Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis
By Jonathan Clements. Detective Shunsaku Ban and his nephew-assistant Kenichi arrive in Duke Red’s city of the future on the trail of an organ-trafficking doctor. But the city is coming apart, with Duke Red’s adopted son Rock leading a predatory police force, and the enslaved robot population scapegoated as the cause of all ills. Meanwhile, […]
Ghost in the Shell: Innocence
By Andrew Osmond. Dolls, dogs, gods, children and their relationships with neurotically self-conscious humanity come under philosophical investigation in Mamoru Oshii’s sequel to his film, Ghost in the Shell. Rendered in a blend of drawn and computer animation, the sequel’s first half looks like a sleekly beautiful variant on the future-noir aesthetic of Blade Runner, […]
Phoenix: Reminiscence of Flower
By Jonathan Clements. On a distant, desiccated planet wistfully named Eden, colonists George (Yosuke Kubozuka) and Romi (Rie Miyazawa) play at being Adam and Eve. They have a long road ahead of them if they are to ever terraform the planet and make it truly habitable for human life. For now, they are obliged to […]
Tekkonkinkreet
By Jasper Sharp. Directed by the LA-born Michael Arias, and adapted from Taiyo Matsumoto’s cult manga of the same name, Tekkonkinkreet depicts the adventures of two young street urchins named Kuro and Shiro (“Black” and “White”) as they run riot around the aptly-named Takara-Machi (Treasure Town), leading a feral existence far removed from the other […]
The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store
By Jonathan Clements. There’s something weird about the Hokkyoku Department Store – all the customers are animals. There’s an owl who can’t find a something to placate his wife; there’s a wolf in search of a proposal gift to win another wolf’s heart; there’s a sea mink that just can’t find the right present for […]
Galaxy Express 999
By Helen McCarthy. Rintaro’s 1979 film Galaxy Express 999 travels a very considerable distance, goes faster than you might expect, but skips a number of stations. And the infrastructure still isn’t complete, so some destinations remain unreachable… a bit like Crossrail. In Japanese rail parlance, both Crossrail and Galaxy Express 999 the movie are limited […]
G Gundam
By Andrew Osmond. For some fans, G Gundam is the series with a giant robot that looks like an American footballer, complete with shoulder pads. Or maybe it’s the show with the British Gundam (“John Bull Gundam”) that looks like a Beefeater, or the Canadian Gundam (“Lumber Gundam”) that wields twin axes. Or the Chinese […]
Princess Jellyfish
By Andrew Osmond. Princess Jellyfish is an unusual name, which fits a most unusual anime. This eleven-part series is a sitcom that might turn into a romcom, in which the two main characters are a painfully shy girl with a passion for jellyfish, and a stunning princess who happens to be a boy (and the […]
Deiji Meets Girl
By Andrew Osmond. Deiji Meets Girl is an anime that plays with anime formats and storytelling, in ways that may bewilder newcomers to the medium, though fans will latch onto the joke fast. The anime itself has been shown in different ways. It was first screened on Japanese TV as a series of twelve very […]
Buichi Terasawa (1955-2023)
The manga artist Buichi Terasawa, who died on 8th September, enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in the 1980s, becoming popular just as his particular brand of lurid, violent sci-fi formed the fuel for the early 1990s boom in adult anime. He was born plain Takeichi Terasawa in Hokkaido – he would use the alternate […]