An interview with Masao Maruyama
Except it’s not even really day one of the Edinburgh part of the festival which started several days before with a packed screening of the English dub of Your Name and followed by the two Resident Evil CG films and an education day. Day one for me then.
Starting with the first film in the Eureka Seven: Hi Evolution reboot series, from the off it was clear this was not a well regarded film. I had expected the cinema to be packed yet a third of the seats remained empty, and during Jonathan Clements opening remarks, the film was described as being “unfortunately” in competition for a judges’ award.
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A review of The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl movie
Watching a film with an audience, regardless of how big or small, changes that film from being consumed, to having it performed. Many films, anime or otherwise, stand well on their own but The Night Is Short, So Walk On Girl is likely at its best projected large in front of an audience.
whip smart humour, sudden outbursts of song and rapid turns of fortune that are at once charming
It is raucous and bawdy and funny and peculiar in all the ways you’ve come to expect from a Masaaki Yuasa production, but it has a verve and energy that can only be amplified in front of a crowd. This is, after all, a film about the long, involved, drunken night out of several university students.
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A review of the first Eureka Seven: Hi-Evolution movie
Everything is a remix, or so the saying goes. The first of the three movie series reboot of Eureka Seven, labelled Hi Evolution, seems to have taken this literally. Starting with a half hour or so of brand new footage, it then switches to retelling a meaty but largely irrelevant chunk of Renton’s escapades during the TV series.
Retelling is perhaps too kind a word for what is some cleaned up, original aspect-ratio footage from the landmark fifty episode TV series, chopped and screwed into the remainder of the film’s runtime.
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A review of the first and second New Game! anime series
Up until New Game! it seemed that P.A. Works held a monopoly on the “earnest girls working earnestly” genre, one it ostensibly started back in 2011 with Hanasaku Iroha and most recently with Sakura Quest. But here’s New Game! with its, admittedly still teenage, protagonist Aoba starting work in the video game production company Eagle Jump, aiming to be a character designer like her idol, Kou Yagami.
Faithfully adapted from the 4 panel manga by Shoutarou Tokunou, the two series of New Game! follow Aoba from a furtive newbie as she navigates both working life as well as commercial creativity. The question then is, can it hold its own in the same genre as Shirobako?
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I’m off to the Edinburgh leg of the annual Scotland Loves Anime this week and the festival is important enough to me to drag me out of my self-imposed writing moratorium. So a look back as to why, and some thoughts on the significance of the festival as a whole.
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