Tag: 2D animation

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Animation Features Movies

Princess Mononoke
(Mononoke-hime,
もののけ姫)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 1997 – Japan – Cert. PG – 134m

*****

The groundbreaking, mythological Japanese animated epic returns to UK cinemas from Friday, 17th October 2025

Originally reviewed for What’s On in London when the film appeared in the Barbican’s 2001 Studio Ghibli season. It never got a proper theatrical release in the UK at the time. The review presents a fascinating snapshot of the cinema landscape in the UK from the time when, outside of anime fandom, film journalists, and industry insiders, Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki were largely unknown.

Film critics are occasionally privileged to see incredible films that, for one reason or another, never receive proper UK release. The Barbican is currently hosting a season of 11 films by Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli (Jib-Lee), an animation company as familiar in Japan as Disney is here, that fall into exactly this category. They include Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and his imaginative fantasy epic Princess Mononoke (1997). Both took the Japanese box office by storm, the latter topping $150m putting it second only to Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Miyazaki’s latest Spirited Away (2001) has topped the Japanese box office for weeks.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Perfect Blue
(Pafekuto Buru,
パーフェクトブルー)

Director – Satoshi Kon – 1997 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 81m

*****

Multi-layered, identity crisis psycho thriller redefines the boundaries of animation, Japanese or otherwise – back out in cinemas in a 4K Restoration on Friday, October 10th

During a gig by girl pop trio CHAM, one of its three singers Mima announces her decision to quit the band. Her intention to pursue an acting career is a move designed to both help her escape the inevitable waning popularity of the pop idol and make the public take her more seriously than they would the innocent girl they perceive her pop idol / persona to be.

Her agent, a former pop idol herself, expresses concern when Mima is first required to play a rape scene in her new daytime TV soap Double Bind and second to pose nude for a photographer. But there’s worse to come for Mima as an internet fan page starts to chronicle an idealised version of her life and a series of bloody corpses start piling up in her wake.

Although it plays like an Argento or De Palma Hitchcockian thriller, Perfect Blue is in fact a cel animated, subtitled Japanese affair that once and for all kills off widespread misconceptions about animation – it’s neither for kids, nor cute, nor simplistic.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Glassworker
(Sheesha Gar,
شیشہ گ)

Director – Usman Riaz – 2024 – Pakistan, Spain – Cert. 12a – 98m

*****

The son of a pacifist glassblower learning his father’s trade falls for the violin-playing daughter of an army colonel in wartime – complex, animated, anti-war drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th

If you knew nothing about this animated film beforehand, you’d assume it to be Japanese. Love it or hate it, most animation made in Japan falls within very distinctive, stylistic, visual parameters. According to the press blurb, director Riaz is an admirer of Studio Ghibli directors Miyazaki and Takahata as well as more recent directors Mamoru Hosoda and Satoshi Kon. Visually, the film feels more like a Miyazaki than anything else, and of comparable quality too. Yet it’s also highly original, and Riaz, here directing his first feature after a number of shorts, clearly has his own voice.

It opens with a frame story about youthful glassblower Vincent Oliver (voice: Sacha Dhawan) who, with the help of his father, is preparing for the opening of his debut glassware exhibition. He rereads a letter from a girl which his father (voice: Art Malik) had told him years ago to destroy in their workshop’s furnace.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Mars Express
(Mars Express)

Director – Jérémie Périn – 2023 – France – Cert. 15 – 85m

*****

In the 23rd Century, a private investigator and her resurrected robot assistant go to Mars to investigate the murder of a cybernetics student – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 13th from the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The difference between humans and machines is one of the great themes of science fiction from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) to Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995). Mars Express takes its name from an Earth-Mars shuttle which, following a bravura action / chase sequence early on, not unlike the one at the start of Ghost in the Shell, is used by private investigator Aline Ruby (voice: Léa Drucker from Custody, Xavier Legrand, 2017) and her assistant Carlos Rivera (voice: Daniel Njo Lobé) to transport a captured suspect from Earth to Mars where, it transpires on arrival, the relevant paperwork to detain their prisoner has been wiped from their on-person devices and internet-accessible office, meaning they are forced to release their prisoner. The narrative is littered with cleverly thought out ideas like this.

The setting is the 23rd Century and mostly Mars, where the pair are hired to search for a second year cybernetics student who has gone missing.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Most Precious
of Cargoes
(La Plus Précieuse
des Marchandises)

Director – Michel Hazanavicius – 2024 – France – Cert. 12a – 81m

*****

In Winter in a forest, a poor woodcutter’s wife rescues an abandoned baby thrown from a passing train and, despite her husband’s misgivings, raises the girl as her own – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 4th

Once upon a time… In the woods through which many trains pass… In a war… Yes, that war… In Winter, when everything is under snow… The wife (voice: Dominique Blanc from La Reine Margot, Patrice Chéreau, 1994; Indochine, Régis Wargnier, 1992) of a poor woodcutter, unable to have children, is outside and prays to the Gods of the Trains. Whether they hear her and look upon her kindly, or whether they even exist, it’s impossible to say. Following her prayer, however, she hears the sound of a baby crying. How did the baby get there? Well, unbeknownst to the woman, a man in a goods wagon threw it out of a passing train. She locates the baby girl, takes it home, feeds it. It’s the child she never had.

Her husband, the woodcutter (voice: Grégory Gadebois from Everything Went Fine, François Ozon, 2021; Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius, 2017), on returning home, discovers the baby and is furious.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Ghost Cat Anzu
(Bakeneko Anzu-chan,
化け猫あんずちゃん)

Director – Yoko Kuno, Nobuhiro Yamashita – 2024 – Japan – Cert. N/C 15+ – 97m

****

When her father leaves to sort out his loan shark debt problem, a man-sized, ghost cat is charged to look after her by her grandfather – animated fable plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March

A man, his arm in plaster, drags his daughter to the picturesque town of Iteru, self-proclaimed Town of Eternal Summer. The demeanour of down-at-heel Karin (voice: Noa Goto) couldn’t be more at odds with that sentiment. Climbing the steps to the local temple to arrive at the door of the monk’s residence, Tetsuya (voice: Munetaka Aoki) proclaims to his father his return, and the fifth grade status of his schoolgirl daughter. What’s he doing now, his father asks. “This and that,” comes the reply. His wife, the girl’s mother, died three years ago.

While Karin is outside looking at a giant statue of Buddha, a human-sized cat arrives on a motorcycle fielding mobile phone calls. Who are you?, the cat (voice: Mirai Moriyama) asks the girl. Tetsuya, meanwhile, asks his father for money to pay off a loan shark and is told never to show his face there again.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Detective Conan
The Million-Dollar Pentagram
(Meitantei Konan
Hyakuman Doru
no Michishirube,
名探偵コナン
100万ドルの五稜星)

Director – Chika Nagaoka – 2024 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 111m

****

Spin-off from a hugely populardetective mystery manga and anime franchise – and Japan’s biggest box office success of 2024 – impresses on the level of eye-candy provided you don’t attempt to follow the overly convoluted plot – out on UK digital from Monday, March 3rd 2025

Japanese property Detective Conan is huge, running as a serialised manga in Weekly Shonen Sunday for 30 years, and turned into an anime series two years after that. By 2024, the manga has been collected into over a hundred volumes, while the franchise has spawn both animated and live action features among other things. The current film is the 27th animated feature, and at the time of writing is the biggest film at this year’s Japanese box office.

It may not be a good place to start with the franchise. Unlike Spy x Family Code: White (Kazuhiro Fusuhashu, Takashi Karagiri, 2023), which does a surprisingly effective job at getting the newcomer up to speed on a well-established anime franchise, Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram doesn’t bother to explain its characters and their complex network of relationships, so you may find yourself completely lost before it starts throwing its increasingly convoluted plot developments at the viewer (as it does almost immediately with disorienting speed).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Chang’an
(Chang’an San Wan Li,
长安三万里,
lit. 3 000 Miles from Chang’an)

Directors – Xie Junwei, Zou Jing – 2023 – China – Cert. 12a – 168m

****

General Gao Shi of the Tang dynasty recounts his life, his struggle to become a poet and his friendship with Li Bai, a more renowned poet – animated epic is out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 28th

Set roughly halfway through the Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.), this lengthy, animated epic starts off like an historical war movie in the vein of the live action Red Cliff (John Woo, 2008, 2009) but swiftly morphs into something else entirely as this initial narrative about the capture and interrogation of an enemy soldier turns into a frame story – which is rather more than that, popping up repeatedly throughout the narrative with the frame story’s resolution taking centre stage towards the end of the proceedings. Even this is deceptive; while military strategy and conflict is covered, the narrative is far less interested in that than in the overall life of main protagonist and minor poet Gao Shi, his meetings and friendship through the years with secondary character and major poet Li Bai, and the wider poetry of the period.

Believing himself about to be punished for the failure of his well planned and fought military campaign against the Tubos (the Tibetans, their ethnic identity never clarified within the film itself – at least, not in the English subtitles, presumably because the film is aimed at a Chinese audience who would already know this ethnic, historical; background), the ageing General Gao Shi (voice: Wu Junquan) falls neck first on his spear before receiving the Emperor’s emissary who wants to question him, it turns out, about not his military campaign but, rather, Li Bai.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies Music

The Colors Within
Kimi no Iro,
きみの色,
lit. Your Color)

Director – Naoko Yamada – 2024 – Japan – Cert. PG – 101m

*****

A Catholic schoolgirl with synaesthesia inadvertently forms a rock band who find themselves playing a gig at her school – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

That’s the Serenity Prayer, and it opens this remarkable story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school as she prays it to a statue of Mary in the school chapel. A scene of her as a small girl attending the dance class, and scenes of her seeing other pupils in the corridor, are rendered in vivid, blinding colour where bright white light constantly threatens to engulf the pastel shades in which the girl sees. For more on synaesthesia, see A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (Mark Cousins, 2024).

If you were to land in the middle of this film with no context, for a frame, or a scene (drawn animation parlance for a single shot), you could be forgiven for thinking there was something wrong with the print, or the colour balance. I am immediately reminded of the reviewer who said of Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947) that the film was so visually perfect that it could be shown out of focus and upside down and the audience would still be enraptured by its kinetic abstract colour properties.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Spirited Away
(Sen
to Chihiro
no Kamikakushi,
千と千尋の神隠し)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2001 – Japan – Cert. PG – 125m

****1/2

(A shorter version of this review was originally published in Third Way for UK release date 12/09/2002. At which point, hardly anyone in the UK outside of anime fandom knew who Miyazaki was.)

In director Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a ten-year-old girl must survive a bathhouse run by demons after her parents are turned into pigs – back in UK cinemas from Thursday, December 26th 2024

To discover the films of Hayao Miyazaki – and those of his company Studio Ghibli (pronounced “Jib-Lee”) – is like suddenly being exposed to those of Disney without prior knowledge of their sheer number or quality. In Miyazaki’s native Japan, Spirited Away shattered box office records to succeed Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) as the most lucrative movie of all time. In the US, it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature while making only modest inroads into the marketplace. Britain, however, is not the US, and it may well fare better here than it did there.

Previous Miyazaki outings have covered children’s experience of the countryside (My Neighbour Totoro, 1988; one of this writer’s favourite films of all time), a young girl’s learning to find her way in the world (Kiki’s Delivery Service, 1989) and conflicting loyalties among pilots in interwar Europe (Porco Rosso, 1992).… Read the rest