Rounding out Saturday's events for the Scotland Loves Animation Glasgow festival was the UK premiere of Trigun: Badlands – the long awaited movie sequel to the TV series which, hard as it is to believe, concluded twelve years ago. With both the movie and series producer, Shigeru Kitayama, and director, Satoshi Nishimura present for the inaugural showing, it was quite the special event.

Kicking off with a short introduction from both via the accomplished translator Bethan Jones, Nishimura commented that he knew the film wouldn't win any awards and that it would be better if we (the audience) had a beer in one hand and a bucket of popcorn in the other, but he hoped we would have fun laughing our heads off and running around with outlaws in the film. Kitayama echoed his sentiments and after a nervous and slightly haphazard juggling act at the solitary microphone, the film started.

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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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