By Brian Camp

The 2010 New York International Children’s Film Festival offered U.S. premieres of three Japanese animated features from 2009— Summer Wars , Oblivion Island , and Mai Mai Miracle —all shown in subtitled 35mm prints to sold-out houses of parents and enthusiastic children of all ages. From an animation perspective, all were quite spectacular-looking and boasted great imagination. Summer Wars was...

By Joseph Luster

I figured it's been a while since I've watched Neon Genesis Evangelion in its entirety, so going into Evangelion 1.11 would be kind of a fresh slate viewing, or at least a memory-jogging one. It turns out the former isn't actually possible, but it was certainly a different experience nonetheless. Coming from someone who originally watched Eva on rented VHS tapes, and then again and again on ev...

By Cody Bye

"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, a pair of star-cross'd lovers, take their life.” – William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act I My decision to take on the review of the boxed sets of Romeo X Juliet was a difficult one. When I watch anime, I typically trend towards titles that are more masculine in nature, shonen or seinen type movies and series, while staying away from the more...

By Mike Toole

I’m really not convinced of the efficacy of the “digest version” movie adaptations of so many popular anime shows.  Decades ago, they made sense; 24-hour cable TV wasn’t around, so they were used to fire interest in the stuff on TV ( Heidi ), fill in gaps in the story ( Space Runaway Ideon ), provide a much-needed ending that was precluded by the TV show being canned ( Baldios ), or revit...

by Paul Thomas Chapman

Hayao Miyazaki is his own fiercest competition. Even though his films have captured the hearts and minds of audiences both in Japan and abroad, even though Miyazaki's career as a film-maker spans decades, even though his influence in the world of Japanese animation is second only to Osamu Tezuka, even though he has rightly earned his place as a titan within the industry, I often examine his la...

By Darius Washington

Recently, I was going through some older anime magazines and saw a blurb about the impending release of the Vehicle Team Voltron DVD sets… accompanied by a pic from the Lion team. I started looking through other publications and it occurred to me there’d been very little coverage of these sets other than on one or two websites, which is very sad considering this was a pretty cool mech series i...