*** When 19-year-old surfer Hinako moved to a seaside town to pursue her passion, she never expected the waves to be this choppy… After a fire in her apartment complex ends with her being saved by handsome firefighter Minato, she soon falls in love, and the two begin an all-too-perfect whirlwind romance that looks like […]
Read More Review: Ride Your Wave****½ One cold Christmas Eve, A baby cries in Tokyo. Where is your mother? Loosely based on the 1948 John Wayne film 3 Godfathers, Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers tells the story of three homeless outcasts who find a new-born baby abandoned on Christmas Eve and set off across the city on a quest to […]
Read More Hidden Gems: Tokyo Godfathers***½ The first feature from Trigger, the animation studio behind anime television series such as Kill La Kill and Little Witch Academia, Promare is a sci-fi actioner following a group of high-tech firefighters 30 years after a mysterious event lead to a subset of humans (known as the ‘Burnish’) gaining the ability to control fire. […]
Read More Review: Promare*** If there was ever a live-action manga adaptation that actually looked promising, Mushishi is it. Based on Yuki Urushibara’s award-winning fantasy manga and directed by Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo, the film pairs a story suited to live-action with a skilled director familiar with manga and the process of adapting it for the big screen. […]
Read More Manga Madness: Mushishi (2006)* Let’s just start with the obvious: Death Note is a mess. Watching it is like ticking off a check-list of How To Make The Worst Manga Adaptation Ever: Adaptation of a multi-volume series in under two hours? Check. Nonsensically altering the plot to make it ‘appeal to a Western audience’? Check. Completely missing the […]
Read More Manga Madness: Death Note (2017)* Released in 2000, Production I.G.’s Blood: The Last Vampire stands out for its atmospheric visuals, stylish direction, and stunning digital animation. Directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo from a tight script written by Kenji Kamiyama (who would later go on to helm the acclaimed Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series), it told the story […]
Read More Manga Madness: Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)** “It’s not like there aren’t any East Asian actors who could have done a good job as the Major.” This was me, to my dad, during the height of the Ghost in the Shell whitewashing scandal. Ever clued-up on the workings of the film industry, he rightly pointed out that the film would likely […]
Read More Manga Madness: Ghost in the Shell (2017)Death Note: *** Death Note: The Last Name: ***½ With a manga as world-conquering as Death Note (the series was banned in China, supposedly inspired a gruesome copycat murder in Belgium, and caused havoc in US schools, where students were disciplined for filling replica notebooks with the names of fellow students, teachers, and in one […]
Read More Manga Madness: Death Note and Death Note: The Last Name (2006)***** Ever since her swift rise to fame in the twilight years of World War Two, actress Chiyoko Fujiwara was the brightest star of the Japanese film industry, inspiring dedicated fans across the country. She was the ‘it girl’, the heroine, the princess. And then she was gone. Years after her sudden and unexplained disappearance […]
Read More Hidden Gems: Millennium ActressRurouni Kenshin: *** Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno: **** Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends: *** In the golden days before mangaka Nobuhiro Watsuki experienced his undeservedly brief fall from grace in 2017, the phrase Rurouni Kenshin only conjured thoughts of exciting samurai action rather than uncomfortable conflict about the ethics of consuming a story created by […]
Read More Manga Madness: Rurouni Kenshin Trilogy (2012-2014)