another anime movie review

By Andrew Osmond. Shirobako opens… misleadingly, actually. Its first minutes show an animation high-school club where five close-knit girls are making their own anime mini-epic. Once that’s been done, they promise each other, they’ll join up again to make something else. And then… the story skips forward two and a half years. Two of the […] http://dlvr.it/T28YXR

By Andrew Osmond. The film Blue Giant opens in UK cinemas this Wednesday. It’s a music drama about the fortunes of three teen boys in Tokyo – sax player prodigy Dai, haughty pianist Yukinori, and greenhorn drummer Tamada – trying to make it as a jazz trio. You can read more about Blue Giant’s story […] http://dlvr.it/T20nl9

By Shelley Pallis. The story of I Could Never be a Succubus begins with a striking Gotterdammerung, as a bold hero and an evil demon lord fight for their lives in a burning castle. But this is not one-on-one, the hero is the leader of a stereotypical party of adventurers, and the adversary soon realises […] http://dlvr.it/T1tlNn

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 […] http://dlvr.it/T1lBPz

By Zoe Crombie. As one of, if not the, most popular anime studio in the world, Studio Ghibli has attracted attention from academics, authors, and journalists globally – most recently, the book Now Go: Grief and Studio Ghibli explores the studio in a fresh and highly individual way. Relating much of Ghibli’s oeuvre to personal […] http://dlvr.it/T1d1yB

By Andrew Osmond. The film’s title card reads, “Patlabor Movie 3.” The functional name is in line with the previous Patlabor films – and at least this one has an extra tag, “Wasted XIII” – but it’s the most misleading part of the movie. Released in 2001, eight years after Patlabor 2, Wasted XIII isn’t […] http://dlvr.it/T1TbHH

By Andrew Osmond. The first Patlabor film is an excellent cerebral thriller. Patlabor 2 The Movie, though, is an artistic statement. Thirty years old, it’s still the anime that feels the most like live-action. It’s only tangentially a mecha film, with the title Patlabors on screen for a fraction of the running time. This is […] http://dlvr.it/T1LvWB

By Andrew Osmond. Great Pretender is a crime-caper series, not unlike Lupin III, but less cartoon-zany. This is a hardboiled show, with sex, drugs and real-world grit; it has bold, unreal colours without feeling lurid; and its character designs are by Evangelion legend Yoshiyuki Sadamoto.  Right from the off, Great Pretender surrounds us with hustles and counter-hustles. Our viewpoint is Edamura, […] http://dlvr.it/T1BL31

By Shelley Pallis. Alpi is a wandering exorcist (or “Soul Sender”), although she is not very good at it. She has only taken on the dangerous job in an attempt to track down her missing parents, who disappeared some years earlier. But much of the appeal in “Rona’s” manga comes from the quirky way this […] http://dlvr.it/T13KbQ

By Andrew Osmond. Parasyte starts with its money shot. A husband and wife face each other in a dimmed room; then the man’s head splits and unfolds into a Venus fly-trap, with rows of teeth and a half-dozen eyes on stalks. The woman can’t scream, only gasp in halting, terrified breaths, before the thing chomps […] http://dlvr.it/T0wyV6