Midnight Eye. 12/04.

The news Midnight Eye editors and writers Tom Mes and Jaspar Sharp seem most excited about is the imminent release of the Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. And understandably so, what with a blurb like this one from Donald Richie: "All you need to know about the cutting edge of the new Japanese film - genre animated, inventive and imaginative, violent and cool... a cinema that has reinvented itself."

Otherwise, the emphasis this issue is on Japanese animation, starting with Sharp's interview with Kihachiro Kawamoto, "a pioneer in the neglected field of stop motion puppet animation." Kawamoto was already over 40 when he met Czech animator Jiri Trnka, "and only then did I begin to understand everything there was about the puppet world." Now, nearing 80, he's working on a feature, "a long-term dream," A Book of a Dead Person (Shisha no Sho).

Michael Arnold: "[G]lobalization or no, the anime boom has been in the works for decades."

Reviews:

• Sharp on Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, "neither markedly better nor worse than any of his brilliant previous works. Neither particularly similar nor radically different, it is a film that can, and no doubt will, be savoured again and again, revealing different aspects to different people upon different viewings."

• Arnold on Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers, which "tries unsuccessfully to take sides instead of artfully running circles around the imaginary boundaries that Miyazaki, Otomo and Oshii have so skillfully exploited."

• Mes on Suzuki Matsuo's Koi No Mon, which "revolves around the turbulent romantic push and pull between a pair of manga-obsessed nerds... quite a few people's definition of two hours of fun."

And then, Sharp's roundup of a few of the highlights of the 17th Tokyo International Film Festival (October 23 -31).

Posted by dwhudson at December 6, 2004 9:10 AM