After twenty-five years of fans debating, discussing, speculating and impatiently waiting, Hideaki Anno finally brings his Evangelion saga to a conclusion in the feature Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.01: Thrice Upon a Time, airing on Amazon Prime. The broadcast series Neon Genesis Evangelion debuted in October, 1995. Eerie female voices exhorted, “Zankoku na tenshi no you […]

GKIDS’ latest feature from celebrated director Masaaki Yuasa (Mind Game, Ride Your Wave) Inu-Oh, is an Official Selection of the 2021 Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. The film will make its world debut at the Venice Film Festival in the Horizons section, followed by its North American premiere in the Toronto International […]

Kenji Iwaisawa’s offbeat On-Gaku: Our Sound (2019) has attracted a loyal following in the US; it even earned an Annie nomination for Independent feature. Although it’s based on a self-published manga by Hiroyuki Ohashi, Iwaisawa wrote the screenplay, directed the film and animated it almost single-handedly. He simply couldn’t afford professional animators; the film’s shoestring […]

Netflix is developing a CG-animated feature film Ultraman in partnership with Tsuburaya Productions and Industrial Light and Magic. Ultraman joins Netflix’s fast growing original slate of animated features which includes Academy Award nominated Klaus, Kris Pearn’s The Willoughbys, Academy Award Nominated Over the Moon from Glen Keane; as well as the Fall 2021 comedy Back […]

Those bad bad humans. Chopping down forests. How dare they displace Hei from his home! Hei, a magical spirit in the form of a wide-eyed cat, finds himself transported to the Big City. There, he’s attacked by a trio of human thugs, but rescued by a fellow shape-changer named Stormend. Hei joins Stormend’s unnamed faction […]

Many recent anime TV programs reflect Japan’s daunting socio-economic problems in the post-Bubble economy: An aging, shrinking population; a bleak financial future that makes many young people undesirable as potential marriage partners; growing economic inequality; the persistent trauma from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident Westerners call Fukushima—and the government’s ineffectual response to it.