Month: February 2018

Categories
Anime Editorials

Rediscovering Shonen Jump anime

Watching anime, I go through peaks and troughs.
The start of the year was a peak, but throughout February, I’ve been in a bit of a trough trying to find something new to watch and fall in love with.
At some point, I remembered that there’s a whole bunch of Shonen Jump anime that I should get back in to. I mean, I never finished Naruto Shippūden. Naruto is the reason I became an anime fan in the first place, my gateway drug. Apparently I’ve seen 573 episodes of One Piece too. I used to love One Piece and somehow it’s still going, with my last count showing 826 episodes and rising. Bloody hell, that’s a lot.

Continue reading “Rediscovering Shonen Jump anime”
Categories
Anime Reviews

Great romantic fools: The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl

In 2017, Masaaki Yuasa directed The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, which is a film set in the same fictional universe as his 2010 series The Tatami Galaxy. I really liked The Tatami Galaxy. I remember thinking that it was a more conventional (and therefore more accessible) anime than his other works at the time (Mind Game, Kemonozume and Kaiba) but it was still unmistakably his anime: raw, hyperactive and cathartic. At that same time, I didn’t know anything about its author, a certain Tomihiko Morimi, who I’ve later realised has a signature style all of his own. He wrote The Eccentric Family too.

Continue reading “Great romantic fools: The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl”
Categories
Anime Reviews

Girls’ Last Tour

Tall grass and open skies
That’s where we’ll be
Tall grass and open skies
That’s where we’ll be
Tall grass and open skies
That’s where we’ll be
That’s where we’ll meet
(Yvette Young – A map a string a light)

In Girls’ Last Tour, Earth has been ravaged. Life has been all but extinguished. A permanent winter. All that’s left are cities. Concrete jungles powered by technologies long since abandoned. In that world travel two of the last people, Yuuri and Chito, on their trusty old motorcycle. From skyscraper to subway they move, searching for food and supplies amidst the lost civilization, trying to make sense of the symbols and artifacts left behind by their parents and grandparents generation. What to us are graves, factories, transistor radios and songs, are to them a mystery. Strange, magical things.

Continue reading “Girls’ Last Tour”