Midnight Eye. Anime.

"The big question (apart from the obvious one of why all three of us are still interested in Japanese cartoons now that we're all the wrong side of our mid-30s) is what has changed" since Midnight Eye was launched online over five years ago, writes Jaspar Sharp in a review of a new "Revised & Expanded Edition" of the volume that "led directly to us starting our book review section," The Anime Encyclopedia. In commercial and pop cultural terms, it's a whole new world, of course, but "has the language and discourse surrounding anime really changed that much"? After wading through the Encyclopedia's sea of infobits, Sharp turns to a collection of essays, Mechademia: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, for interpretation, but: "Anime and manga may now be global phenomena, but from the evidence presented here, [the contributors'] scholarship has adopted a resolutely US-centric perspective."

Johannes Schönherr emails Hiroshi Harada to ask about the "incredibly elaborate 'freak show' events which encompass live theater, live music, acrobatic acts, wild stage settings, freaky characters let loose on the audience" that would frame screenings of Shojo Tsubaki in the 90s - all of which would be sprung as a surprise on the audience. As for the film itself, "it's animated, it's on celluloid, it is about a poor young girl who lives a hard life in a freak show circus, and its scenes often switch from being extremely kawaii to extremely graphic, violent, and at times oozing into the territory of far-out sexual fetishism."

Outside of Japan, only "obsessive manga-heads or art film fanatics" are aware of the work of Kihachiro Kawamoto, supposes Dean Bowman. "Kawamoto's embracing of puppet animation is... imbedded in a culturally specific Japanese tradition of Bunraku puppet theatre.... Despite the cultural specificity of his work, which might act as a barrier to the kind of popular appeal [Hayao] Miyazaki has enjoyed often in spite of his rather abstract approach to narrative, it is nonetheless fitting that The Book of the Dead was premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival during a retrospective of his work in 2005. In 1963 Kawamoto studied for a year in Prague under the Czech animator Jiri Trnka (The Hand), a period that was to cement his passion for the medium and exert a considerable influence on his style."

Catherine Munroe Hotes: "Released in 2005, Thinking and Drawing features a wide selection of animation styles from line drawing to CGI manipulated photographs. The subject matter ranges from feminist allegory to ghostly tales. Although each film has a short running time of between 5 and 17 minutes, the depth of meaning in each is truly astonishing. The films have shown together and separately at festivals in Europe, North America, and Australia."

Paul Jackson finds Koichi Chigira's Brave Story "so steeped in the genre traditions of fantasy cinema and video games, flaws and all, that its characters, settings and storytelling rarely rise above their familiar confines."

Posted by dwhudson at April 24, 2007 2:05 AM