Thanks to Madman Entertainment, ccpopculture has 5 DVD copies of the latest (and possibly last) Studio Ghibli film, When Marnie Was There, to give away. “Twelve-year-old Anna believes she sits outside the invisible magic circle to which most people belong, and shuts herself off from everyone around her. Concerned for her health, Anna’s foster mother decides to…
Despite my storied history of nerdy pursuits, I’ve never really been a comic book reader. I’ve read some of the canon titles – you know, Watchmen, Kingdom Come, and, um, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics? – but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to educate myself in the medium, picking up some discount trades…
“It’s stupid to stake your life on table tennis. I just don’t get it. It’s revolting.” So says Makoto “Smile” Tsukimoto in episode three of Ping Pong, an anime about people staking their lives on table tennis. As this quote might suggest – and as its unconventional animation confirms – Ping Pong isn’t the sort…
You’d need a heart of stone to grow up in the ‘90s and come out without some environmentalist tendencies. You’d go to the movies and watch as cute rainforest animals had their home imperilled by oncoming bulldozers (in Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest) or cringe at the cruelty inflicted upon an innocent orca (in Free…
Freezing Vibration is the follow-up to Freezing, a 2011 fanservice anime which suffered from lacking any apparent target audience. Taking a conventional premise – a primarily female-populated high school spiced up with frequent magically-augmented battles – the first season failed to provide any kind of interesting plot, wasting its time on progressively tiresome hierarchical disputes.…
Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata’s adaptation of the ancient folk tale “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” is rendered in gorgeous hand-drawn animation that recalls both a children’s picture book and Japanese woodcuttings. This aesthetic and the title suggest the film’s shift in focus – rather than telling the story of the bamboo cutter who finds…
There are very few nerdy activities I haven’t partaken in at some point. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve beaten the Queensland State Champion at Scrabble. I’ve assembled and painted two Warhammer 40,000 armies. I’ve written Neon Genesis Evangelion fan fiction. I’ve played pretty much every prominent collectible card game you can name – Pokémon,…
Spirited Away is not my favourite of Hayao Miyazaki’s films – that title goes to My Neighbour Totoro, now and forever – but it is perhaps his best. The story told here is deeply steeped in Japanese mythology yet imbued with resonant universality. As a child, who hasn’t fretted at being abandoned by their parents,…
It’s an empirical fact that Cowboy Bebop is one of the greatest anime series ever made. It’s also an empirical fact that one of its greatest episodes has essentially nothing to do with the show’s emphasis on its protagonists’ futile attempts to escape their dark pasts, nor of its core of existential loneliness: I’m speaking,…
This cumbersomely titled anime – called Noucome for short – has perhaps the largest gulf between potential and quality of anything I’ve seen. Its premise is absurd but laden with promise: the show’s protagonist, Kanade Amakusa, a high school boy, finds himself regularly faced with “Absolute Choice” – a set of options that he’s required…
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