anime

Angel’s Egg (1985)

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Angel’s Egg, a 1985 film from director Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, is currently screening in limited runs with a 4K remaster, and I was lucky enough to catch it at my local arthouse. It’s stunning. A beautifully rendered monochrome world with only two living beings within it, the film is one that resists most attempts to interpret its metaphors, with Oshii himself admitting that there are parts of it that he does not understand. As such, it feels like a long, strange dream, full of images that feel pregnant with symbolism but too ephemeral to achieve any truly coherent exegesis. 

In a waterlogged and abandoned city, an unnamed girl protects a large egg, while she forages for canned food and collects jugs of water. A giant machine rolls through the town, and an unnamed man bearing a cross-shaped weapon clambers down from it. They resemble one another, both being porcelain pale with platinum hair, but the girl flees from the man initially, and when he asks her for her name, it’s unclear if she fears him, can’t remember her name, or if she perhaps never even had one in the first place. The man briefly steals the egg and then returns it to her, retelling the story of Noah’s Ark but changing the ending so that the dove never returned, and that everyone on the ark simply forgot about their pasts. This leads the girl to take the man to a sort of sanctuary where she has been bringing her collected jugs of water, numbering in the thousands, and placed them all around the fossilized skeleton of an angel. The man, who has said that the only way to know what is inside of an egg is to break it, does so one night while the girl sleeps, and her screams the following morning when she discovers the bits of shell are heartbreaking. She runs and falls into the churning sea, where she drowns. 

That’s a very rough sketch of what barely constitutes the “plot” of the film. This isn’t a story so much as it is a series of surreal images strung together as flimsily as the sluggish narrative of a dream in which you’re exploring a seemingly endless, empty city beneath a gray sky. (These are positive qualities that the film possesses despite “flimsy” and “sluggish” having derogatory connotations.) None of it really seems to mean much of anything. My favorite images from the film are completely tertiary to the above synopsis. The city seems to be filled with statues of fishermen, which the girl is startled by and avoids the presence of. Later, the city suddenly becomes filled with shadows of giant fish, silhouettes cast upon the streets and the sides of buildings, and the fishermen spring into action in an attempt to catch them, firing harpoons into the road and through streetlamps and into windows and empty houses. When I was still trying to understand the film and not simply experience it, I thought of them as automatons from the derelict city’s ancient past, left running in order to catch fish which had been hunted to death. That didn’t at all explain where the shadows came from, and now I see the sequence as two different kinds of ghosts, memories of two extinct parties that are both now long gone, physical husks that hunt long-dead prey, and the shadows of the flesh long since transcended. Is that accurate? Does any of it mean anything? I’m not sure, but it definitely doesn’t really matter. 

Angel’s Egg is filled with Biblical imagery, with occasional glimpses of what appears to be the (or an) actual ark, sitting on a cliff as rain falls. Noah’s Ark is thematically central, and the film’s final image implies that all of what we have seen transpire occurred on the upturned hull of a giant ark-style vessel. The man’s use of a weapon in the shape of a cross is likewise open to many interpretations, but I remain convinced that attempting to puzzle all of that out is utterly the wrong way to engage with the film. There’s a giant mechanical sun that’s also an eyeball, and it’s covered in statues. What does it mean? Who cares? Enjoy the ride.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Batman Ninja: Yakuza League (2025)

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Way back in the ancient pop culture landscape of 2018, there was some excitement & novelty to be found in a one-off experiment like Batman Ninja. Sure, every other major film in production was a superhero picture and, sure, the Caped Crusader was in roughly 30% of them, but it was still a welcome break in format to see the genre reimagined in a unique context – freed from the laborious narrative responsibilities of a “shared cinematic universe.” The first Batman Ninja film was an over-the-top indulgence in redesigning famous Batman villains within an alternate-universe anime aesthetic. Its newly released sequel does the same for members of The Justice League, but all the excitement & novelty has been dulled by a constant flood of multiversal storytelling over the years since. Every superhero picture is an alternate-dimension reimagining of familiar superhero archetypes now, and so Batman Ninja vs Yakuza League serves no real purpose beyond being an easy gateway into appreciating the visual delights of anime artistry for previously uninitiated 12-year-olds. Still, it’s cute.

Yakuza League‘s boldest creative gamble is in its assumption that its audience remembers any plot details or running jokes from the previous Batman Ninja outing. The story picks up at the exact moment when the last movie ended, with Batman & Robin returning to modern Gotham from their time-travel adventure in feudal Japan. It seems there are some lingering space-time anomalies resulting from that adventure, mainly that the island of Japan has disappeared from global maps and relocated to the sky above Gotham. The now sky-bound nation’s alternate history has been ruled by infinite yakuza gangs, leading to a “Yakuzageddon” event that threatens to tear Gotham down if the Bat Family cannot fix the corrupted “multiverse frequency” in time. The anomaly initially manifests in a “yakuza hurricane,” raining countless gangster intruders into Gotham like so many Agents Smith from Matrix sequels past. The situation escalates when Batman & Robin fly to the floating Japan in the sky to restore order in the now crime-ridden country, only to discover that the alternate-universe anime equivalents of fellow Justice League members are the biggest, cruelest gangsters of all. Many loud, silly fights ensue as they struggle to restore Justice League values into the Yakuza League variants, with only Wonder Woman working as their ally on the inside.

The major saving grace of Yakuza League is that DC has once again given Japanese animators free rein to reimagine their most iconic characters in an anime context (with Junpei Mizusaki & Shinji Takagi sharing directorial credit). They have as much fun with that freedom as possible, taking for-their-own-sake detours into 80s Saturday morning cartoon parody, Lady Snowblood-inspired karaoke video art, and pop-up book illustrations that help expand the artistic project beyond its most obvious boundaries. By the time Batman climbs into yet another mech suit to fight the Yakuza League equivalent of Superman, however, the “Batman, except it’s anime” aesthetic can’t help but feel a little rote. If you’ve already seen Batman Ninja, you’ve already seen everything Yakuza League has to offer – give or take scenes of The Flash sharing lightning powers & sartorial choices with Mortal Kombat‘s Raiden. If you’ve seen any superhero movie in the 2020s, you’ve also already seen the genre collapse in on itself with this style of “What if?” alternate-universe reimagining, which is starting to feel like an admission that there’s nothing exciting or novel left to mine from this material. It’s all just different flavor packets added to the same basic gruel.

-Brandon Ledet 

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

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A.I. tech bros’ latest attack on the basic dignity of everyday life targeted Studio Ghibli of all things, proving that absolutely nothing is sacred to these ghouls. There’s a recent software upgrade to the Plagiarism Generator technology that was advertised in the form of “Ghiblifying” pre-existing images with digital filters that adapt them to the visual style of the legendary animation studio. Nevermind the blatant copyright infringement that amalgamates already underpaid artists’ work into digital-age corporate slop. Nevermind that the studio’s broad cultural association with Hayao Miyazaki—and Hayao Miyazaki only—disregards the work of fellow directors & animators under that brand who have their own distinct style. The most insulting insinuation about the “Ghiblified” A.I. image trend is that it reduces decades of finely crafted animation to a few vague visual signifiers that could be summed up in a single word: “Cute.” Like the A.I.-generated Wes Anderson videos before it, this recent dispatch from Tech Bro Hell makes Studio Ghibli’s work look simpler, safer, and more twee than it is in practice, mining its surface aesthetics without engaging with the substance beneath. It’s just as empty & lazy as it is profane.

What would these “Ghiblified” A.I. images look like, for instance, if they pulled their visual cues from Isao Takahata’s work instead of Miyazaki’s? Would it capture the full span of life’s tenderness, cruelty, warmth, and pain, as gorgeously illustrated in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or would it reduce the immensity of that film’s beauty to a few strokes of an algorithmic color-pencil? Would it convey the collectivist environmentalism of Pom Poko‘s radical politics, or just automatically equip all figures pictured with comically large scrotums? The real gotcha example, of course, is what an A.I. “Ghiblified” photo implicates about a film as devastating as Takahata’s WWII drama Grave of the Fireflies. I’m not sure how valuable the cutesy surface aesthetics of the studio’s character designs are in the context of a story about children starving to death during the societal disruption of war. In-film, the contrast between the characters’ classic anime cuteness (which Roger Ebert summarized as “enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity”) and the real-life atrocities those characters suffer makes for horrific emotional impact, perfectly illustrating the inhuman evil of war. Using those visual signifiers out of context to cutesy-up your beach vacation photos is incredibly crass, then, if you take more than a half-second to think about it.

The biggest emotional gut punch of Grave of the Fireflies arrives in the first couple minutes, before you even get to know the children at the center. We’re introduced to our coming-of-age protagonist Seita in his dying minute, actively starving to death in a train station while passersby treat him as an inconvenient obstacle during their daily commute. When he passes, he leaves his body behind to reunite with the spirit of his even younger sister, Setsuko, who has apparently been waiting for him to join her in a firefly-lit afterlife. Both children’s fates are succinctly & poetically spelled out in this one quiet moment, so all the audience can do when the timeline dials back to 1945 is slowly watch it happen with no way to stop it. Seita & Setsuko are orphaned in the final days of WWII by firebombing raids and Naval attacks that leave both their parents dead. They live in a world sandwiched between mass graves below and falling ash from above, but they can at least depend on each other for community. Seita takes on housing & feeding his sister as his sole responsibility, dodging any pressure to join the war effort that would distract from her survival. As the opening warns, he fails, but he does manage to leave her with some joyous memories along the way despite the pain & indignity of starving to death, unhoused. It’s incredibly tough to watch.

Grave of the Fireflies indulges in all the usual youth-nostalgia and hand-drawn natural wonder that typifies Studio Ghibli’s broader approach to 2D animation, but it’s mostly in service of making the emotional tolls of war weigh as heavily on the heart as possible. It turns out that even when gorgeously animated, war is Hell. Worse than Hell, maybe. The most insidious images I saw during last week’s A.I. Ghibli Fest were from the official Twitter account of the Israeli army, cutesifying their real-time, real-world bombing & starvation of Palestinian children en masse as if they regard Grave of the Fireflies as an aspirational roadmap rather than a dire warning of past evils that should not be repeated. Of course, most people using the Ghiblified A.I. generators have much cuter, gentler works from the studio in mind, like My Neighbor Totoro (presuming they have any direct familiarity with the studio at all, beyond walking past advertisements for routine repertory screenings at the local AMC). When Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japan, it was paired with Totoro on a double bill that confused & traumatized unsuspecting children who weren’t prepared for such a heavy night out. That late-80s programming choice underestimated the full scope of what Studio Ghibli offers as a movie studio that produces daring, emotionally complex art decades before the A.I. C.H.U.D.s repeated the same mistake. They’re not in the game to sell twee digital filters and stuffed commemorative plushies; Grave of the Fireflies is alone proof of that.

-Brandon Ledet

The Colors Within (2025)

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The coming-of-age anime drama The Colors Within is about a teenager with extreme synesthesia who forms a synthpop band to express her unusual relationship with color through song. It’s a much gentler picture than that descriptor implies. Naoko Yamada’s color-pencil sketchbook vision is exceptionally quiet for a story about teenage rock ‘n rollers and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. It celebrates the soft smears of color you see when you view the world without eyeglasses. It dwells in the dead air of band practice as the collective idea of a song is just starting to materialize, before it has any foundational structure to cling to. The three members of the band are each fragile recluses who spook easy, to the point where you’re skeptical that they’ll ever have the courage to perform for an audience. When all that restraint melts away during the climactic concert, however, the relief of its release feels good enough to make you cry.

Our protagonist is an adorable, shy teenager who can only relate to the people around her by reading the colors of their auras. Her sweetness and mental abstraction are a kind of social liability, so her only real friend at her Catholic boarding school is a well-meaning nun who encourages her to find “secular ways to honor God” outside the official curriculum. The opportunity to do so presents itself when an older, more rebellious classmate drops out to work at a local bookstore, and a panicked schoolgirl crush inspires her to demand they start a band together to keep in touch. A third lonely, shy musician who hangs around the bookstore brings the project together, but it’s a triumph that mostly manifests as long stretches of downtime between sparse songwriting sessions.

While our protagonist’s synesthesia is presented as a defining character trait, it really doesn’t affect her journey to self and communal discovery except in providing the language to express something she can’t otherwise vocalize. This is mostly a story about youthful, innocent yearning, both in romance and in art. Every member of the band has a secret, both in their unexpressed attraction to each other and in the ways their individual duties to education, work, and religion conflict with their art project. A lot of their yearning is just the desire to spend more time creating that art, finding it difficult to engineer opportunities to all meet in one place, working on one idea. I remember finding time to practice to be an eternal struggle back when I used to write songs for punk bands in high school & college, but I also remember the times when everything aligned just right for us to play songs together satisfying my soul like few other joys of my youth. It’s easy to be nostalgic while returning to that distinctly teenage headspace, so the story can feel like it’s set decades in the past despite all the smartphones and laptops.

The music our trio of sweethearts eventually plays together is catchy, soulful, and well worth the effort of waiting through the stunted progress of its writing. It’s also the music of dissociation, finding immense beauty, joy, and creative expression through the distinctly intangible sounds of synths, theremin, and guitar feedback. Synthpop is a perfect aesthetic choice for a character who sees the world through hazy, swirling aesthetics. It gives her a way to reinterpret her visions of color into the sounds of color, in the process expressing her love for her bandmates in a more direct way than she could previously express anything about anyone. None of the routine prayer nor rigid interpretation of God’s will at her Catholic boarding school ever approaches anything so purely divine. Thankfully, there was one cool nun around to help her see the positive value in those secular pleasures without feeling any unnecessary, residual shame for the indulgence. This is how I remember writing songs with my friends feeling at that age, but that is not at all how I remember my own Catholic schooling.

-Brandon Ledet

Spirited Away (2001)

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Nearly a decade ago, when I was getting ready to move away from Baton Rouge, a friend of mine was likewise preparing to head back west to be with her now-husband. We had a dual garage sale in which we tried to get rid of some various knick-knacks. We didn’t have much that anyone would want, and we weren’t very successful. As a joke, she had priced her DVD of Spirited Away at a million dollars, because she didn’t actually want to part with it, and when she realized that I had never seen it, she gave it to me. I’m ashamed to say that in the interim, half-remembered bits of other Miyazaki films blended together during a rewatch of several of them shortly after my accident in 2018, making me think that I had watched it. When I sat down to do a rewatch in preparation for the culmination of Swampflix’s upcoming ten-year anniversary project, it turned out that I hadn’t, so this was a beautiful first-time watch for me. I have a friend who has only recently come into my life but with whom I’ve grown very close very quickly was looking forward to sharing this one with me at a screening at our local arthouse theater as it was a huge part of his childhood, plans which were dashed when we both tested positive for COVID the day before the screening. Since we both had it, however, we decided to push forward with our plans and watch it together that same night anyway. 

I’ve been digesting it ever since, and I’m still not fully sure what to say about it. It’s not just a movie; it’s a magic spell, a fairy tale journey, an unconventional narrative composed of little condensations of fantasy that moves blithely from storybeat to storybeat without ever stopping to catch its breath. It introduces and resolves so many things so quickly that the pacing reminds one of an episode of golden-age Simpsons, where a bag-boy strike in act one leads to near-death on an African waterfall at the climax. It runs on feverish imagination, unrestrained by the need to adhere to any real act structure at all. 

Chihiro is an elementary-aged girl who, along with her parents, is moving to a new home. Along the way, her father takes a detour down a road that ends at a red pedestrian gate in a wall that extends as far as the eye can see in either direction. The trio enters the area, which her father believes (and perceives) to be an abandoned amusement park; her father and mother unquestioningly eat food which they stumble upon while Chihiro explores further, meeting a boy named Haku, who implores her to take her parents back across the river before sunset. When Chihiro returns to her parents, however, they have been turned into pigs by the spirit food, as the place reveals itself to be the home of innumerable kami spirits. She refuses to leave them behind and becomes trapped there, while various parties attempt to locate her as they can smell a human amongst them. Haku helps her to evade capture and directs her to find and seek employment with a spider-like spirit named Kamaji, who runs the boiler that powers the baths of the bathhouse that serves as the primary location for the film. She proves herself to him and he asks Lin, a more humanoid bathhouse worker, to take Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse (and is responsible for her parents’ transformation). Yubaba attempts to scare Chihiro into running off, but when she is unable to do so, she gives the girl a job, although her contract is Faustian. She takes part of the kanji of Chihiro’s name away, leaving only “Sen,” which becomes the girl’s new name. Chihiro/Sen later learns from Haku that this stripping of one’s name also leads to the loss of one’s memory, and that he is also cursed to work for Yubaba since he cannot remember his own true name. 

It’s hard to describe Spirited Away other than to outline the plot like I have above, but it goes in so many interesting directions with such vivid and luscious imagery that simply recapitulating the narrative diminishes it. Chihiro is the kind of kid everyone wishes they could have been: stalwart in the face of overwhelming odds, unrelenting in her devotion to saving her parents and returning to the real world, and compelled by an abundance of compassion that seeks no reward but nonetheless is granted them. She’s Dorothy Gale, and she’s Alice, and she’s also completely her own character, brave and fierce but always kind and thoughtful. She’s unwilling to trade her freedom for anyone else’s, and although this morality seems alien to the spirits who inhabit the world around her, it also gives her fresh eyes that grant her the ability to resolve issues the spirits can’t, like finding the source of a polluted river spirit’s pain and removing it like the thorn from the paw of Aesop’s lion, healing it. When she fails, it’s never because of her lack of ingenuity, it’s merely because she fails to grasp all of the social rules of a culture that she’s only recently found herself within. 

Visually, the film is stunning. After nearly two decades, it’s still as vibrant and gorgeous as it was the first time audiences saw it. Each sequence is beautiful, and every frame is filled to the brim with baroque details of the spirit world, but it’s almost impossible to try and explain it, because this is a movie that one has to see in order to really understand. It’s like trying to explain a painting to someone who’s never seen it; it has to be experienced, has to be felt, has to wash over you and make you a part of its world. It’s magic.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mind Game (2004)

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I’ve been incredibly lucky to see multiple movies by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa in a proper theater, where his vibrant free-for-all imagery shines in all its psychedelic glory.  While he mostly works as a showrunner for televised anime, Yuasa’s feature films Inu-Oh and Night is Short, Walk on Girl both played at local multiplexes in their initial run, and both made it clear why his expressive, imaginative visual style often gets him cited as a successor to the late Satoshi Kon.  It’s a shame I was either too young or too out of the loop to catch his debut feature Mind Game that way in 2004, but thankfully local repertory series WW Cinema recently filled in that gap.  I was instantly on board for the layered multimedia animation style of Mind Game, which quickly establishes Yuasa as a visual genius, even if only in flashes.  It took me much longer to warm up to the film’s immature nerd-boy sexuality, but I eventually got there once that got psychedelic too.  Mind Game likely would’ve been my favorite movie as a teenager had I caught it fresh, but now I can only see it as a crude prototype for Yuasa’s more recent masterworks like Inu-Oh.  Regardless, any time one of his films plays on a nearby screen is a cultural event, especially since I don’t watch nearly enough television to keep up with the bulk of his work.

Nishi is a young 20-somethings loser who’s still hung up on his childhood crush and his childhood dreams of becoming a famous manga artist but is too shy & cowardly to do anything about either.  When his crush is threatened with rape by two yakuza in her family’s diner, he fails to come to her defense, speaking up just forcefully enough to get himself shot instead of saving the day.  In the afterlife, his soul is confronted with video footage of his cowardice, then defies the orders of a shapeshifting God to fade into oblivion by instead returning to his body to fight off the rapist gangsters who killed him.  The gamble works, sending the yakuza’s victims on a wild car chase that lands them in the belly of a whale for the majority of the remaining runtime.  Then things get weird.  Inside the whale, Nishi gradually learns emotional maturity and how to genuinely connect with people instead of ogling them as a pervy outsider.  It’s character growth that somewhat helps soften the grotesque sexual assault depicted in the first half and the constant commentary on the cartoonish proportions of his love interest’s breasts – just not entirely.  The main point of the story is about learning to fully embrace life instead of cowering from it, but there is some tangible subtext in a young Yuasa beating himself up about his own social immaturity as an illustrator who’s used to living & thinking alone instead of healthily interacting with others.  The good news is that two decades later he’s demonstrated that personal maturity in Inu-Oh, which has all of the visual inventiveness of Mind Game (including gorgeous animation of mythical whales) without all the teen-boy sexual hangups souring the vibe.

As much as I’m downplaying Mind Game as one of Yuasa’s finest works, it is oddly the one I’d most readily return to for rewatch.  That’s mostly because it’s bookended by gorgeous, rapid-fire montages of isolated images that piece together a birth-to-death lifespan for its four central characters (the whale-belly captives) that I’m not sure I fully absorbed on first watch.  Yuasa gives you just enough visual information for your brain’s pattern-recognition software to piece everything together, but I’m not sure I fully trust the conclusions I reached in the theater.  For a movie that spends most of its time sitting around the belly of a whale, waiting for something to happen in existential angst, it really does throw a lot at you.  The representation of God as a kaleidoscopic collection of impossible bodies that changes shape every time you look directly at it is a major highlight, recalling Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.  There’s a funhouse mirror warping to most of the imagery that stretches through the screen to literally bend your mind, but there’s also a Tom Goes to the Mayor-esque use of crude photocopy printouts that grounds the whole thing in the rudimentary tools of its era.  All of Yuasa’s magic tricks are already proudly on display in Mind Game; it’s just a shame that his immaturity was just as loudly vibrant in this instance. Or maybe it’s just a shame that I had personally aged out of its grody nerd-boy charms before I caught up with it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

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Full disclosure: I’ve been struggling with what to write about The Boy and the Heron for over a week now. It’s obviously a beautiful movie, made with loving care, attention to detail, and bizarre imagination that one has come to expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and has all of his hallmarks of adorable and anti-adorable creatures, but also has a narrative that feels more incomplete than normal. I should also disclose that, although I am a forever proponent of watching these films with subtitles rather than with dubbing, my viewing experience was of the dubbed version of the film, and I’m not certain if there are differences between the two versions that could explain some of what I’m missing. 

Mahito Maki is a twelve-year-old boy who awakens one night to learn that there is a fire raging through Tokyo, and that the hospital where his mother is located is in the center of the conflagration. He runs toward the fire’s destruction, but his mother is lost. Some time later, his father, a manufacturer of air munitions, evacuates his family to his wife’s ancestral estate, currently occupied by his late wife’s sister, whom he has married in the interim since the opening scene. Mahito has trouble bonding with Natsuko, whom everyone remarks upon as being nearly identical to his late mother, and he further isolates himself by intentionally gouging a nasty wound in his head that is then presumed to have been the result of violence from bullies, and he is allowed to remain at the estate rather than having to go to school. Exploring the area, he finds a run-down structure and enters it through a doorway that is not completely sealed; later, he learns from one of his stepmother’s seven attendants, Kiriko, that this was the library of his great-granduncle, who was obsessed with magic and who disappeared in his youth, prompting the tower to be sealed. Mahito also finds himself the subject of the attention of a large grey heron, which speaks to him in a language he understands and tempts the boy to follow him into the tower. Fashioning himself a bow and an accompanying arrow (fletched with a recovered feather from the heron), Mahito enters the tower with Kiriko when searching for Natsuko, who has disappeared; deep within a hall, they encounter the heron again, who tempts Mahito with an image of this mother. Mahito manages to injure the heron in its beak because of the transitive magical properties of the heron’s feather, turning him into a grotesque bird man, who is ordered by a wizard to assist Mahito in his journey, and the heron, Kiriko, and Mahito find themselves transported to another world.

This isn’t a new story, not really. Children going to fantasy worlds is one of the oldest tropes of children’s literature, whether that world be Narnia or Oz or Neverland or Wonderland or Fantasia or the Labyrinth (etc.), and, from what I can tell, the novel from which The Boy and the Heron takes most of its narrative inspiration, 2006’s The Book of Lost Things, is also one of these narratives. In that novel, the main character’s stepmother has already given birth to his half-sibling (rather than being pregnant still, as in the film), and so there are even more parallels to fantasy media of this kind; I haven’t read the book, but a review of several summaries implies that the presence of a new baby is part of the incitement of the protagonist’s journey, as in Labyrinth. The tropes here are from all over. Just like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mahito has been evacuated from a city center during WWII (although we’re not supposed to think too hard about the fact that Majito’s father is making military equipment for the Axis); the recent death of the boy’s mother is even more strongly felt here than in The NeverEnding Story; and this film manages to ride the line that divides the Oz books from their most famous adaptation with The Wizard of Oz, as Mahito’s journey is clearly real, as Dorothy (et al)’s travels into Oz were in L. Frank Baum’s novels, but said world contains images that are derived from things that he has seen in the real world, as in the 1939 picture. 

What is new here also seems to have come largely from Miyazaki. There’s nothing in any of the summaries of The Book of Lost Things that indicate recurring bird images and motifs as part of that novel’s narrative (the book seems to largely feature canines and lycanthropes), but we all know that this man loves flight; it’s all over his work. Here, this is seen in the “real” world via Mahito’s father’s work as an air munitions manufacturer but which translates into several different species of birds in the “fantasy” world, all of whom have different natures that present to Mahito as things which at first seem cruel or wicked to him but which ultimately prove that the apparent violence of nature exists not because of malice in the world, but simply because existence does not conform to us as individuals. There is the heron first, whose motivations are unclear and who exists more as a trickster, whose behavior is inscrutable. Second are the pelicans, who first attack Mahito and are later seen descending upon and devouring this film’s cutesy sprite creatures, the Warawara. Although they seem to be malicious in this attack at first, a dying gull tells Mahito that their people are starving as a result of having been brought to this place, where they have no other natural food source. Finally, we meet the parakeets, who are largely anthropomorphic and willing to eat human flesh. The last of these do have some malicious intent, just as Mahito’s emotional climax of the film requires that he recognize that he has malice within himself as well, which saves him from the same fate as his great-granduncle. It’s this same realization that he has come to an age where he has to force himself to grow and mature as a person by recognizing that he can feel negative emotions and not act upon them that leads him to finally accept Natsuko and go home. After he has a fun adventure with the time-traveling child version of his mother, of course. 

I’m not sure that this one is destined to become an indisputable classic like some of Miyazaki’s other work, but that’s what we always say about late additions to the canon of an auteur with a career that has already proven that it will have a lasting legacy. It’s clearly a deeply personal film, and when making something that is created with an intentionally idiosyncratic worldview (rather than aiming for something more like universal appeal), there’s always the danger of making it insular and inscrutable. I certainly expect this one to have a smaller audience of devotees than something like Princess Mononoke or even Howl’s Moving Castle (which was greeted with a similarly lukewarm/confused audience reception as The Boy and the Heron upon initial release, to my recollection), but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, it’s that there’s no Miyazaki film that isn’t someone’s favorite, and that will apply here, too. It could even happen to you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cutie Honey (2004)

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I’ve been talking a lot of shit this year about the exhausting routine of superhero media.  It’s just been non-stop whining, to the point where I couldn’t even praise the ecstatic animation style of the universally beloved Across the Spider-Verse without also citing its narrative contributions to our growing, culture-wide superhero fatigue.  I should probably take time to note, then, that I am a total hypocrite on this exact subject.  While I’ve been mostly avoiding the ongoing deluge of major-studio superhero sequels (the new Guardians, the new Shazam, the new Justice League spinoff, etc.), two of my favorite trips to the theater so far this year were specialty screenings of two Japanese superhero films: Shin Ultraman & Shin Kamen Rider.  Hideaki Anno’s post-Evangelion career pivot to lovingly remaking the vintage tokusatsu media of his youth has been hugely rewarding lately, with the wholesome humanism of his Ultraman film and the earnest inner-turmoil of his take on Kamen Rider reviving the otherwise artistically dead medium of live-action superhero filmmaking.  It turns out there’s still plenty novelty & enthusiasm to be found in the tokusatsu end of superhero media, at least for Western audiences whose only major exposure to the subgenre was decades-old broadcasts of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  So, even though I’m supposedly fatigued by the Hollywood assembly line of live-action comic book adaptations, I recently found myself looking back to the first time Anno dipped his toe in the genre two decades ago with his take on the bubbly kawaii superhero Cutie Honey.

Reviving source material originally published as manga and animated series in the 1970s, Anno’s live-action Cutie Honey film is the clear bridge between his early anime career and his recent swerve into retro live-action tokusatsu reboots.  All of the absurd, anime-style shot compositions of his recent “Shin” films were already part of his established visual style in 2004, complete with his needlessly stylistic depictions of bureaucratic desk work.  He even incorporates hand-drawn animated sequences into Cutie Honey‘s opening credits & action set pieces, both as a nod to the character’s comic book origins and as a shrewd cost-saving tactic.  For all of its stylistic connections to Anno’s other work, it’s the first time I’ve seen him participate in the “magical girl” anime trope, which helps separate the film’s familiar Anno-isms from the macho, Batman-style brooding of Shin Kamen Rider and the gee-willickers Space Age awe of Shin Ultraman.  Cutie Honey approximates what it might be like if Anno produced a Shin Sailor Moon movie next; or at least that’s what came to mind for an anime-newb like me who’s only been exposed to the medium’s most iconic “magical girl” titles. He does update the vintage anime’s visual sensibilities with a little ironic kitsch and mid-aughts fashion choices (including an amusing amount of attention to flip phone bling), but for the most part the highlights of his Cutie Honey film are in the same register as his recent Ultraman & Kamen Rider films.  He approaches this kind of material with the goofy exuberance of a Looney Tunes short or an episode of Adam West’s 1960s Batman series, except amped up with the psychedelic visuals & self-hating sleaze he made a name for himself with in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The titular Cutie Honey is a cute, sweet-as-honey office worker who loves taking bubble baths and playing dress-up.  She’s also a cyborg superhero who can “transform” into any conceivable disguise by pressing the heart-shaped pendant on her magical choker and shouting “Honey flash!” into the cosmic void. Her disguises mostly amount to her playing Gene Parmesan style dress-up games to fool her enemies, but when the situation at hand calls for violence she does change into hot pink body armor, going full kawaii superhero.  Anno takes a lot of obvious delight in filming the Sailor Moon-style magical girl transformation sequences in those battle scenes, as well as staging her fights with legions of faceless goons that she kicks into the air like limp mannequins.  The details of Cutie Honey’s global espionage sidekicks or her gender-ambiguous arch-enemies—known collectively as Panther Claw—don’t matter as much as the sugary joy of her cutesy quips & superheroic costume changes.  The film is simultaneously goofier and sleazier than Anno’s recent “Shin” movies, constantly ogling its bouncy superhero in her underwear between costumes and trapping her in damsel-in-distress lesbian kink scenarios.  Despite all that old-man leering, it’s aggressively girly for a superhero film, which pushes it even further into a campy, gay sensibility than the Batman ’66 vibes of Anno’s recent works.  It’s especially amusing that Cutie Honey fuels up for her superhero transformations by eating ungodly piles of junk food, which makes her the perfect hero for little girls and overgrown gay stoners everywhere.

Although Cutie Honey is an early rough-draft sketch of what he would later achieve in his “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” projects, I don’t know that I would as readily recommend it to Hideaki Anno die-hards as I would to fans of Girl Power superhero media like Tank Girl, Birds of Prey, Josie and the Pussycats, and Spice World.  It neatly belongs in that hyperactive, hyperfemme superhero canon, even with the thick male-gaze lens strapped to Anno’s camera.  In either case, it’s refreshing in the context of our modern MCU/DCEU sponsored hellscape, which 2008’s Iron Man kicked off just a few years after this seemingly ancient early-aughts novelty.  I highly recommend checking it out while Anno’s perspective on the superhero genre still feels fresh & exciting, even though the legal means of doing so is a little shaky.  YouTube has it dubbed; Internet Archive has it subbed.  Neither transfer is in especially great shape but, hey, at least you won’t be watching Uncle Ben’s corpse or Mrs. Batman’s pearls hit the pavement for the thousandth time.

-Brandon Ledet

Arrietty (2010)

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It comes up here from time to time, but my favorite fictional thing is a story about tiny people in a normal sized world. I’ve talked about my childhood love of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and how that translated into a fondness for the (first two) Ant-Man movies, but a lot of it can be traced back to my utter absorption into one specific series of novels I read in my youth: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. There’s nothing more magical to me than tiny beings using normal-sized objects in novel ways: the knight from a chess set as a kind of decorative bust; a watch, sans band, hung on a wall as a clock; a postage stamp framed as a piece of art. I never understood why those books were so much less well known than other fantasy novels of the same ilk, and I never could figure why Arrietty Clock, who was just about the coolest girl in the world, was less famous than Lucy Pevensie, Dorothy Gale, Pippi Longstocking, or Wendy Moira Angela Darling. There have been numerous adaptations over the years, but one of the best came out when I was too busy with grad school to take note of it, but I finally have, and it’s a delight. 

Arrietty was released in Japan in 2010 before seeing a U.K. release the following year and U.S. distribution through Disney in 2012, under the title The Secret World of Arrietty. I refuse to call it that (can you imagine if The Wizard of Oz was titled Dorothy’s Secret World or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was called The Secret World of Lucy?), but I do want to list it here for those of you who will want to seek it out for your own enjoyment. I’ll also recommend that, since the film is available on HBOMax in both the original Japanese and the U.S. English version, that you check it out in its original language, in spite of my love for Carol Burnett, who voices the Haru equivalent in the English dub. I was particularly fascinated to see this adaptation, which sets the story in (seemingly) 1980s Japan rather than Edwardian England, as I’ve always thought of this as a quintessentially English story, like Mary Poppins or the Narnia series, and although the idea of updating the setting to the U.S. seems heretical to me, I knew the Studio Ghibli aesthetic would more than make up for any displacement. 

Arrietty is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her mother Homily and father Pod. The three of them are “borrowers”: humanoid beings of 4-5 inches in height, who live alongside and parallel to full-sized humans. The former survive by “borrowing” from the latter, whom they call “human beans,” keeping themselves hidden and their existence secret. As the story opens, Arrietty has finally reached an age when she is to be taken on her first borrowing expedition into the home of an older woman named Sadako, who lives with her housekeeper Haru and who has recently taken in her great nephew Shō, a boy roughly Arrietty’s age who suffers from a heart condition. In the novel, Arrietty’s family lived in the base of a clock (hence their surname there), but here, they live largely beneath the house in a beautifully detailed home of their own; they access the larger house through a series of secret holes that are accessible only to them because of their size, although the passageways between them require a bit of exploration and adventure to navigate, and vermin like rats pose a threat to them. Shō spotted Arrietty in the garden when he first arrived and is fascinated by her, and he startles her when she and her father are on one of their expeditions, causing her to drop a precious sugar cube, which the Borrowers are forced to forsake. Shō further attempts to befriend Arrietty, with whom he shares both a profound loneliness and a deep melancholy, as she is likely to be among the last of her kind and has never known anyone other than her parents, while he has spent his short life as an invalid with few friends and little hope for a future despite an upcoming operation. Despite his best intentions, however, their friendship endangers the Borrower family in ways that neither could have predicted. 

This is not a perfect translation of the novel(s), but it is a marvelous and lovely example of how to translate a denser text for the screen. Some changes are small; I already mentioned above that the family lives in a crawlspace rather than a mantel clock, but there are also character changes that shift the story subtlely, and not for the worse. Shō is much friendlier from the outset than the unnamed boy in the novel, who has a bit of the old British superiority complex despite having been raised mostly in India; that is completely removed here, as is the fact that he had little English literacy as a result of having lived abroad. In the novel, it is this fact and Arrietty’s willingness to read to him that helps the two to bond, while here, the things that he does for the Borrowers he does purely out of the goodness of his heart. There are also fewer Borrowers here and the Clock family’s isolation is more profound as a result; Pod mentions to his daughter that there used to be others of their kind elsewhere in the house but that they have either moved on or been killed. The Clock’s relatives like Uncle Hendreary (Pod’s brother) who are rumored to have moved to a nearby badger sett and the boy’s attempts to transmit letters between the two families are cut, which also adds to the textual richness of the questions regarding any other Borrowers out there in the world; until we meet feralish Borrower Spiller later in the film, we’re unsure whether Arrietty and her family are the last of her kind, deepening her kinship with Shō. This also eliminates a lot of the squabbling between the various Borrowers, which is a fun comedic element in the novels as they get into rather large rows for such tiny specimens but makes for a more concise narrative here. 

But what’s most impressive here, of course, are the visuals. The backdrops are painted with that lovely Ghibli precision, and the style lends itself well to creating the sumptuous verdancy of an ivy-draped garden from the perspective of a four-inch teenager. Because Arrietty and her family are so tiny, the idiosyncrasies of every teacup, sideboard, and wainscot are terrifically magnified, and all of it is lovingly rendered in gorgeous detail. Great attention is paid to smaller characteristics as well; in one scene, Homily pours tea for her family, and it comes out in (relatively) huge globs because of the surface tension of the water, a characteristic that carries over to the behavior of rain in a different beautifully animated section of the narrative. A glob of cheese on toast, likewise, does not flatten, but retains its bead-like shape. All of these details combine to make the film incredibly immersive, and it’s all the more to its benefit. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Suzume (2023)

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It’s generally hackneyed for Western critics to compare any (or, in some egregious cases, all) modern anime directors to the legacy of Hayao Miyazaki, but it’s especially hackneyed to invoke that name when praising Makoto Shinkai, who’s been slapped with the ill-fitting label “The Next Miyazaki” at least since he made 5 Centimeters per Second two decades ago.  I am a little guilty of this hack behavior myself, having compared the way Shinkai lovingly illustrates the beauty of urban settings with the way Miyazaki illustrates the majesty of Nature – twice, when reviewing both his breakout hit Your Name. and its lesser loved follow-up Weathering with You.  And even though his latest film, Suzume, is partially set in the Japanese city of Miyazaki and features a direct shout-out to the Miyazaki-penned Whisper of the Heart, I really need to break the habit of typing that name every time a new Shinkai picture rolls through American cinemas.  We all do.

At this point, Shinkai’s closest comparison point might be someone who only occasionally dabbles in animation: Wes Anderson.  The 50-year-old industry long-timer has tripled down on his schtick so hard since Your Name. broke out in 2017 that his stubborn resistance to explore new visual or thematic territory has become endearingly stubborn in a distinctly Andersonian way.  I know exactly what I’m going to get from a Makoto Shinkai picture long before I buy a ticket and accompanying popcorn bucket: a supernatural romance between youngsters distanced by Japan’s urban/rural divide – their lives eventually united though fast-moving trains, widespread disaster, and the transformative power of love.  Shinkai’s non-existent lenses will “flair” across his CG-smoothed train rides and exquisitely detailed hand-drawn backdrops in the exact same way every single picture, and the only question, really, is what supernatural device he will use to keep his lovelorn teens apart.  He’s been so consistent in his recent output that he’s inspired his own crop of shameless imitators (as evidenced by other, lesser teen romances like Fireworks & I Want to Eat Your Pancreas) the same way that Wes Anderson’s retro, symmetrical wit inspired aggressively unwitty flicks like Garden State & Napoleon Dynamite.  The thing with both directors is that no matter how familiar & insular their respective filmmaking styles have become, they’re both still delivering vividly entertaining work every project.  I don’t know that Shinkai will ever match the soaring teen emotions of Your Name., but the artistry of his two triple-down follow-ups still coasts miles above most modern animation.  Like with Anderson, his work remains impressively gorgeous & earnest in the moment even if it’s no longer surprising or novel in the larger context of his career.

In this particular game of Makoto Shinkai Mad Libs, a rural teenager stumbles across a magical doorway guarded by a stone cat figurine that her touch brings to life.  When the impish cat-god scampers away, the unguarded door opens to unleash gigantic flaming tendrils from The Other Side that slam down on her unsuspecting hometown, threatening to destroy everything & everyone she knows in devastating earthquakes.  A college-age hunk she immediately crushes on teaches her how to close & lock this dangerous door, then joins forces with her to return the cat-god to its rightful station.  Only, the little feline prankster turns the hunk into a talking chair, which makes the heroic pair’s already awkward romance even more uneasy.  From there, Suzume and her wooden-chair beau chase the kitten around Japan, closing all the doorways to the afterlife that open without its protection along the way.  The wide-scale tragedy of the resulting earthquakes is treated seriously and is eventually tied to the 3/11 tsunami disaster that devastated Japan in 2011.  That historical context piles a lot of emotional heft onto the youngsters’ flirtatious relationship, but it’s also lightened by the physical awkwardness of their predicament.  In some ways turning the older boy into a talking chair makes him a less threatening object of desire for his teen-girl counterpart, but the movie still has cheeky fun in moments when he is visibly flustered that Suzume sits in his “lap.”  When she asks, vacantly, “Um, why are you a chair?” in perfect teenage aloofness, Shinkai is winking a signal that it’s okay to giggle at the outlandish premise.  Even so, the physical object the boy inhabits is eventually afforded its own emotional heft in Suzume’s backstory, so that his transformation is rooted in a tsukumogami Japanese folklore tradition instead of a LOL, So Random flippancy.  By the time Suzume crosses the gates of Hell to rescue her chair from the afterlife and defeat the flaming earthquake tendrils for good, there’s no question how seriously we’re supposed to take their relationship.

As easy as it is to become jaded about Shinkai’s tendency to repeat himself, there’s also no denying that he’s good at what he does.  By the film’s fiery emotional crescendo where Suzume is struggling to dislodge her new chair friend from his Arthurian stone prison while the world ends around them, it’s incredible how breezy the journey to get there felt in retrospect.  It’s as if you were so distracted by the frustrations of retrieving an escaped kitten that you didn’t even notice you opened the forbidden Hell door from Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland during the frantic search (a formative film that I beg you not to scan its production credits, to spare me further self-inflicted accusations of hackiness).  Shinkai has a way of building to immense wonder & awe even if you start out assuming you’ve seen it all before, and I’m starting to hope he never changes course.  I want him to follow the Wes Anderson career path where every subsequent Makoto Shinkai movie will be the most Makoto Shinkaingest movie the world has ever seen.  May we all survive the disasters of climate change long enough to see his anime equivalent of The French Dispatch in 2032.

-Brandon Ledet