Obits 18
Nobuhiko Obayashi & Hanagatami
By Jasper Sharp. Hanagatami (2017) has to be among the most important Japanese films of the last 20 years. This sweeping, emotive and flamboyant tale of love and friendship among a group of six college-age teenagers whose lives are about to be changed irrevocably by WW2 is an undisputable masterpiece for Nobuhiko Obayashi, a filmmaker […]
Jay Benedict (1951-2020)
Jay Benedict, who died on Saturday from coronavirus complications, was not a well-known name, but a well-known voice in anime. As one of the few American actors resident in London in the 1980s and 1990s, he was called up on multiple occasions to provide voices on “midlantic” dubs. Most notably for viewers of a certain […]
Sankichiro Kusube (1938-2020)
Sankichiro Kusube, who died of liver cancer on the 20th March, did not lend his name to many anime productions, even though he worked on dozens. A high-ranking producer at A-Pro, and then at its successor studio Shin Ei, he used to say that the production credits should belong to the people who were actually, […]
Mariko Miyagi (1927-2020)
Mariko Miyagi, who died on Saturday from malignant lymphoma, supposedly left her acting career behind in the 1980s, but remained prominent in the public eye for many further decades. A teenage vaudeville performer in the dying days of the Second World War, she swiftly rose to media stardom in the post-war era, initially as the […]
Hisashi Katsuta (1927-2020)
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 […]