Midnight Eye. Special issue: Anime.

Mamoru Oshii is at the center of Midnight Eye's special issue devoted to anime, beginning with Nicholas Rucka's brief but dense interview with the director in which we learn, among other things, that while Oshii was once an admirer of Tarkovsky, his isn't so much anymore.

As far as I can tell, someone forgot the byline for the review of Brian Ruh's Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii, "a welcome study of a director whose works openly invite closer analysis." Shame about the byline, though, since you'd like to know who's claiming Oshii is "one of the most significant individual figures working in Japanese cinema today."

Just have to slip in here not only mention of our own interview Oshii, but also that, in PopMatters, where Sharon Mizota reviews Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Ruh, who also edits AnimeResearch.com, conducts his own interview with Oshii within the framework of his assessment of Innocence; and it may come as a surprise to some that, when he decided to become a director, Oshii was thinking long and hard about Godard.

In the first part of a lively and opinionated overview of the 8th Puchan International Fantastic Film Festival, which took place in July (and for more, see the excellent history and report at Koreanfilm.org), Jaspar Sharp eventually zooms in on the work of three early pioneers of Japanese animation.

For this issue's round-up, Sharp and Tom Mes highlight four diverse anime features.

Reviews:

• Mes on Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy, "quite simply... not a good film."
• Sharp writes more of an intriguing production history than a review of Journey to the West, "the third feature-length colour animation ever produced in Japan."
• Andrew Cunningham considers Hideaki Anno's Cutie Honey, "the first live action anime that actually preserves the feel and look of the original series successfully. It sets the bar pretty high."

Posted by dwhudson at September 24, 2004 9:12 AM