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Demon Slayer Movie: Mugen Train (English Dubbed)

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The 2020 Demon Slayer movie made headlines and history when it premiered in Japan in late October. The first feature-length film based on the popular Shonen Jump manga and anime series amassed more than $350 million at Japan’s box office during its opening weekend, surpassing not only the record set by Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away as the highest grossing Japanese film of all time, but the fourth-highest grossing film of 2020, period. This happening as the future of the film industry remains in flux in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic speaks to the evident fact of anime’s economic and cultural dominance as global entertainment. Now, more than half a year since the film’s release, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train finally makes landfall in the States. Given the massive concentration of fanfare and newfound mainstream attention toward the series in the wake of its premiere, the question remains: Is this film worthy of the hype? For the most part, it emphatically is....
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Makoto Shinkai's Latest Movie

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Makoto Shinkai, The writer and director of Your Name has revealed his latest project. It’s called Suzume no Tojimari (Suzume Locking Up The Doors), and it will be released in Japan in fall 2022. Above is the key art for the upcoming film. Suzume no Tojimari follows a 17-year-old girl named Suzume who lives in a quiet town in Kyushu. Her life changes one day when a young traveler tells her he’s looking for a door. She follows the young man into the mountains, where there’s an old door surrounded by modern ruins. This begins her mysterious journey. Shinkai is once again writing and directing the film. Masayoshi Tanaka, who previously collaborated with Shinkai on Your Name   and Weathering with You, will be designing the characters. Kenichi Tsuchiya is working as the picture’s animation director, and Takumi Tanji is the art director. Both previously worked on Your Name. As of writing, no other staff members have yet been revealed, nor have any cast members been announced. In...
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5 Centimetrers per Second

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  5 Centimeters per Second is a Japanese animated romantic drama film by Makoto Shinkai. It theatrically premiered on 3 March 2007. The film consists of three segments: "Cherry Blossom", "Cosmonaut", and "5 Centimeters per Second", each following a period in Takaki Tōno's life and his relationships with the girls around him. One thing Shinkai loves to put into his romance stories is some element of fantasy or science fiction, usually used as the backdrop to push his characters towards one another. Your Name does this in spades, where there's not only body-swapping and time travel, but also elements of fate and destiny surrounding parts of the story aside from its central romance. While this makes the story far more interesting, it also makes it harder to relate to the characters and the events in their lives that lead them to one another. One the other hand, felling unrequited love for someone and life pulling friendships apart is something most pe...
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A Letter To Momo

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“A Letter to Momo,” from veteran Japanese animator Hiroyuki Okiura, features many of the elements that have become familiar to fans of the lyrical animated epics of Hayao Miyazaki and his heirs, including a beguiling color palette; finely rendered images of water, greenery and rustic Japanese architecture; and a story shot through with loss, discovery and mystical animism.  Many of those tropes are skillfully deployed in “A Letter to Momo,” Okiura’s sophomore feature, which makes it seem churlish to note that the overall enterprise winds up being glum, repetitive and baggy at an overlong two hours.  The story, of a girl coming to terms with the recent death of her father with the help of three goblins from the spirit world, owes more than a little to the far superior classic “My Neighbor Totoro.” The Momo of the title is Momo Miyaura, who has moved from Tokyo to Shio Island with her mother in the wake of her father’s death.  Haunted by her final argument with her dad, Mo...
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One Punch Man

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 Hugely popular Anime in Japan and around the world, “One Punch Man” follows the story of Saitama, a superhero who can defeat any opponent with a single punch but seeks to find a worthy opponent after growing bored by a lack of challenges in his fight against evil. Created in 2009 by Japanese artist ONE as a web comic, “One Punch Man” quickly went viral. In 2012, it was then published on Shueisha’s Young Jump Next with illustrations by Yusuke Murata along with ONE. The series saw worldwide sales of over 30 million copies. When the English edition published by VIZ Media debuted in the U.S. in 2015, the first and second volumes made the New York Times manga bestsellers list and was nominated for an Eisner and a Harvey Award. Since then, the popularity of “One Punch Man” has led to a critically acclaimed anime TV series, as well as a video and mobile game. Anime may have developed a loyal and feverish following outside of Japan since the dawn of high-speed internet but in...
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Death Note

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Death Note is a Japanese  manga  series written by  Tsugumi Ohba  and illustrated by  Takeshi Obata .  The story follows  Light Yagami , a teen genius who stumbles across a mysterious otherworldly notebook: the "Death Note", which belonged to the  Shinigami   Ryuk  and grants the user the supernatural ability to kill anyone whose name is written in its pages. The series centers around Light's subsequent attempts to use the Death Note to carry out a worldwide massacre of individuals whom he deems morally unworthy of life to change the world into a  utopian  society without crime, using the alias of a god-like vigilante named " kira " and the subsequent efforts of  an elite task-force of law enforcement officers , consisting of members of the Japanese police force, led by  L , an enigmatic international detective whose past is shrouded in mystery, to apprehend him and end his reign of terror. ...
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From Up On Poppy Hills

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After first working as a landscape architect, Goro Miyazaki (son of legendary animated filmmaker Hayao) was lured into the family business as the inaugural director of the Studio Ghibli Museum in 2001. By 2006, he’d drifted into the director’s chair for the animated Ursula K Le Guin adaptation Tales From Earthsea. His second film, From Up On Poppy Hill, is a nostalgic melodrama set in early 1960s Yokohama adapted for the big screen by his father — a very different prospect to the Earthsea’s epic, dragon-filled fantasy. From Up On Poppy Hill is set in 1963, but you weren’t actually born until four years after that. How did you prepare for the design of the film? Luckily there is a lot of documentation on the way of life in what we call the Showa Period in Japan.  In fact, there was almost too much information! There are also many live action films and so on from the period which were a great help and I interviewed women who were high school students at the time. However, this peri...
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King's Game

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An entire high school class of 32 people receive a message on their cellphones from a person known only as the "King." The messages contain orders that the students must obey, or they risk the punishment of death. With their lives on the line, the students soon find out that the orders are getting more and more extreme as time goes on. But one student, Nobuaki Kanazawa, is determined to put a stop to the murderous King's Game, once and for all. If it’s the sort of thing you fancy, no shortage of anime about high-school students killing each other off. Where once the niche was so narrow you could accuse any such project of copying Battle Royale, now you can find a new example every handful of seasons. King’s Game the Animation was the representative for the last part of 2017, and it went hard with the drama, gore, and consequences but with so many projects like this surfacing, the trick becomes differentiating oneself from the rest. Why is this particular mass...
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