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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 […]

By Zoe Crombie. Anime has taken inspiration from Western cultures throughout much of its history, from Astro Boy’s Disney-inspired aesthetics to the gorgeous European locales of films like Howl’s Moving Castle, and one of the most important productions in this vein is the World Masterpiece Theater series of adaptations of […]

By Tom Wilmot. Unlikely as it might be, the late Yasuharu Hasebe is one of Japan’s best-represented filmmakers overseas, with several of the director’s works making their way west over the past twenty or so years. Radiance Films continues the trend of bringing Hasebe’s trademark action movies to Blu-ray with […]

By Jonathan Clements. Lina is rushed to the infirmary at the edge of life, her body terribly battered and sliced by an encounter with a lethal dragon, surrounded by wizards chanting healing spells and administering stasis commands. It is only as she slowly recovers, her memories of the battle mercifully […]