Tag: Keiichi Hara

January 23, 2024 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Kokoro (Ami Touma) has a name that means “heart”, but feels that hers is constantly being stamped on. Mean girls at school make her life so difficult, that eventually she gives up altogether, and stays home with an alleged stomach-ache. Lying on her bed and feeling sorry for herself, she discovers that […]

February 27, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Koichi Uehara (Takahiro Yokokawa) is the only kid in town who isn’t going somewhere exotic for the holidays. His friends are off to Hokkaido and Bali, but he’s stuck in boring old Tokyo. Even a trip to the grandparents’ place is hardly exotic, as they only live a few miles away in […]

September 17, 2020 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Keiichi Hara’s feature film Birthday Wonderland plays like a very traditional family fantasy, which seems to be part of its point. Given that the film tells the story of a Japanese girl travelling into a magic world, it inevitably raises thoughts of Spirited Away – which was, among other things, a plea […]

September 21, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Listless and depressed, and desperate to avoid the latest trend-conscious schoolgirl drama at school, Akane (Mayu Matsuoka) feigns an illness, which her mother Midori (Kumiko Aso) seems ready to indulge – it is going to be her birthday soon after all. Instead, she sends the pouting teenager over to Aunt Chii’s junk […]

March 7, 2016 · 0 comments

Andrew Osmond takes a step into the past. Thanks to cinema and TV, some long-ago places can feel closer to us than most present-day countries. For British people, one of the closest is Victorian England, specifically Victorian London, home to Dickens dramas, Sherlock mysteries, Martian invasions and the gory mythos of Jack the Ripper. This […]