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Zeta Gundam
By Andrew Osmond. Gundam is a big franchise, encompassing nearly 40 years of anime, and leaving even some seasoned fans lost amid, say, G Gundam and Gundam 00. Zeta Gundam comes from 1985, when the franchise was in its early days. It’s the sequel to the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam, which Anime Limited released […]
Books: A Tokyo Romance
By Jonathan Clements. Poor boy that I am, when I arrived in Japan I did so knowing nobody and nothing – author Ian Buruma turns out to have the Hollywood director John Schlesinger for an uncle, and an oil-business bigwig with a Tokyo mansion for a “distant relative” in 1975. He also already has a […]
Gun Gale Online
By Andrew Osmond. Despite its hefty name (this is anime!), Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online is a simple series. It’s an adventure-comedy with a central sight-gag; a pint-sized little girl in pink, dashing and leaping around her larger foes, shooting heads, cutting throats, and blowing up the survivors with grenades. Before you envisage […]
Books: Women’s Manga etc…
By Jonathan Clements. Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities seems at first glance like a grab-bag of buzzwords assembled to attract the attention of search engines rather than humans. The introduction by Fusami Ogi gives up on defining what manga actually means, and her colleague Kazumi Nagaike announces that “…the […]
Char’s Counter Attack
By Andrew Osmond. That the first “original” cinema film in the Gundam franchise contains the word “counterattack” suggests two things. First, that someone at the Sunrise studio was thinking of a certain other 1980s film with spaceships and epic duels; and second, that it’s warning the audience that the film is a sequel. Which Char’s […]