Thanks to a peppering of festival showings and a word-of-mouth groundswell, Redline already has a great start to it. Although being in production for five years might cast doubt on that. Premiering fourteen months prior in Locarno, Switzerland and travelling around the festival circuit before getting its UK premiere earlier in May, the volume of veracity of opinion made this my most anticipated of the Glasgow Scotland Loves Animation events. Saying it didn't disappoint would be doing it an injustice.

Praise can of course be heaped on its visuals – director Takeshi Koike's previous works such as Dead Leaves and the Animatrix's World Record are comparatively poor primers for the stylistic barrage on display here – just as scorn can be heaped on its paper thin plot. But something gels the film together, making the dog faced aliens, the trance-house soundtrack and the outright craziness work. To paraphrase the subsequent question and answer session: they put everything into the movie, chewed up the scenery, then shot it with an orbital laser.

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Jonathan Clements introducing Summer Wars

Kicking off the Scotland Loves Animation set of events was a showing of Summer Wars at the Glasgow Film Theatre. Organised by with the help from UK organisations such as Manga Entertainment, the Japan Foundation and Creative Scotland, it is the first in a series of films being shown at the GFT and later at the Edinburgh Filmhouse.

Having been earlier in the year to the UK premiere of Evangelion 2.0, it was familiar territory and the trip up from England wasn't as fraught as I had expected. The queue to enter the cinema was sizeable and with no allocated seats, I feared getting a good spot would be impossible. I was pleasantly surprised though to land in an almost central spot and for some seats to be left vacant.

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