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 Korean comic. At the same time, it’s unquestionably anime, produced by Tokyo’s famed MAPPA studio. It did much to establish MAPPA’s reputation for frenzied action anime, and it’s a direct precursor to MAPPA’s subsequent hit, Jujutsu Kaisen – which would be started by the same director, Sunghoo Park, The set-up of God of High School is comically generic. It’s set in the present-day world, but a world where “God of High School” is a massive marti ..read more

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. That’s when he finds a website offering rental girlfriends. (“For just 5,000 yen per hour,” says the site, which was about £35 when the series was broadcast in 2020, and about £27 as of writing). As to whether rental girlfriends are anime fantasies like alien girlfriends, or whether they’re really a thing in Japan… We’ll get to that later. Soon Kazuya is sitting in a café with a gorgeously beautiful, smiling girl. The script c ..read more

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 young to remember it, was a vintage British animation about a shop that collects lost objects, dolls, carvings and the like, which come alive and talk among themselves. We Rent Tsukumogami has a similar idea, except that its focus shifts between the talking objects and their human neighbours, who live in Edo, the city that’ll one day be Tokyo. Edo has been shown in many period anime, but Tsukomogami feels particularly close to the Miss Ho ..read more

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 punchline, too, repeated over and again. And we still love it. In particular, the anime’s opening and closing titles are YouTube-friendly masterworks, visions of domestic family bliss that you thought vanished with 1950s advertising. These titles are accompanied by multiple songs. Arguably the biggest earworm is the peppy “Souvenir” by Bump of Chicken, which was the opening song for the second half of the first season. It was quickly embedded in Toky ..read more

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 aristocratic little girl called Catarina being introduced to a potential future husband, a prince no less. They’re strolling around the gardens outside the family mansion when Catarina trips on a loose paving stone, bashes her head very hard… and is shocked when a lifetime of memories pours into her. Before she was Catarina, she was a Japanese girl in “our” world, who died in that standby of anime reincarnations, a road accident. But that’s onl ..read more

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 Howl’s Moving Castle, and one of the most important productions in this vein is the World Masterpiece Theater series of adaptations of Western children’s books. Bringing new attention to this frequently forgotten series, anime scholar Maria Chiara Oltolini’s new book Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation: The Adaptation of Children’s Novels into the World Masterpiece Theater Series explores the origin ..read more

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 west over the past twenty or so years. Radiance Films continues the trend of bringing Hasebe’s trademark action movies to Blu-ray with the release of his electrifying directorial debut, Black Tight Killers (1966). War photographer Honda (Akira Kobayashi) returns from Vietnam and immediately falls for air hostess Yoriko (Chieko Matsubara). However, their first date is suddenly interrupted when Yoriko is whisked away by a ..read more

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 by wizards chanting healing spells and administering stasis commands. It is only as she slowly recovers, her memories of the battle mercifully lost, that her carers start to ask the difficult questions. Why was a black knight fighting such a beast without support? Where were the magical talismans that all black knights should carry? Why was she so under-supported? Where, in fact, was her husband? Takasugi Naturu’s cod-Victorian fanta ..read more

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 plot: a man runs off with the mob’s money, and a lady companion. Or, as pioneering French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard once put it: all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl has much the same strengths as Godard when he’s on form. Ishii demonstrates a similar flair for taking actors or actresses and having them do what they do on camera so that it’s completely absorbing to wa ..read more

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. Accompanying Sakurako on her deadly excursions is high school student Shotaro Tatewaki, a grounding influence who keeps some of Sakurako’s more questionable impulses in check. Together, the pair solve mysteries, combining an unrivalled knowledge of human anatomy with an innate ability to understand those around them in their quest to get to the bottom of each case, and hopefully solve the mystery linked to each ..read more