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And so, in Tokyo’s modern Shibuya district, nine-year-old Ren (‘the boy’) meets the gruff Kumatetsu (‘the beast’). Ren is a runaway; bear-like Kumatetsu is embroiled in a career dispute in Jutengai and needs an apprentice in the noble martial arts.
As always, Hosoda’s hand-drawn character animation is excellent, and amidst all these wondrous adventures, his focus remains firmly on the psychological subtleties. Because, just as Ren isn’t eager to be lectured, Kumatetsu truly isn’t born to teach. But their bond will grow, slowly but surely, as together they realise the role and even the importance of anger and how to manage that frightful, dark emptiness within, when you feel like everyone has abandoned you.
Relationship drama? Demonic massacre? Romcom? Supernatural adventure story? It’s the nineties, so: it’s all of the above! Toei Animation’s adaptation of Yuzo Takada’s manga series has something for everyone: from budding teen romance to bloody dismemberment – luckily, our Yakumo is immortal. Now, he only has to help that kawaii three-eyed demon become human.
The most Miyazakian film by Makoto ‘the new Miyazaki’ Shinkai (Your Name., 2016) is slightly less romantic than usual, instead focussing more on learning to cope with death and solitude. We enter a gorgeous, multicultural underworld, to which our young female protagonist Asuna and her kawaii cat Mimi are irresistibly drawn.
Anthology project with three stories by Katsuhiro Ōtomo (Akira, 1988), who himself directs final short Cannon Fodder (about a world built around cannons), after Tensai Okamura’s comedic Stink Bomb (about someone unknowingly becoming a chemical weapon) and Kōji Morimoto’s highlight Magnetic Rose, combining space adventure with creepy psychological horror – and opera.
Groundhog Day meets video game. Each time the aliens kill Rita, her day starts over again. As if she wasn’t depressed enough already.
Wonderfully energetic adventure story marked the first collaboration between director Isao Takahata and his protégé Hayao Miyazaki – later founders of Studio Ghibli. With its mythological source material (an epic of the indigenous Ainu) and socialist message (well received by 1968’s students), Horus became known as the first ‘grown-up’ anime.
Even though narrator Yuki fears this might get laughed off as a mere fairy tale, director Mamoru Hosoda has given us a grounded and deeply empathetic film, drawn from his own childhood and mother, who raised him as a single parent.