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Anime Editorials

Noi Problem: The Awesomely Weird Characters of Dorohedoro

Looking like a cross between professional wrestlers and the Cenobites of Hellraiser, the characters of Dorohedoro are awesomely weird. Weird because it’s like watching Pinhead and Freddy Krueger sit down for a cup of tea in-between murdering a bunch of people and stuffing their bloody remains in a bin bag, and awesome because, well, what isn’t awesome about that?

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Anime Reviews

Dorohedoro episode 1 anime review

Q Hayashida’s bewildering horror manga is finally animated! Dorohedoro is a dismal, filthy anime that’s teeming with cheerful monsters and we wouldn’t have it any other way!

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Anime Reviews

The food chain: The Promised Neverland episode 8

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Manga Reviews

The swirling nothingness: Shuzo Oshimi’s vampire manga Happiness

Shuzo Oshimi’s Happiness is a beautiful clusterfuck that I can’t get enough of, but let’s get one thing clear: there’s absolutely nothing happy about Happiness.

It all begins when high-schooler Okazaki is bitten by the vampire Nora. She grants him two choices: either live like her, or die.

Really, he has no choice.

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Anime Reviews

A game of faces: The Promised Neverland episode 1

There are some early visual cues that all is not right for the orphans in The Promised Neverland.

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Anime Reviews

Dororo episode 1 is superb

This is what I needed.

Dororo episode 1 is a visual treat, with its Mushishi esque painterly backgrounds and moody period setting.

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Anime Reviews

Anxious and otherworldly: Boogiepop and Others first impressions

My gut feeling is that Boogiepop and Others won’t be a crowd-pleaser.

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Anime Reviews

Unspeakably beautiful: Devilman anime review

A belated new year’s resolution for me is to publish more posts this year than last, but rather than try to come up with a bunch of boring editorials, I went through MyAnimeList and picked out twelve anime that I want to try and write about, bringing me first to Devilman (both The Birth (1987) and The Demon Bird (1990) episodes,) the closest that anime has come to replicating the feel of an H.P. Lovecraft story, that of aeons-old demons and lost civilisations.

Like one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, it even begins with an ill-fated scientific expedition into a distant mountain range. The children of those scientists, Akira and (the totally insane) Ryou, are the protagonists, with Ryou leading Akira towards his fate as Devilman, mankind’s only opposition to the hordes of demons hell-bent on reclaiming Earth for their own. There’s nothing remarkable about that premise and there are dozens of other stories just like it, but Devilman has some fascinating, deeper hues to it than most.

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Live action Reviews

Ghosts in their own ghost stories: Shokuzai

“If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born. We are the chick-The world is our egg. If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without ever truly being born. Smash the world’s shell. FOR THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORLD!”
–Revolutionary Girl Utena

Shokuzai (Penance) is a story of people dying without ever being born. Exposed to a tragedy at a young age, it’s like they were frozen in time and encased within a shell of adolescence as they grew into adulthood. They were five girls in their school’s playground when one of them was abducted right in front of their eyes and murdered. 15 years later, we return to their lives and find them still struggling to come to terms with what happened. Stunted, empty, cursed; they could never break out of their shells. Thus began the 5 episode series Shokuzai, a 2012 Japanese TV drama directed by the horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse, Tokyo Sonata.)
When I began investigating Japanese film in 2008, Kurosawa fast became a favourite of mine. Like a Japanese Tarkovsky, his style is calm and atmospheric, using background noise and image to convey a strong feeling of alienation and disquiet. If you’ve ever seen anything from the anime directors Ryutaro Nakamura (Serial Experiments Lain, Ghost Hound) or Hiroshi Hamasaki (Texhnolyze, Shigurui,) you’ll know what to expect. Kurosawa’s made a lot of horror, but in a genre renowned for its visceral qualities, his films are unusually meditative and artful nightmares that play with the strange and surreal to emphasise an ugly and desperate reality. When even Martin Scorsese is a fan (the excellent Shutter Island owes a lot to Kurosawa,) you realise this is a filmmaker worthy of note.

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Anime Reviews

The anime-fication of Attack on Titan

This season, I’ve found myself in the fun position of having two of my favourite manga series adapted into anime. We already know how things went with Flowers of Evil, but there’s still the case of Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) to consider. Produced at Wit Studio and directed by Tetsurō Araki (of Death Note and Kurozuka, amongst others,) it’s the adaptation I was hoping for back in 2011. So, is it any good? Going by this first episode: hell yes.