Tag: Shunji Iwai

January 29, 2021 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The delightful comedy-drama The Case of Hana & Alice is a kind of anime, except that it was filmed first in live-action, then converted into animation via traced drawings and CG software. The novel technique is used to tell an offbeat story. Set in contemporary Japan, it’s about two eccentric teen girls […]

November 3, 2018 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. In Britain and America, time-travel is often the pretext for a big story, and doubly so in animation. After all, T-Rexes or Terminators aren’t more expensive to animate than present-day Japan. And yet, anime often goes for the small time-travel tale. Think of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a story with […]

June 21, 2018 · 1 comment

By Andrew Osmond. If you’ve wondered about the artists who created the incredible backgrounds for Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, then meet Mateusz Urbanowicz. The Polish-born artist painted more than 120 backgrounds for Shinkai’s blockbuster (examples). He also contributed almost a hundred others to The Case of Hana and Alice (examples) and worked on an episode […]

October 9, 2017 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. School’s out for summer, but most of the boys are too deeply involved in an argument about fireworks to notice the drama unfolding elsewhere. Nazuna (Suzu Hirose), their prettiest classmate, won’t be coming back in the new term – her mother is remarrying and moving to a new town, and plans to […]

January 7, 2017 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. There was a time in the late-1990s when director Shunji Iwai possessed near celebrity status among young movie fans in Japan, the poster boy for a new breed of filmmaker who emerged neither from the moribund studio system, nor the uncompromisingly raw-edged counterculture of the 1980s independent scene, but from the image […]