The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Anime refers to Animation produced in Japan. Anime has a number of distinctive differences from regular mainstream animation. It deals with subject matter in often more complex ways than the formulas of US animation, which is largely perceived as being for children.
Anime can be recognised by distinctive features. One of these is the design of the characters, which often (although not always) come with oversized eyes that can take up half their face. Other features can include wild and colourful hair or elongated bodies that can be three-quarters legs.
Anime can be pitched to young girls (shoujo) or young boys (shonin). There is also a body of anime that has often perverse sexual content (hentai). Plots covers fantasy subjects, talking animals, animal transformation and epic fantasy, or science-fiction themes like Cyberpunk, space opera, superhero and power-suit fantasies.
One distinctive genre to emerge from anime was that of the giant robot genre of 1960s tv, concerning giant human-powered robots and Mecha. This led to the Transformers fad of the 1980s, an anime tv series designed as a spinoff of the toy line.
Anime had been produced since the 1910s, gained popularity in the 1960s and 70s primarily on tv. The breakthrough film was Akira (1988), which created a cult for anime in the West. This had led to a fandom that has its own conventions and fans who cosplays as characters. Anime fandom has grown to the extent that there is now a far larger audience for anime outside of Japan than among native Japanese audiences.
From the 1990s onwards, there have been a number of live-action film adaptations of anime, made both by Japanese and Hollywood filmmakers. These are covered under Animation in Live-Action.
Mamoru Hosoda conducts the bizarre notion of an anime version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is a Hamlet that Shakespeare would barely recognise, following a heroine as she makes a journey across the afterlife
An anthology of short anime pieces from various directors, including creator Katsuhiro Otomo, the cult creator of Akira. The four episodes vary from historical to fantasy to futuristic warfare and, as with any anthology, vary in quality from the okay to the watchable
From Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, an anime that seems a mix of Biggles and Never Let Me Go, all taking place in an alternate world. The film is exquisite in its detail
The great Osamu Dezai makes a colourful anime that jumps aboard the Stars Wars space opera fad
Anime film spun off from a popular Japanese tv series. Despite crude animation, this has a colourful vigour and taps the same space opera vein as Star Wars, which came only three months earlier
The brooding space pirate Captain Harlock is one of the famous anti-heroes in manga and anime. Harlock gets a big screen revamp here from Shinji (Appleseed) Aramaki, one of the most amazing of modern anime directors, who delivers a series of epic space battles with a breathtaking beauty
One of the masterpieces of Hayao Miyazaki, a gentle, beautiful work of anime set in an afterlife bathhouse where Miyazaki’s range of extraordinary creatures and quiet tenderness finds something that Western fantasy rarely ever comes near
Katsuhiro Otomo overseen anime about the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an alien artifact that gives a child vast psychic powers in a swathe of destruction not dissimilar to Akira
The importation of anime director Shinji Aramaki to helm the latest Starship Troopers film provides dazzling animation and hardware, along with some hard, furious military action that easily outstrips all the other films. On the other hand, the film never goes beyond being about soldiers shooting up bugs
The fifth of the films in the series begun with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The best of the series was the previous entry Starship Troopers: Invasion where they turned it over to anime director Shinji Aramaki. This is a sequel to that, although the same mix fails to work again
Sixteen years after making Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo returns to direct a full-length anime, making a Steampunk work that is dazzling in its epic quality and vistas of mass destruction
Beautifully made Mamoru Hosoda film about a rogue A.I. taking over a social media network. A film that is also a heartwarming work about family togetherness
Beautifully made anime from Makoto Shinkai about a young girl and a three-legged chair on a quest to close a series of portals across Japan and prevent unimaginable chaos emerging
Studio Ghibli adaptation of a classic Japanese folktale from Hayao Hiyazaki’s mentor Isao Takahata. This is a slower, very different film than Hayao Miyazaki’s, the animation designed like a traditional Japanese woodprint. Never quite soars like Miyazaki’s films do but not without its charms
Hayao Miyazaki’s son Goro more than capably takes up his father’s mantle in a anime beautiful adaptation of one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s later Earthsea books
Grungy low tech anime that comes out like a sarcastic version of Hello Kitty
Likeable and charming Japanese anime for children about a young boy of hubris who sets out on a series of adventures
Anime about two homeless boys living in an inner city neighbourhood. The background artwork has a stunning degree of detail such that the city almost becomes its own character
Fascinating anime about a cafe for androids. Imagine a cross between an Isaac Asimov Robot story and Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. The film opens up in a series of episodes that tell stories of human-robot relations that hold a lovely tenderness
Multiverse films are all the in-thing in superhero films right now. This anime is a treatment of multiverse themes far away from superheroics that works beautifully in its sophistication of ideas
aka The Fantastic Adventures of Unico Japan. 1981. Crew Director – Toshio Hirata, Screenplay – Masaki Tsuji, Based on a Story by Osamu Tezuka, Producer – Shintaro Tsuji, Music – Ryo Kitayama, Art Direction – Akio Sugino. Production Company – Sanrio. Plot The gods are jealous of the young unicorn boy Unico who can bring […]
The first of two OVA sequels to the anime classic Legend of the Overfiend, this lacks the perverse imagery of the original
Cult anime about a monosyllabic vampire hunter moving across a hallucinatory post-apocalyptic dispatching mutants and vampires
Yoshiaki Kawajiri, director of Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, steps in to make a sequel(?)/reboot(?) to the cult 1985 anime with visually enthralling regard
Anime film about an android-overrun future Japan that resembles another episode of the Appleseed franchise
From Makoto Shinkai who made Your Name., a lovely anime about a girl who can control the weather. An odd premise about orphans that soon develops unusual and unexpected depths
A ghost story from Studio Ghibli – although rather than any Western equivalent that sets out to scare the pants off us, this is a sweetly tender story of friendship between two girls. The result more than capably approaches some of Hayao Miyazaki’s best
A sweet and quite lovely anime where a girl befriends the boy she pines after being offered a mask that transforms her into a cat body – only to then have her own body stolen
Anime from Yoshiaki Kawajiri about a war with a demon dimension that falls halfway between H.P. Lovecraft and a hard-boiled detective thriller and brims over wit fascinatingly pathological sexual imagery
Little-seen but beautifully made anime set in an alternate timeline where a young man becomes the volunteer for the first space launch
Mamoru Hosoda proves himself as one of the major directors in anime with this tender, lovely and enormously affecting work about a mother raising two werewolf children.
Anime involving a superheroic battle for the fate of the world. Dazzling eye candy but too many characters and subplots make things confusing
Makoto Shinkai anime that starts as a light and fluffy piece about a boy and a girl who keep waking up in each other’s bodies but expands out into a wholly different story, gaining unexpected emotional depths
An animated film based on the hit playing card phenomenon, which proves largely incomprehensible to anybody not versed in the game
A very rare anime film about a fairy who descends to Earth from the heavens and takes the side of downtrodden peasants in standing against a greedy landowner and a demon god