Japan 433
Books: Animated Encounters
By Jonathan Clements. In her new book, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s, Daisy Yan Du argues against the way that Chinese animation wants to see itself, so often presented as an entirely local, inwardly focussed realm that pays no heed to foreign markets. Particularly in the period under study, you might be […]
Amanchu!
By Andrew Osmond. Amanchu! is a portrait of female friendship; or, if you prefer, it’s one of the sub-genre of anime depicting “cute girls doing cute things.” It should be said that the first category of anime doesn’t collapse into the second, even if anime fans sometimes speak as if it does. You can like […]
Books: The Monstrous Feminine
By Shelley Pallis. In the midst of a British media panic about “Momo”, a slit-mouthed Japanese woman who supposedly exhorts children to commit crimes, there’s never been a better time to investigate the world of dangerous Japanese ghost-girls. Barbara Creed’s landmark book The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) kicked off an entire subgenre of writing about Monstrous Wombs, […]
Mifune: The Last Samurai
by Jeremy Clarke. Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) is director Akira Kurosawa’s iconic star of his samurai movies Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. He’s the subject of three time Oscar-nominated documentary film maker Steven Okazaki’s useful documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai (2015). As narrator Keanu Reeves says in voice-over, without Mifune there would have been no Magnificent […]
Little Witch Academia
By Paul Browne. For trainee witch Akko Kagari, things never appear to go as planned. Inspired at a young age by the spectacular public shows hosted by professional witch Shiny Chariot, Akko enrols at the Luna Nova Magical Academy in a bid to emulate her idol. But the fledgling witch struggles to keep up with […]