The first part of 2020 has certainly been great so far for cinematic anime, with releases of big movies like Weathering With You, Ride Your Wave, One Piece: Stampede and now the second film in the My Hero Academia franchise. I hope the rest of the year can keep up with this relative feast of theatrical Japanese animation. Once upon a … Read more
With Makoto Shinkai’s latest cinematic release, I come to the end of my 6-day anime movie marathon, courtesy of Scotland Loves Anime at the Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen. This was a re-run of films first shown back in October at the 2019 festival in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Technically the showing of Weathering With You that I attended wasn’t part of the … Read more
Amongst anime fans, Masaaki Yuasa is a divisive director. For every fervent evangelist of Netflix’s gory, intense Devilman Crybaby, there’s a detractor who hates the tone and subject matter. For every fan who cites The Tatami Galaxy as an epistle from God that speaks directly to their heart, there’s another who shrugs “Meh, just wasn’t my thing.” I’m … Read more
My children have designed a disturbing new ratings scheme for anime films, based on whatever substance they think the director was abusing at the time of production. Of the films from this week’s Scotland Loves Anime season at the Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen, these are their ratings so far: Psycho-Pass: Sinners of the System: Caffeine. My daughter found this really boring … Read more
Towards the end of Children of the Sea, main character Ruka states “I didn’t even understand anything that happened at all.” She’s doing an excellent job as an audience stand-in. I went into this knowing very little of what it was about and afterwards left it none the wiser. Apart from feeling overwhelmed by the gorgeous … Read more
What a way to start a 6-day cinematic anime binge than with a 3-hour-plus orgy of sci-fi violence? Yes, Scotland Loves Anime came to my local cinema and although it technically started yesterday with Weathering With You, I’ll be catching a later showing of that next week. Today I watched all three Psycho-Pass: Sinners of … Read more
With the dawning of a brand new decade, it’s time to gaze back into 2019 with 2020 vision (sorry, I couldn’t resist). I paused at regular intervals last year to provide snapshots of each season and you can read them here: Winter 2019 (middle) (end), Spring 2019 (middle) (end), Summer 2019 (middle) (end), Autumn 2019 … Read more
This is a statement of intent. Up here in the frozen north of Scotland we only rarely get the chance to experience anime on the big screen. The nearest annual film festival is Scotland Loves Anime every October at the Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh Filmhouse. Due to family illness I was unable to attend this year’s … Read more
Is it really that time again? Seems like only yesterday I wrote about Summer 2019’s anime. In my half-season scorecard article, I declared Autumn 2019’s anime to be underwhelming, and proceeded to bury myself in vintage anime to prepare for this article about 2011. Following that ordeal, I plunged headlong into my seasonal backlog, in preparation … Read more
Studio Trigger’s first full-length animated theatrical feature Promare (pronounced PRO-MAYR) was unleashed onto the unsuspecting UK public today with a widespread cinematic release. In real terms, this means that one of my local cinemas showed this movie once, this evening, and probably never again. I am glad I was able to see it. My fellow writer TheMamaLuigi has already … Read more