Tag: Jonathan Clements

February 23, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Suddenly, there are penguins everywhere. And then there aren’t. Aoyama and his fellow townsfolk are confused by the infestation, but it may have something to do with that big silver sphere out in a meadow near the woods. Shouldn’t someone be doing something about that? So begins Penguin Highway, animated by director […]

February 22, 2020 · 0 comments

Hisashi Katsuta, who died yesterday, provided one of the most recognisable voices in anime, but only came to that career after a decade in radio. He was one of the teenagers drafted to work in military factories in the last, desperate days of the Second World War, but was just young enough to avoid military […]

January 12, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “What was Saturday morning?” Dr Gina O’Melia asks innocently, upending a whole can of worms for young, millennial scholars who cannot see the resonance of those words. These days, with streaming, narrowcasting and pocket screens, every single waking moment can be “Saturday morning” if you want it to be. The idea of […]

December 30, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. In a publicity coup to rival no other in January 2016 at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that while he had been talking, Netflix had rolled out (at least in theory) in 130 countries, including Azerbaijan, Vietnam, India, Nigeria, and Poland. It’s a suitably grandstanding opening […]

December 12, 2019 · 3 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Patrick W. Galbraith’s Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan begins with an advert that depicts a man who is, in the words of Lawrence Eng, a “reluctant insider”, a slave of the rat-race who has an ace up his sleeve. Back in his bachelor pad, he has a virtual girlfriend […]