By Tom Wilmot. It wasn’t so long ago that Gakuryu Ishii was a somewhat obscure figure in the West, despite being one of Japan’s most influential modern filmmakers. However, with the director’s seminal punk films Crazy Thunder Road (1980) and Burst City (1982) receiving stacked Blu-ray releases in recent years, Ishii is experiencing something of a cultural resurgence. Third Window Films continues to celebrate this still underappreciated champion of Japanese underground cinema with a new release for one of his most beloved cult projects, Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001). The film follows Dragon ..read more

Sight and Sound De Facto Reveals the Greatest Anime of All Time By Miles Atherton. Still from the film Akira (1988), directed by Katsuhiro Otomo Late last year, Sight and Sound magazine’s famous duo of “Greatest Films of All Time” aggregated from the top 10s of hundreds of world-renowned critics and directors respectively, hit newsstands with colossal shifts from their 2012 incarnations. The relatively-obscure Belgian film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles claimed the top spot of the Critics’ 250 picks, while Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey moved up a rank to lead the ..read more

Takahiro Kimura, who died on 5th March, first got the idea that animation might be the career for him when he saw episodes of Armoured Trooper VOTOMS and Blue Meteor SPT Layzner in his student days. “As for the university,” he later remembered, “well, I realised that if I wanted to graduate at the rate I was going, it was going to take me another eight years, so I decided to give up! I really feel sorry for my parents.” He’d chosen to apply for work at the studio that made Layzner, Anime R, because at the time there was an anime magazine column about life at the studio, and it sounded like a ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. In Levius, boxing meets steampunk; or to put it in anime terms, Megalobox (or Tomorrow’s Joe) meets Fullmetal Alchmist (or Violet Evergarden). It’s a series by the Polygon CG studio, which many readers will know for its space opera, Knights of Sidonia. Like that series, Levius was produced by Netflix and first screened on the platform. But it’s a big change of scene from Sidonia. Instead of starfields and spaceships, the setting looks decidedly British. The hero’s city has rows of terraced brick houses that could have come from the titles of Coronation Street, or from the ea ..read more

By Jonathan Clements. In the far future, the human race is extremely long-lived, but infertile. One by one, they are dying off, with no sign of a solution. In a last-ditch effort to find an answer, a cyborg agent is dispatched below ground, to the wainscot society of artificial creatures that were once the servants of mankind, but which rebelled many centuries earlier. Something is keeping the underground life-forms alive and fecund – humanity just needs to work out what it is. A pitch like that might easily be a pre-amble to an anime like Patema Inverted or Tokyo Underground. What sets Junk ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. Over The Sky, a cinema fantasy adventure, is a close relative to Keiichi Hara’s 2019 film Birthday Wonderand. They’re both family-friendly anime, without violence or vulgarity, though Over the Sky has threats and even anguish in its closing stretch. They’re both films about teenage girls entering fantasy otherworlds that do not use, or even acknowledge, the tropes of so-called “isekai” anime. By “isekai,” I mean the slew of “going to other worlds” anime since the 2010s that refer extensively to videogames, otaku culture, and each other. Instead, the films draw on older kinds ..read more

By Jonathan Clements. Producer Toshio Suzuki was entertainingly underwhelmed when he was approached by agents for the pop stars Chage and Aska, who asked if Studio Ghibli would do the video for their new single “On Your Mark.” Fact is, he said, he’d never heard of them. Later versions of the story have tried to be a bit more upbeat. No; Ghibli was enthusiastic about working with those great artistes. Oh yes, everybody was super-stoked about it. What an honour it was. Then again, while Chage and Aska sold millions of records in Japan, if a foreigner has heard of them today, it’s usually becaus ..read more

“Manga artist Leiji Matsumoto has departed for the sea of stars.” That was how his daughter Makiko Matsumoto, who heads his office Studio Leijisha, announced Matsumoto’s death on 13th February of acute heart failure in a Tokyo hospital, at the age of 85. Born in 1938, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Matsumoto grew up on Kyushu. The third largest of Japan’s four main islands, the closest to Korea, and the place where European missionaries and traders based their business before the closure of Japan to the outside world. Matsumoto took great pride in being a Kyushu native. He felt that Kyu ..read more

By Andrew Osmond. Just days after the news broke that Anime Limited licensed the soundtrack to Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume, the company has announced it also has the soundtrack to Trigun Stampede. Just to clarify, this is the brand-new series now streaming on Crunchyroll, made by the CG studio Orange (Beastars, Land of the Lustrous). It’s an all-new version of the 1990s Trigun manga by Yasuhiro Nightow, chronicling the exploits of the gunslinger Vash the Stampede, who many fans met through the first Trigun anime by Studio Madhouse. Interviewed by Anime News Network, one of the new version’s produ ..read more

By Shelley Pallis. Ichi and Tae are a pair of those perennial manga clichés, “childhood friends.” And, this being the self-aware, post-modern 2020s, Ichi has read enough manga to know what that means. Now that they are teenagers, they are sure to find themselves struggling with their feelings for each other – can they still be friends? Or can they be more than friends? Ichi is sure of it – he wants to be more than friends, and we get to see him as he bashfully hems and haws and stammers his way around trying to talk about a new area of conversation with the girl who has been his companion rig ..read more