Lonely Castle in the Mirror
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 […]
Vampire in the Garden
By Andrew Osmond. Vampire in the Garden is a girl-meets-girl story, set in a wintry wonderland. One girl is human, the other a vampire, but they share a longing to escape their world of war and death. It’s very plainly a girls’ love story, though some viewers may complain that it can’t fully speak its […]
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
By Andrew Osmond. Mars: 2071. Spike Spiegel is a “cowboy” bounty hunter, loosely allied with cyborg ex-cop Jet, gambler Faye and female hacker Edward. Faye is tracking a criminal hacker called Lee when a tanker explodes on a highway, spreading an unknown virus that attacks the brain. With a record bounty on the perpetrators’ heads, […]
The Animatrix
By Andrew Osmond. Warner Brothers’ acquaintance with anime has twin foundations: a yellow rodent and a red pill. Warner Brothers’ handling of Pokémon and The Animatrix reflect the opposite ways that Western distributors sold anime abroad in the early twenty-first century: either conceal its Japanese origins, or else make them a selling point. Pokémon was […]
Books: Anime — A History
By Zoe Crombie. Since its initial release in 2013, Jonathan Clements’ Anime: A History has served as a unique resource for anyone looking to contextualise their love of anime. The just-published new edition elucidates this complex history further with newly added sections on timely conversations around the medium. Refreshingly, Clements’ book doesn’t adhere to the […]
Summer Ghost
By James L. Perkins. After working as an illustrator and character designer on light novels, manga and anime features such as the gut-punching and emotional I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, and the heartfelt romantic tale of Josee, The Tiger and The Fish; new director loundraw (no caps… just because) truly exploded onto the scene […]
Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom
By Shelley Pallis. After a millennium of warfare, the rival kingdoms of Alhamit and Balkari have finally fought each other to a standstill. In a frankly ill-conceived plan to create dynastic harmony, Alhamit agrees to send its most beautiful princess to marry a prince of Balkari. Balkari agrees in return to send its cleverest prince […]
To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts
By Andrew Osmond. War wracks you with terrible transformations, and turns you into a monster. To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts takes place in an alternate America, renamed Patria, and begins in the fire of its civil war. In this world, the Southerners are winning, their firepower reducing the enemy to bloody meat (it’s plain from […]
Komada: A Whisky Family
By Jonathan Clements. Thirty-something Rui Komada (voiced by Saori Hayami) is torn between pursuing her personal dreams and turning around her ailing family business, a whisky distillery that has been struggling to cope with declining drinking habits and supply-chain issues in the aftermath of a natural disaster. After her father’s death, she inherits a company […]
Macross Plus: The Movie
By Andrew Osmond. Released twenty-eight years ago, Macross Plus: The Movie still dazzles now, a film that somehow manages to combine plane dogfights and space duels (think Star Wars meets Top Gun); a melancholy drama about former friends tormented by their ruined past; and an AI pop-goddess who seems far less fantastical in the age […]