Category: Japan
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Ring (1998) – Sadako the Angry Ghost
When Hideo Nakata’s Ring came out in 1998, followed by Ring 2 in 1999 – they looked like groundbreaking Japanese horror movies. The Japanese film industry is, on the whole, very conservative and tight-fisted, relying on endless low-budget formula comedies and soaps. Yet once in a while a director will come along and produced interesting…
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Revisiting Battle Royale
In last week’s post Jane Dougherty raised the interesting question as to whether modern Young Adult fantasy sanitises the world for its readers, serving them the illusory comfort of simplistic ideas of good and evil over which teens can triumph, as opposed to the more complex banal institutional horrors that characterise the 20th and 21st…
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Phoenix (Hi no Tori) – Osamu Tezuka
Following on from Jim Barker’s post about the need to take comics seriously I thought I’d write about an artist who is recognised as one of the greatest comic book writers of all time, Osamu Tezuka and his finest creation, the twelve volume Phoenix series (Hi no Tori), first published in Japan between 1967 and…
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The Japanese Wuthering Heights – Arashi ga Oka (1988)
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a really odd book. On the surface it’s the first bodice-ripper – a passionate tale of doomed love set among the Yorkshire Moors. Yet our ideas about the story, and the tragic duo of Cathy and Heathcliff, often come from the myths that that have built up around the novel,…
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Angel’s Egg
The first batch of Japanese anime to appear in video shops in the UK were resolutely aimed at the disturbed 13 year old boy market. The choice was limited to giant robots belting each other or deeply unpleasant pornography involving school girls being raped by multi-tentacled demons. Not surprisingly those of us uninterested in badly…