Tag: Japan

January 17, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The film’s title card reads, “Patlabor Movie 3.” The functional name is in line with the previous Patlabor films – and at least this one has an extra tag, “Wasted XIII” – but it’s the most misleading part of the movie. Released in 2001, eight years after Patlabor 2, Wasted XIII isn’t […]

January 14, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The first Patlabor film is an excellent cerebral thriller. Patlabor 2 The Movie, though, is an artistic statement. Thirty years old, it’s still the anime that feels the most like live-action. It’s only tangentially a mecha film, with the title Patlabors on screen for a fraction of the running time. This is […]

January 10, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Great Pretender is a crime-caper series, not unlike Lupin III, but less cartoon-zany. This is a hardboiled show, with sex, drugs and real-world grit; it has bold, unreal colours without feeling lurid; and its character designs are by Evangelion legend Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. 

January 7, 2024 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Alpi is a wandering exorcist (or “Soul Sender”), although she is not very good at it. She has only taken on the dangerous job in an attempt to track down her missing parents, who disappeared some years earlier. But much of the appeal in “Rona’s” manga comes from the quirky way this […]

January 4, 2024 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Parasyte starts with its money shot. A husband and wife face each other in a dimmed room; then the man’s head splits and unfolds into a Venus fly-trap, with rows of teeth and a half-dozen eyes on stalks. The woman can’t scream, only gasp in halting, terrified breaths, before the thing chomps […]