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Monthly Archives: April 2024
11 posts
By Andrew Osmond. Rental Magica begins like a gentler, less assertive, but actually more professional Ghostbusters. The setting is modern Japan, where many different groups of magic users exist to deal with paranormal imbalances, or as the characters put it, spell wave contamination. In one episode, it’s mentioned such contaminations […]
By Zoe Crombie. Kimari is a high school student teetering on the edge of experience, wanting to live while she’s young but needing the right push to do so. That extra encouragement comes in the form of Shirase, a fellow student whose belief that her mother, a missing Antarctic explorer, […]
By Andrew Osmond. Many readers of this blog will know what a dating sim is. It’s a computer game where your character develops a romantic relationship with someone else, often one of multiple “possible” characters. Actually, the definition’s more contentious than that. That above description could apply to many Visual […]
By Andrew Osmond. The God of High School is an unusual, perhaps even unique anime, set in Korea, with Korean heroes, a Korean director, and based on a Korean comic. At the same time, it’s unquestionably anime, produced by Tokyo’s famed MAPPA studio. It did much to establish MAPPA’s reputation […]
By Andrew Osmond. Rent-a-Girlfriend is a risqué romcom about a young man going online and… It’s as the title says. College student Kazuya is smarting after he’s dumped. That’s when he finds a website offering rental girlfriends. (“For just 5,000 yen per hour,” says the site, which was about £35 […]
By Andrew Osmond. The feature film Venus Wars has a special nostalgic cachet in Britain and America, at least among fans who are old enough to remember when Akira was a “new” thing. Following the release of Otomo’s film, Venus Wars was among the first batch of SF-action anime to […]
By Andrew Osmond. One way you could pitch the anime series We Rent Tsukumogami would be to describe it as Miss Hokusai meets Bagpuss. Bagpuss, if you’re too young to remember it, was a vintage British animation about a shop that collects lost objects, dolls, carvings and the like, which […]
By Andrew Osmond. A spy, an assassin and a telepathic tot walk into a story. That’s the set-up for Spy x Family, but it’s pretty much the show’s punchline, too, repeated over and again. And we still love it. In particular, the anime’s opening and closing titles are YouTube-friendly masterworks, […]
By Andrew Osmond. My Next Life as a Villainess is one of those handy anime titles that effectively tells you the story. It opens with a hugely spoiled aristocratic little girl called Catarina being introduced to a potential future husband, a prince no less. They’re strolling around the gardens outside […]