Paris and London can sometimes seem like alternate dimensions. Anime adaptations of English children’s classics, often […]

June 11, 2021 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. An anime cinema feature film of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth has been announced, entitled The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. At last, an anime film with a title that Japanese people will find as hard to pronounce as the rest of us! It’s directed by Kenji Kamiyama, the man […]