Tag: Japan

March 18, 2020 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Anonymous Noise is a love-triangle teen melodrama, and a music drama, and it’s very much in the tradition of girls’ (shojo) manga. That’s hardly surprising; the source strip, created by Ryoko Fukuyama, was serialised in the venerable girls’ manga magazine Hana to Yume, which was also home to the popular Fruits Basket. […]

March 15, 2020 · 2 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Thirteen years ago, when I was writing about Vision of Escaflowne for a non-specialist magazine, I claimed, “The best way to describe Escaflowne is as the closest thing to a ten-hour Hayao Miyazaki film.” As crude as that description is – and Escaflowne is no mere Miyazaki imitator – it still holds […]

March 12, 2020 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. This is not the place to start for any newcomers to Gundam Wing. Endless Waltz is the last chapter of the Gundam Wing story, following on directly from the final TV episode (part 49). The TV series is already available from Anime Limited, and we wrote it up here. The TV Gundam […]

March 9, 2020 · 1 comment

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 […]

March 3, 2020 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Never-Ending Man is a live-action documentary film about Hayao Miyazaki, and it starts with his “retirement” announcement in September 2013, after his “final” film, The Wind Rises. Those quote marks suggest how well he stuck to his word. “I’ve caused quite a stir before by saying I’m quitting,” Miyazaki said, “so people […]