Last week I wrote about this very busy Spring anime season’s sequels and ongoing shows. Now it’s the turn of the shiny new things! At the beginning of the season there were only three new shows that caught my eye, but as time progressed, and other AniTAY colleagues weighed in…

Wow. Is it just me or has the halfway point of this season jumped up from nowhere and bit us all in the arse? No? It’s just me, then? Oh well, I’ve been really busy, what with “real world” things like attending bonkers heavy metal gigs, family weddings and finally…

For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing a retrospective series of articles respectively focusing on each of the previous short films and full-length movies written and directed by Japanese animator Makoto Shinkai. Following his tentative first steps into the industry with the essentially-single-handed production of both She and…

Finally. With Makoto Shinkai’s newest movie Suzume now on general release in the UK and North America (I saw it last night, review incoming as soon as I can gather my thoughts), I’ve chronologically worked through his whole backlog to get to the movie that really put his name on…

For some reason, up until now, this was the only Makoto Shinkai film I hadn’t seen. Maybe it was due to the bad taste that his earlier 5 Centimetres per Second left in my mouth, when his subsequent films came out I probably felt I’d had enough of his navel-gazing…

Makoto Shinkai’s follow-up to 2007’s divisive 5 Centimeters per Second was perhaps his most deliberately mainstream movie yet —2011's Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below — inexplicably released in some countries (including the UK) under the alternative title Journey to Agartha. It’s as if some producer or other…

I’ve been dreading writing about this one, because when I first watched it twelve years ago, I went into it completely blind and hated it. Makoto Shinkai’s 2007 hour-long movie 5 Centimeters per Second evoked such a visceral negative reaction in me that I recall screaming What the fuck was…

Would you believe that after a little over four years, this is my 200th article? At an average of around 2000 words each, that’s enough to fill four full-length commercial novels… But instead I’ve written mostly about weird Japanese cartoons. It’s been fun. Thanks for sticking with me! Anyway, this…

Already we’ve reached the end of 2023’s first anime season, so it’s time again for me to offer opinions on the stuff I watched. Overall it’s not been one of the bigger “hype” seasons, but there’s still been plenty of high quality anime with which to feed your hungry eyeballs…