Perfect Blue is a 1997 anime psychological thriller directed by Satoshi Kon. The film is about Mima Kirigoe, a member of a Japanese pop-idol group called “CHAM!”, who decides to pursue her career as an actress. Some of her fans are displeased with her sudden career change, particularly the stalker named Me-Mania. As her new career proceeds, Mima’s world becomes increasingly reminiscent of the works of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Philip K. Dick: reality and fantasy spiral out of control, and Mima discovers that Me-Mania is the least of her troubles. Read more…
Steamboy is a 2004 Japanese animated film, produced by Sunrise, and directed and co-written by Katsuhiro Otomo. In 1863, scientists Lloyd Steam and his son Edward have succeeded after a lengthy expedition in discovering a pure mineral water which they believe can be harnessed as an ultimate power source in steam engines (the main industrial catalyst of the time). When an experiment in Russian Alaska goes terribly wrong, resulting in Edward being engulfed in freezing gas, a strange ball-like apparatus is seen “born” from the destruction. Read more…
Origin – Spirits of the Past (Gin-iro no Kami no Agito in Japanese) is an anime film produced by Gonzo. It tells the story of Agito, a young boy living in a dystopian Japan set 300 years in the future. This apocalypse was brought about by extensive genetic engineering on trees, conducted at a research facility on Earth’s moon, in order to produce trees capable of growing in harsh, arid conditions. The trees became conscious and spread to Earth in a fiery holocaust, wiping out most of modern civilization and fragmenting the moon. Read more…
Ninja Scroll is a Japanese action thriller anime set in feudal Japan, by critically acclaimed director/writer Yoshiaki Kawajiri.
A team of Koga Ninja is sent to investigate a plague in Shimoda village, but on their way they are slaughtered. The only survivor is Kagero, who is captured and nearly raped by her assailant, a huge stone golem called Tessai. Read more…
Fullmetal Alchemist The Movie – The Conqueror of Shamballa is a 2005 Japanese anime. Directed by Seiji Mizushima and written by Sho Aikawa, it acts as a continuation of the first Fullmetal Alchemist television series.
Dragged from his homeworld of Amestris to a parallel world called Earth, Edward Elric lives in Munich, Germany, in the year 1923. Stripped of his alchemical powers and some of his limbs, he researches rocketry with Alfons Heiderich, a young man who resembles his brother, Alphonse Elric, thinking that if he uses a rocket, he can return to his world. Read more…
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a 2006 science fiction anime based twenty years after the novel Toki o Kakeru ShÅjo by Yasutaka Tsutsui. The film focuses on a high school girl who inadvertently gains the power to travel through time and begins using it frivolously to fix problems raising philosophical questions along the way. It was produced by the animation studio Madhouse and directed by Mamoru Hosoda. Read more…
Millennium Actress is a 2001 Japanese anime by director Satoshi Kon and animated by the Studio Madhouse. It tells the story of a documentary filmmaker investigating the life of an elderly actress in which reality and cinema become blurred. The narrative style is complex and interwoven in the style of “play within a play”. Read more…
Studio Ghibli, Inc. is a Japanese animation film studio, and previously was a subsidiary of Tokuma Shoten. The company’s logo features the character Totoro from Hayao Miyazaki’s film My Neighbor Totoro.
Several anime features created by Studio Ghibli have won the Animage Anime Grand Prix award including Laputa: Castle in the Sky in 1986, My Neighbor Totoro in 1988, and Kiki’s Delivery Service in 1989. In 2002, Spirited Away won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the first anime film to win an Academy Award. Read more…
The Cat Returns is a 2002 Japanese animated movie directed by Hiroyuki Morita and produced by Studio Ghibli. It follows on from the 1995 movie Whisper of the Heart about a girl writing a fantasy novel. Although the girl’s life had no magical elements, short fantasy scenes depicted what the girl was writing about. Those short scenes were so popular that fans demanded a movie be made of the fictional girl’s novel. The Cat Returns is that movie. Read more…
Whisper of the Heart (If You Listen Closely in Japanese) is a 1995 anime movie from Studio Ghibli directed by Yoshifumi Kondo with screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki and based on the manga by Aoi Hiiragi.
One summer evening in 1994, Shizuku Tsukishima, a fourteen-year old girl who is in junior high school in Tama New Town, on the outskirts of Tokyo, looks through the checkout cards in her books and notices a pattern: each book had previously been checked out by someone named “Seiji Amasawa”. Read more…
