Tag: Jonathan Clements

May 20, 2021 · 5 comments

“When you’re a cartoonist and working at home you sit at your desk pretty much all day,” Kentaro Miura once said in an interview. “You get most of your information about the world from the news on TV. I think that’s how most cartoonists spend their days. And then I start to see the whole […]

May 6, 2021 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. In one of the most widely discussed scenes in Mitsuyo Seo’s 1945 animated feature Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, the frenzied activity of building a South-Sea military base grinds to a halt for the animal soldiers to teach Japanese to the natives. An unruly outdoor classroom of apes, tigers and even a somewhat out-of-place […]

April 30, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Eric C. Rath observes that in the anime series Sushi Police, fish are portrayed weeping at the injustices done to them by culinary criminals. Luckily, a three-man team travels the world “armed with wasabi machine guns, a vacuum to collect illicit sushi and chopstick nunchaku.” Sushi Police is, or course, bonkers, but […]

April 27, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Stolen from her betrothed, raped by the lord of the manor and his men, medieval European peasant girl Jeanne loses her faith in God and turns to the Devil. Cast out by the baron’s jealous wife, she embraces witchcraft and leads a peasant rebellion. That, at least, is the basic plot of […]

April 21, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “There is something wrong with our present society,” Izumi Suzuki once wrote, “and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that… Even when you’re talking about some future society, if you write with full faith in our present world, then nothing changes, you just end up with the same […]