Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You
By Zoe Crombie. Nasa: a space loving teenager who has turned an embarrassing name into a life goal, and who has just walked in front of a moving truck. The reason for his foolish actions and his ultimate saviour: a mysterious girl who proposes marriage when Nasa suddenly declares his feelings. The result: an adorable, […]
Navigating this Blog
Although only the most recent three weeks of posts are visible on this blog’s front page, you can navigate through the previous nine years of articles using the tags. Click on these links to find our world-class obituaries and book reviews, or coverage of Japan and China. You can read the Hugo award-winning Jeannette Ng […]
Rental Magica
By Andrew Osmond. Rental Magica begins like a gentler, less assertive, but actually more professional Ghostbusters. The setting is modern Japan, where many different groups of magic users exist to deal with paranormal imbalances, or as the characters put it, spell wave contamination. In one episode, it’s mentioned such contaminations have caused everything from the […]
Trapped in a Dating Sim
By Andrew Osmond. Many readers of this blog will know what a dating sim is. It’s a computer game where your character develops a romantic relationship with someone else, often one of multiple “possible” characters. Actually, the definition’s more contentious than that. That above description could apply to many Visual Novels where relationships are important […]
God of High School
By Andrew Osmond. The God of High School is an unusual, perhaps even unique anime, set in Korea, with Korean heroes, a Korean director, and based on a Korean comic. At the same time, it’s unquestionably anime, produced by Tokyo’s famed MAPPA studio. It did much to establish MAPPA’s reputation for frenzied action anime, and […]
Rent-a-Girlfriend
By Andrew Osmond. Rent-a-Girlfriend is a risqué romcom about a young man going online and… It’s as the title says. College student Kazuya is smarting after he’s dumped. That’s when he finds a website offering rental girlfriends. (“For just 5,000 yen per hour,” says the site, which was about £35 when the series was broadcast […]
Venus Wars
By Andrew Osmond. The feature film Venus Wars has a special nostalgic cachet in Britain and America, at least among fans who are old enough to remember when Akira was a “new” thing. Following the release of Otomo’s film, Venus Wars was among the first batch of SF-action anime to be marketed as anime in […]
We Rent Tsukumogami
By Andrew Osmond. One way you could pitch the anime series We Rent Tsukumogami would be to describe it as Miss Hokusai meets Bagpuss. Bagpuss, if you’re too young to remember it, was a vintage British animation about a shop that collects lost objects, dolls, carvings and the like, which come alive and talk among […]
Music: Spy x Family
By Andrew Osmond. A spy, an assassin and a telepathic tot walk into a story. That’s the set-up for Spy x Family, but it’s pretty much the show’s punchline, too, repeated over and again. And we still love it. In particular, the anime’s opening and closing titles are YouTube-friendly masterworks, visions of domestic family bliss […]
My Next Life as a Villainess
By Andrew Osmond. My Next Life as a Villainess is one of those handy anime titles that effectively tells you the story. It opens with a hugely spoiled aristocratic little girl called Catarina being introduced to a potential future husband, a prince no less. They’re strolling around the gardens outside the family mansion when Catarina […]