Tag: Jonathan Clements

June 19, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Hikaru likes to sing while she is sweeping up at work. But she is good at it. Good enough to turn it in to a career? Nobody would take it that seriously, until her old friend Ran-chan returns from the Big City and announces that she is going to audition for a […]

May 29, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the boggling weirdness of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, that animated oddity in which the child-hero from Japanese school textbooks is reimagined as a patriotic general, leading animal marines in an assault on foreign devils. But its not just the premise of Sacred Sailors that […]

April 20, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. It’s hard indeed to compete with the sort of granular detail and insight of Shirobako, but Animeta does a fine job from the very first pages, in which cynical staff at an anime company bicker over the poor quality of new hirelings. Facing a bunch of talentless drudges, the go-getting director Kujo […]

April 17, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. In 1939, Japanese embassy personnel in London were ordered to destroy stacks of compromising documents, and made the mistake of hiring a local company called Tottenham Dust Destroyers. Explicitly told to burn crates full of books and papers and not to tell the police, the Dust Destroyers immediately did so, alerting MI5 […]

March 29, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. In a tongue-in-cheek reminiscence, Yasuhiko Tan, the NHK producer who greenlit Future Boy Conan over dozens of other possible projects, wrote of his interest in the show as if it were a deluded romance. Bewitched by the charms of the original offer, and over-awed by the appearance of the pilot episode, he […]