another anime movie review

By Andrew Osmond. This August, Makoto Shinkai’s film The Garden of Words – soon to have a new Blu-ray/CD Steelbook – will be adapted as a London stage play. It runs at the Park Theatre at Finsbury Park from 10th August 10 to 9th September; if you want to know more, I interviewed director Alexandra […] http://dlvr.it/Ssyy9X

By Andrew Osmond. Here’s a funny thing; there aren’t many out-and-out anime comedy films. Of course, there are plenty that have comedy – some of anime’s best comic characters are from films, like the indomitable trans heroine Hana in Tokyo Godfathers and the clingy BFF Tomohiro in A Silent Voice. But these films aren’t comedies; […] http://dlvr.it/SsrB27

By Jonathan Clements. Even though Gunbuster was released across three video cassettes, two episodes a time, its format preserved the two-part structure of TV anime, with a little “eyecatch” bumper at the halfway mark to imply that the show was just about to break for commercials. The chorus of voices that sings “Gunbuster~~~!” in the […] http://dlvr.it/Ssgpc4

By Tom Wilmot. In the spring before her first year of high school, the shy Yuna feels lost when her best friend moves away. However, it isn’t long before she’s thrown into the company of Akari, a spritely girl who has moved into the same apartment building. To begin with, the two couldn’t be more […] http://dlvr.it/SsYFKf

By Andrew Osmond. In 2008, The New Yorker ran an epic article on Hayao Miyazaki to accompany the release of Howl’s Moving Castle. Beautifully written by Margaret Talbot, it was a celebration of the director. But one criticism in it was telling, made by Ghibli’s other legendary director. “With Miyazaki, you have to totally believe […] http://dlvr.it/SsNppx

By Jonathan Clements. Noriko Takaya, the leading lady in Gainax’s Gunbuster, gets her first unwelcome taste of battle in the episode “First Love, First Sortie.” But as the title implies, she also finds something else, in the form of her brief encounter with the handsome American pilot Smith Toren. Toren Smith (1960-2013), for that was […] http://dlvr.it/SsFHKf

By Andrew Osmond. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the future director of Arriety, When Marnie Was There and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, was in at anime’s deep end. It was 2000, and the 26-year-old was Ghibli’s baby, the studio’s youngest key animator. He’d joined Ghibli four years before, dropping out of a commercial drawing and advertising class […] http://dlvr.it/Ss5ln3

By Andrew Osmond. This summer sees the resurgence of Studio Ghibli, as Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live? opens in Japanese cinemas on 14th July. Ghibli articles, understandably, tend to be laudatory verging on hagiographies, running through the studio’s great moments of whimsy and poetry. But one part of Ghibli’s history gets pundits’ lips curling […] http://dlvr.it/Srx0WP

By Jeremy Clarke. Teenage romance, parallel worlds and dysfunctional families are the main ingredients of The Relative Worlds, Yuhei Sakuragi’s uneasy cross between a mawkish teenage romance boy and a sci-fi action picture in the James Cameron mould. The romantic, emotional parts are gentle and almost hesitant. The science fiction, fantasy and action parts are […] http://dlvr.it/SrpBVP

By Andrew Osmond. As long as new fans are stepping tentatively into anime, there’ll always be a need for an up-to-date guidebook, helping them tell their moe from their mecha. There’ve been a great many English-language guides in the last three decades. At one end, the mammoth Anime Encyclopedia encompasses the whole medium. At the […] http://dlvr.it/SrdSmT