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Creativity is a hard thing to come by, and few shows have it. Plenty are action-packed, entertaining, exciting, and all together predictable. Then there are the DOA packages, where somebody tries something new but utterly fails because their ideas are just too far out there to understand. Sometimes, a mix of the familiar and the [...]
When you don’t absolutely love the next great thing in anime, sometimes it can be disappointing…even when the show is pretty good. That’s the case for me and Le Chevalier D’Eon, the latest offering from ADV Films. High levels of anticipation have surrounded the show, in no small part due to the involvement of Production [...]
Spooky noises, haunted houses, possessions…all are part and parcel of the horror genre. One could argue that the field of horror films has never had much promise, and that the only original one in the 1990s was Scream, which simply took the premise and added a postmodern veneer. The Japanese never saw the advent of [...]
Hayao Miyazaki is well known internationally for his films, which are really some of the best animated shows worldwide. Laputa is not one of his first films–it was released in 1986 in Japan–but it came before My Neighbor Totoro, which really got notice both in Japan and in the US. As Disney has bought the [...]
ADV Films is at it again. Back in 2000, they produced their first animated program, the amazingly bad Sin: The Movie. Four years later, they have their newest self-produced title called Lady Death. Unlike Sin, though, ADV Films makes no pretension of passing off Lady Death as a film in the anime …
In as short a description as I can muster, Manie Manie is The Twilight Zone of anime. Although many anime have odd or strange elements to them, very few films go to this length to present new, bizarre worlds that defy categorization. So, at best, what I can do is describe the three segments that [...]
Peanut butter and jelly. Bert and Ernie. Cake and ice cream. Whimsy and the apocalypse. Hmm…the last two just don’t go together the same way, do they? It’s stereotypical, but anime about the destruction of the world are usually filled with humongous explosions, carnage on an unprecedented scale, and somebody named Shinji whining about how [...]
While I definitely don’t love every title put out by ADV Films, I have to say that the spring of 2007 has been an especially noteworthy one for them in terms of “fantastic titles I’d never heard of before.” Coyote Ragtime Show has been a fun intergalactic romp, and Utawarerumono is an intriguing mystery set in [...]
If you’re aiming at the side of an elephant with a shotgun, likelihood is that you’ll hit it when you pull the trigger. However, it’s another thing to try and hit a small moving target…and even if you do, the shot won’t likely do much damage. This is, essentially, the problem with This Is Greenwood. [...]
Ryuichi Ikegami is one of the best-known artists in the manga community both in his homeland and the US. His photorealistic work is simply unmistakable; no one else draws characters like him. Because of the eye for detail and his own personal taste for violence and erotica (as he states in the back of some [...]