Search results
500 results, page 1 of 10
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Books: Rediscovered Classics
By Zoe Crombie. Anime has taken inspiration from Western cultures throughout much of its history, from Astro Boy’s Disney-inspired aesthetics to the gorgeous European locales of films like…
Black Tight Killers
By Tom Wilmot. Unlikely as it might be, the late Yasuharu Hasebe is one of Japan’s best-represented filmmakers overseas, with several of the director’s works making their way…
Books: Marriage, Divorce and Beyond
By Jonathan Clements. Lina is rushed to the infirmary at the edge of life, her body terribly battered and sliced by an encounter with a lethal dragon, surrounded…
Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl
by Jeremy Clarke. Deriving its odd title from a literal translation of the leads’ surnames, Katsuhito Ishii’s highly original gangster movie from 1998 is based on a familiar…
Beautiful Bones: Sakurako’s Investigation
By Zoe Crombie. Genius detective Sakurako Kujo is constantly surrounded by death, regularly finding the bones of murder victims that aid her constant study of skeletons and forensics.…
Mutsumi Inomata (1960-2024)
The artist Mutsumi Inomata, who died on 10th March, has been a ubiquitous presence in the anime world for the last forty years, even though she distanced herself…
Lupin III.6
By Andrew Osmond. Early in Lupin the Third Part 6, there’s an appearance of a bridge which Londoners will find familiar. Hungerford Bridge is one of the capital’s…
Golden Time
By Zoe Crombie. Banri Tada is a bright young student at a private law school who has just finished convalescing from a fall he experienced after his high…
The Boy and the Oscar
By Andrew Osmond. Hooray, The Boy and the Heron has won! When it snagged the Best Animated Feature Oscar last night (sorry, Spider-Verse fans), it marked only the…
Tarako (1960-2024)
“Tarako” Isono, who died on 4th March, would often contend against the media’s assessment of her. Repeatedly in interviews, she would assert that she identified as a “singer-songwriter”,…
Akira Toriyama (1955-2024)
The manga creator Akira Toriyama, who died on 1st March, was cited by the editor-in-chief of Weekly Shonen Jump as being the prime catalyst in driving the magazine…
SPY x FAMILY CODE: White – Coming to UK cinemas this April!
THE HOTTEST NEW ANIME MAKES ITS LONG-AWAITED BIG SCREEN DEBUT THIS APRIL IN SPY x FAMILY CODE: White Japan’s heartfelt and action-packed #1 box office sensation opens wide…
Somali and the Forest Spirit
By Andrew Osmond. Somali and the Forest Spirit is mostly soft and enchanting, the story of a little girl’s journey through a wondrous world, under the protection of…
Books: Anime’s Knowledge Cultures
By Jonathan Clements. The subtitle of Jinying Li’s new book, “Geek, Otaku, Zhai” alludes to the rise of fandom and fans as movers and shakers in modern media…
Mobile Suit GUNDAM SEED FREEDOM – Coming to UK cinemas from 23rd March
A BRAND-NEW CHAPTER IN AN EPIC STORY MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM SEED FREEDOM COMING EXCLUSIVELY TO CINEMAS FROM 23RD MARCH Two decades after it first wowed a generation of…
The Rise and Rise of Mari Okada
By Zoe Crombie. As far as creators of anime go, Mari Okada has experienced one of the strangest rises to power from her humble origins to her current…
A Place Further Than the Universe
By Zoe Crombie. Kimari is a high school student teetering on the edge of experience, wanting to live while she’s young but needing the right push to do…
Manga: Kafka
By Tom Wilmot. As part of its latest wave of Japanese releases, Pushkin Press has taken the plunge into the world of manga, starting with Nishioka Kyodai’s Kafka.…
Granbelm
By Zoe Crombie. Have you ever wondered what an anime series that combines the cute slice-of-life antics of magical girls with the spectacular action of giant mechs would…
Shirobako
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…
Blue Giant: Yuzuru Tachikawa Interview
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…
Books: I Could Never be a Succubus
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…
Books: Ghibli and Grief
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 –…
Patlabor XIII
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…
Patlabor 2
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…
Great Pretender
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…
Manga: Alpi the Soul Sender
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…
Parasyte ~ the maxim
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…
Anime Streaming Guide 2024
By Andrew Osmond. Unlike 2022, which saw big upheavals in anime streaming, things have been relatively stable for the last year. Crunchyroll remains the most prominent anime platform…
Manga: Poetry of Ran
By Shelley Pallis. Ran is a “Child of Impurity”, a warrior with the power to exorcise monsters, but only by taking on their curses himself. As a result,…
The Boy and the Heron
By Helen McCarthy. None of us believed that the ostentatiously non-marketed event known as “the last Hayao Miyazaki film” was actually the last Hayao Miyazaki film, and we…
Books: World of Ghibli
By Zoe Crombie. A gorgeously illustrated guide to stories, characters, and cultures of the films of the beloved studio, An Unofficial Guide to the World of Studio Ghibli…
Royal Space Force
Jonathan Clements on some of the battles behind The Wings of Honneamise. Nobody knows who it was who walked into a Tokyo coffee shop, one summer day in…
Kaiji
By Zoe Crombie. Kaiji Ito has fallen so far on hard times that he is reduced to stealing the logos off cars and slashing tyres. Japan is in…
Akame ga Kill
By Hugh David. Tatsumi is a self-acknowledged country bumpkin who is nonetheless a well-trained fighter. He and two companions leave their remote village to head to the Imperial…
Kids on the Slope
By Andrew Osmond. Kids on the Slope was the first collaboration between director Shinichiro Watanabe and composer Yoko Kanno following the iconic Cowboy Bebop. The new anime proved…
Flowers of Evil
By Andrew Osmond. Anime is often compared to live-action cinema. If so, Flowers of Evil is the cultish indy film, whose moody images sing with the torments of…
Before Shirobako
By Andrew Osmond. Shirobako is an animated series about making animation. You might think it’s something only Japan could do, as anime can go so boldly into real…
Food Wars
By Hugh David. Soma Yukihira’s old man runs a small family restaurant in the less savoury end of town. Aiming to one day surpass his father’s culinary prowess,…
Yoshiki: Under the Sky
by Helen McCarthy. Classical pianist, hard rock drummer, guitarist, composer, songwriter, producer, visual kei pioneer, founder of two record labels, fashion designer, collaborator with brands from Baccarat to…
Harmonie
By Zoe Crombie. A shy boy admires a popular girl in his class, a safe distance away from her macho ‘boyfriend’ and judgemental peers, hoping that she may…
Books: This Great Stage of Fools
By Jonathan Clements. “Aren’t you making a mistake,” asks the lady selling cinema tickets. “Almost certainly,” sighs Alan Booth, a man who came to Japan to study classical…
Gunbuster for Beginners
By Andrew Osmond. Many decades before Gunbuster, French director Jean-Luc Godard declared, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” In the 1980s a…