Category: Anime

All You Need Is Kill (Kenichiro Akimoto, 2025)

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Ever get the feeling that every day is the same and nothing you do makes any difference? Rita’s (Ai Mikami) been feeling like that most of her life. Just going through the motions waiting for something to happen that would give her an excuse to change. And now she has her opportunity, because the world’s been invaded by a plant-like structure and no one yet knows quite why. All she and a team of other youngish people can do is poke around at the roots, but nothing really changes and no progress is made, which might be one reason Rita’s not really bothering. She’s sullen with her teammates and barely knows how to use her exosuit to the extent that even walking around in it is physically difficult. 

When Darol suddenly turns evil and sends out plant-like soldiers to massacre humanity, Rita is powerless but unexpectedly wakes up the next morning to discover the day is repeating. Every day, she must go fight Darol again, get killed, and then wake up to do the same thing. Perhaps it’s not so different from the way things were before in which each day was filled only with labour to the extent that one was indistinguishable from another, but it’s also a maddening loop from which Rita fears she cannot escape. Though taking liberties with its source material, Kenichiro Akimoto’s anime adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel is another in a series of films expressing a sense of emptiness felt among the younger generation hamstrung by a stagnant economy and conservative society where self-fulfilment and satisfaction feel at odds with a commonly held notion of success. Rika goes to battle every day, but achieves nothing before everything resets and she has to start again.

Just as she’s beginning to lose hope, she discovers another looper who has been secretly watching her exploits and supporting from the sidelines yet essentially hiding. Like her carrying childhood trauma and a sense of powerless inferiority, tech whiz Keiji (Natsuki Hanae) spent most of his first few loops trying to run away, which is understandable, only to be ironically inspired by Rita’s determination. She figures out not only that she needs a plan rather than just battling away on instinct alone, but also that she needs help. Her attempts to warn the others of Darol’s impending transformation fail, but looping with Keiji shows her the value of solidarity and the relief of sharing her burdens with someone else. As she says, she’d been selfish and self-involved, unable to see the meaning in anything until she finally realised that there was no point waiting around for the world to change. If she changed herself, the world would change around her if only that she would start to look at it differently.

These are the kinds of rebirth the pair are headed towards through their infinite karmic cycle of trying to figure out how to stop Darol and save the world. Nevertheless, the fact that Keiji is manipulating Rita’s suit and is able to programme his own to act in certain ways undercuts the notion of Rita being the arbiter of her own destiny, given that certain things are already being decided for her by an outside force other than the cosmic accident of the loop by which they are both connected. Then there’s also the implication that each of them are chosen ones that Darol particularly wants to absorb because they’re already strong, they just didn’t know it. But what really matters is that the pair begin to believe in the possibility of tomorrow enough to stop actively holding it back. Rita used to wish tomorrow would never come, and then it did stop coming, and that wasn’t any better. In fact, it was worse. At least now they each have the desire to proceed in the direction of tomorrow, together. Akimoto’s somewhat retro-inspired designs add to the sense of stopped time while the kinetic action sequences lean in to the feeling that Rita’s life is an inescapable slog against overwhelming odds and enemies that constantly respawn validating the nihilistic futility in which she is mired until finally realising that only she, with Keiji’s help, can break herself out of this cycle and finally find the way to a new tomorrow.

All You Need Is Kill is in UK cinemas from 27th February courtesy of Anime Limited.

Trailer (English subtitles)

LUPIN THE IIIRD: The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline (LUPIN THE IIIRD THE MOVIE 不死身の血族, Takeshi Koike, 2025)

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Lupin and the gang find themselves in a race against time after being lured to a mysterious private island in Takeshi Koike’s latest instalment in the classic franchise, LUPIN THE IIIRD: The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline (LUPIN THE IIIRD THE MOVIE 不死身の血族, Fujimi no Ketsuzoku). A sequel to a series of specials, the film opens with a lengthy recap explaining that each member of Lupin’s team has been targeted for assassination and seen off their adversaries using their own particular skills. Now Lupin’s home has been destroyed taking most of his loot with it, so he too is in hot pursuit looking for answers about who might be trying to kill them and why, along with some treasure, of course.

What he discovers, however, is that the island is a kind of graveyard for the unwanted. The place is full of mindless men in masks, the hitmen who didn’t make it reduced to animalistic predation. Disused military equipment scatters the landscape as if in reminder of mankind’s folly. But Lupin (voiced by Kanichi Kurita) is here because according to apparent mastermind Muom (Kataoka Ainosuke VI), he’s trash too and doesn’t belong in the new world Muom is trying to create by making the earth immortal. The air on the island is toxic to people like Lupin and unless he and his friends find a way off it within the next 24 hours, they’re destined to become zombie-like masked men too or else fade away into oblivion leaving not even a legacy behind them. 

The war is then against a notion of obsolescence or the idea that a person can become somehow unnecessary. The gang were followed to the island by Zenigata (Koichi Yamadera) who is still trying to catch Lupin but ends up becoming trapped too. Lupin is obviously very necessary to Zenigata as without him he doesn’t really have a reason to exist. That’s one reason he ends up ironically teaming up with him, protecting Fujiko Mine (Miyuki Sawashiro) and breaking his own code to shoot some bad guys in an attempt to keep Lupin alive to face justice. 

But as it turns out, Interpol might not be the best place to turn for back up as there’s some sort of blackout code on all things related to the island which is marked on no maps. Zenigata’s contact describes it as “sacred” and rather than sending the helicopter he asked for, explains everyone who sets foot on it will have to die because they know too much. As weird as Muom’s plans to make the earth immortal sound, it appears it’s locked into something bigger. All of which is quite good for Lupin who starts to realise there might not be much treasure here after all, but he’s found something more precious in a lead on even greater riches just waiting to be plundered.

This might be his way out of the purgatorial space of the island, the “hell for those burdened by karma” as Goemon (Daisuke Namikawa) describes it, in kicking back against Muom’s plans by identifying his nature and, quite literally, heading straight to the heart of the matter while reclaiming his identity as the gentleman thief from those who think he’s an unwelcome presence. Returning to the lair, he burns the history of himself and declares that life is a fiction to be enjoyed while immortality is a worthless gift that robs existence of its meaning. Separated on the island, the team must face their personal traumas alone before reuniting to try and figure out how to defeat their seemingly immortal captor and fight their way off the island before being consumed by its toxic gases.

The last in Koike’s Lupin cycle, the film is, in some ways, intended as a prequel to Mystery of Mamo, the very first Lupin anime released in 1978. As such it continues the style Koike has established in the series so far complete with kinetic action sequences and retro jazz score. Though this may seem like the end of the line for the gentleman thief, it is really just another beginning in returning the franchise to its point of origin. Lupin is, in a sense, reborn to steal back everything that was taken from him, with Zenigata hot on his heels and the world set to rights again, saved by his very particular brand of chaos.

LUPIN THE IIIRD: The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline opens in UK cinemas 21st February courtesy of Anime Limited.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © MP / T

Make a Girl (メイクアガール, Gensho Yasuda, 2024)

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A socially awkward teenage scientist takes a friend’s advice too literally and builds himself a girlfriend in Gensho Yasuda’s indie animation, Make a Girl (メイクアガール). The central irony is that Akira (Shun Horie) makes Zero (Atsumi Tanezaki) to improve his productivity, but in fact ends up learning how to interact with people from her. Nevertheless, consciously or otherwise, he’s started off from a questionable position given that his notions of what a girlfriend should be are bound up with his unresolved feelings for his late mother along with outdated sexist attitudes. 

Akira’s mother Inaba was a genius scientist who passed away of an illness sometime previously leaving Akira alone with only their huge lab and a drive containing her memories. Fearing he can’t live up to his mother’s legacy, Akira’s inventions are largely useless time-wasting devices which make ordinary tasks take longer than they would if done in the normal way. That’s why he’s so taken with his friend’s story about how getting a girlfriend has improved his productivity at his part-time job. Not really understanding why his friend’s productivity improved, he decides to create a “girlfriend” for himself, but is only doing so in the hope that she will magically allow him to level up. She is then a sentient being that exists solely to support him by being cute and sweet while he otherwise puts nothing at all into the relationship.

Zero’s desire to fit into the stereotypical “girlfriend” role is signalled by her learning to cook so that she and Akira can eat together, while when she tries to go on a stereotypical date with him, she opts to go clothes shopping and says that she’s realised that she likes it when he makes all her choices for her. Akira is really in the awkward position of being both a paternal figure and a boyfriend, branded a “father” to his creation by his mentor while at the same time associating Zero with his late mother even as he tries to “date” her, albeit in a curiously asexual way. It turns out that his mother’s AI coding contained several safeguards which effectively mean that Akira has total control over Zero and if she attempts to defy him, she automatically tries to strangle herself. When he begins to find her annoying because her desire to spend more time with him gets in the way of his research, he simply gets her an apartment and says he just wants to be friends.

Led into a quagmire of existential questioning both by Akira’s indifference and the probing of his friends, Zero begins to wonder who she really is and if she only “likes” Akira because he designed her that way. Though she desperately tries to get Akira back by being an even more perfect girlfriend, which is after all her life’s purpose, she begins trying to claim her identity by overcoming her programming, which is to say escaping his control to be her own self. Akira, meanwhile, finally realises that what he felt for her wasn’t “annoyance” but “love”, if only if still rooted in all the things she can do for him rather than an acceptance that what his friend meant was that falling in love had given him an eagerness for life through the mutual exchange of emotion, care, and support. 

In any case, Zero’s actions take on a misogynistic quality as if Akira were, in a way, attacked by a “crazy girlfriend” who was only ever going to mess up his life because women always get in the way. The fact that the antagonist is also a woman who is jealous of his genius and a kind of rival to Zero further rams the idea home that women only cause trouble and are a threat to a man’s autonomy, even as Akira is still clearly overly attached to the memory of his late mother. The voice of reason is his wiser than her years friend Akane (Sora Amamiya), though even she at times seems jealous of Zero and shares many of the same outdated notions about what a woman should be. It’s almost as if Akira too is a construct who was only turned on yesterday which is why he has no idea about human feelings or how to interact with other people and is, in effect, learning them vicariously through Zero, who is mainly picking them up from Akane but getting a double dose of patriarchal programming that proves much harder to break than any of Akira’s code.

Make a Girl screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback (名探偵コナン 隻眼の残像（フラッシュバック）, Katsuya Shigehara, 2025)

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Detective Conan (Minami Takayama) returns for the 28th instalment in the long-running animated film series, Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback, (名探偵コナン 隻眼の残像（フラッシュバック）, Meitantei Conan: Sekigan no Flashback) as he finds himself embroiled in another mystery revolving around Inspector Yamato’s (Yuji Takada) near fatal collision with an avalanche, a potential terrorist attack on a radio observatory, and the murder of one of Kogoro Mori’s (Rikiya Koyama) old friends. Meanwhile, justice is under fire as the government are working on reforming the plea deal system which leaves some feeling short-changed by justice and that the criminals are getting off too lightly while victims of crime continue to suffer.

Indeed, there’s a kind of symmetry between Conan’s guardian Kogoro, who took him in after he was shrunk to the size of a child by the evil Black Organisation, and bereaved father Funakubo who blames himself for what happened to his daughter Maki because he sent her back to his gun shop where she got caught up in a robbery. Before she left, she said she had something to tell him, but he never got to hear what it was, just as Kogoro never heard what his former colleague from his police days, Croco, wanted to tell him when he set up a clandestine meeting in a local park but was killed by a mysterious assassin before he could say anything. 

Once again, Conan is on the case, though Kogoro more or less sidelines him and insultingly repeatedly reminds Conan that this is not a game. Nevertheless, Inspector Yamato specifically asks for his help, while Conan begins to suspect something bigger is motion when he’s unsubtly bugged by someone he assumes is probably an undercover Public Security officer. All roads lead back to Amuro (Takeshi Kusao), who handles the situation from the cafe in Tokyo where he works to maintain his cover identity. 

Nevertheless, it all links back to the gun shop robbery and its lingering effects on the victims. Not only was one of the thieves not caught, but the other got off on a plea bargain which has left Mr Funakubo on a constant quest for justice in which he is forever hassling the Nagano Police for updates on his case. Meanwhile, there’s interpersonal drama in play in the relationship between police officers Yamato and Yui (Ami Koshimizu) who are also wrestling with unspoken feelings and the fallout from Yamato’s presumed death in the avalanche in which he lost his memory and wasn’t found until a few months later. The wound to his eye is symbolic of his inability to recall the whole of what happened before he was overcome by the snow. He must have seen the face of the man he was chasing at the time, but he can’t remember it. 

Though the mystery itself may not be as complicated as others in the series, involving few clues or difficult puzzles to be solved and relying instead on Conan’s keen intuition and people skills, it leans heavily into a sense of conspiracy and paints Public Security in an unflattering light as they attempt to bug Conan and then in a post-credits scene, are seen to offer another “plea deal” to a suspect in return for keeping Public Security out of their testimony while blackmailing them that, should they choose to speak out, all their secrets will also be revealed to the public and those close to them will suffer. In any case, Conan gets a few more opportunities to use his all-powerful skateboard amid the film’s increasingly elaborate action sequences as he squares off against the crazed villain hellbent on vengeance and an ironic defence of the law.

Where Public Security come in for scrutiny, the police are depicted as universally good, reminding the suspect that it’s the police’s job the enforce the law without fear or favour while protecting ordinary people both physically and emotionally. As messages go, it might be a little authoritarian, but it’s also true that the police take Conan seriously in ways others may not. While they’re all busy with the crime(s), Conan’s friends are also all in Nagano along with Ran (Wakana Yamazaki) enjoying what’s supposed to be a stargazing holiday before being dragged into the case and providing important backup for Conan. As the tagline says, the truth won’t stay buried forever and Conan does his best to play off Public Security and the police in order to solve the case, avenge Kogoro’s friend, and also protect justice in Japan as the courts debate the plea bargain issue and its effect on criminals and victims alike as they try to rebuild their lives in the wake of crime.

Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback is in UK cinemas from 26th September courtesy of CineAsia.

Trailer (Japanese / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Jinsei (無名の人生, Ryuya Suzuki, 2025)

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A man goes by many names before he dies. The hero of Ryuya Suzuki’s almost entirely self-produced anime Jinsei (無名の人生, Mumei no Jinsei) never tells us his name. He doesn’t say anything much at all, but passively allows himself to be called whatever others call him while struggling to come to terms with the death of his mother and continually looking for new forms of family along with a place he can really call their own.

Indeed, in the wordless opening sequence, Se-chan’s father and mother meet, get married, have a child, and split up, but are killed together in a freak accident in which the young Se-chan watches helplessly as a pickup truck being driven by an elderly man mows them down. After that, he ceases to speak and looks on at the world vacantly. He becomes a kind of mirror for the world around him, an empty vessel onto which others may project their own fears and anxieties. Thus at school they call him “grim reaper” because he doesn’t speak or move. When another boy in the neighbourhood tries to reach out to him, he punches him in the face. Nevertheless the two eventually become friends, bonding in their shared status as bullied outsiders rejected by mainstream society. 

Kin, who in some kind of nominative determinism has dyed blond hair, is marginalised because of his interest in male pop idols and dreams of becoming one. A man named Shiratori comes from the city with a prophecy for Se-chan in the form of a VHS tape featuring his father dancing as part of a chart-topping boy band. Se-chan too has the desire to sing and dance, but the entertainment industry feeds on broken dreams. His father, Eito, had been the son of an aristocratic family who rejected him for following his dreams of becoming a singer. His father pulls a gun on him when he returns in disgrace having been caught using drugs and getting cancelled by the world at large. Eito too apparently could not cope with the pressures of showbiz and tired of the cage of stardom. Shiratori is clearly modelled on Johnny Kitagawa whose decades of sexual abuse were an open secret acknowledged only after his eventual death. He tells the boys that they’re in a cage to which he holds the key, but that it’s protection not imprisonment even as they become tools exploited by moneymaking execs intent on selling them body and soul.

Se-chan’s stepfather had told him that life was a swan and he should spread his wings, but cages are hard to avoid as he discovers on working as a Kabukicho club host once again exploited as a hook dangled to get money from women only to fall victim to another heartless man and the woman who couldn’t tame him. Se-chan found a kind of family in the boy band that he doesn’t really find anywhere else, certainly not in Kabukicho, until he decides to renounce the world entirely as a caveman recluse living in a disused building which is to say in a kind of past. Suzuki’s increasingly bleak descent into the near future echoes this desire for more genuine connections and familial warmth uncorrupted by the darkness of contemporary capitalism and the young Se-chan’s unresolved trauma. War and apocalypse give rise to shady cults, which are also like families, but exclusionary in calming themselves to be some kind of elite as a dangerous feudalism resurrects itself.

Travelling 100 years from 1995, the film moves from the biting cold of winter in Yamagata to the blazing heat of a post-apocalyptic society but seems to imply that in the end we find ourselves again and make the world anew as a great family of humanity. Suzuki apparently made the film up as he went  along, working without a script and stitching one scene on to the next, but his images move with a quiet power and purpose even they move towards an inevitable ending and the final goodbye. The man who was the lonely boy Se-chan, grim reaper, God, a pop star named “Zen”, someone’s Love, comes to embody the concept of life itself in being all things to all men while life in effect lived him in the depths of all his longing and loneliness only to find a sense of hope in confronting the eternal void.

Jinsei screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Give It All (がんばっていきまっしょい, Yuhei Sakuragi, 2024)

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The last year of high school is a little premature to be defeated by life, but this seems to be what has happened to Etsuko. It’s fitting in a way, because her problem is that she simply gives up too early and is incapable of seeing anything through because she’s already convinced herself that there’s no point in trying. Yuhei Sakuragi’s anime adaptation of the book by Yoshiko Shikimura, Give It All (がんばっていきまっしょい, Ganbatte Ikimasshoi) is indeed all about how there’s no point giving up before the end and no matter the result there’s satisfaction to be gained just knowing that you gave it all you could.

But Etsuko can’t see that to begin with because she peaked too early. Back in primary school, she won all the races because she was tall for her age. But the other children eventually started catching up with her, and she started to fall behind. It didn’t really occur to her train or to try to compete with them because she was used to just winning and the realisation that she wasn’t “special” after all made her feel like a failure at life. To save herself similar pain, she started giving up before she even started believing that there wasn’t any point in trying. Even so, she’s sullen and miserable, not to mention resentful of those who do put in the effort and start to see results. 

That’s one reason she’s reluctant to get involved with the rowing club again despite the encouragement of her best friend Hime. Badgered into it by transfer student Riina, she does the bare minimum and lets the others down, at one point just letting her oars drop while asking herself what it is she’s even doing here. But it’s also being part of a team that gives her a new sense of purpose as she realises that she’s the one who’s the weak link because she doesn’t have the stamina to keep up with the other girls. 

Meanwhile, they all have their problems too. Riina is struggling to make new friends after moving to the town following her mother’s marriage and is also nervous around boys because she’s always attended single-sex schools. Taeko and Mayumi only joined the club to get back at each other because their families are supposedly feuding, though there’s a little bit more to their relationship drama than a buinsseness dispute between their parents. Hime is really just trying to keep the peace and get Etsuko back to being the confident and outgoing person she used be rather a sullen figure of defeat who is aloof to the point of rudeness and refuses to try at anything. 

Ironically, it’s an encounter with the awkward team captain of a rival high school’s team that begins to open her eyes. Based on her earlier experiences, Etsuko assumes that the other team must just be innately talented and will win the upcoming race easily, but the other girl tells her that she’s mistaken. They didn’t win easily and they don’t have room for complacency. Though she seems jealous of the fun Etsuko and the others seem to be having and the genuine friendships that have arisen between them in contrast to the frosty determination and rigorous training that defines her relationship with her teammates, she reminds Etsuko that they work hard and that Etsuko’s team has potential if only they gave it their all.

While the 3D animation sometimes appears uncanny and distracts from the overall aesthetic, the beautifully designed backdrops add to the sense of peace and serenity in the town and echo Etsuko’s own unfolding sense of joy as the world around her brightens thanks to her new friends. What she learns is that it’s foolish to give up too soon without even trying, while not doing anything will leave her stuck in the middle of the water like a boat with no one rowing for the rest of her life. The thing about rowing is that it requires unity and the team to think as one, which means that she has to engage and bond with her teammates while finding fulfilment in her individual contribution through resolving to give it her all no matter what and knowing that’s worth it no matter the result.

Give It All screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Colors Within (きみの色, Naoko Yamada, 2024)

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“If I could see my own colour, what kind of colour would it be?” the heroine of Naoko Yamada’s The Colors Within (きみの色, Kimi no Iro) asks herself. Yet there’s a curious pun in the film’s Japanese title in that the word “kimi” simply means “you” but it’s also the name of another girl by whom Totsuko (Sayu Suzukawa) is captivated though she doesn’t quite have the ability to articulate her feelings beyond the fact she feels “all sparkly inside”. 

In any case, Totsuko has the ability to see people as colours but largely keeps it to herself in fear that people will think she’s “weird”. Totsuko does indeed appear to be slightly otherworldly, though no one really seems to reject her for her ethereality save perhaps one classmate who describes her as that girl who sits in the chapel on her own all the time. What she’s mostly doing in there is reciting the serenity prayer to find “peace of mind,” and talking to the cool nun at her Catholic boarding school, Sister Hiyoko (Yui Aragaki), who tries probe gently into whatever it is that’s bothering Totsuko but equally avoiding pressuring her reveal anything before she’s ready. Then again, Totsuko may not quite know what it is that’s making her feel uneasy even if she remains upbeat and cheerful with a childlike sense of fun and innocence.

This quality of joyfulness is directly contrasted with the intense melancholy of Kimi (Akari Takaishi) with whom Totsuko becomes fascinated after catching sight of her “beautiful” and “clear” colours. When Kimi disappears from the school it’s rumoured she talked back to a teacher or that they found out she had a boyfriend, but it seems a Catholic education just isn’t a good fit for Kimi so she decided to drop out. Like Totsuko, Kimi has a secret but hers is that she can’t bring herself to tell her grandmother, who attended the same school and is over the moon about her going there, that it isn’t working out for her. What with it being a Catholic school, there’s also the implication that Kimi and also Totsuko may be struggling to define themselves within a repressive environment and reconcile their differences in the intense fear of not only being rejected by their community but damned to hell. 

After Totsuko checks every bookshop in town because someone said they saw Kimi working in one, she accidentally starts a band with her and a boy who just happened to wander in, Rui (Taisei Kido). Rui also has a secret which is his love of music which he fears conflicts with his responsibility of taking over the family medical practice. He isn’t exactly sure he wants this future that’s been forced on him and prevents him from following his dreams. In fact, none of the teens really wants the kind of life their parents wanted for them but they aren’t yet certain of the kinds of lives they do want or really who they are which is why Totsuko is still unable to see her own colour despite clearly discerning everyone else’s.

Through making music together, they discover new ways of expressing themselves and with it growing self-acceptance that allows them to be honest with themselves and others about who they are and what they want. Music in itself becomes an act of holy communion with the universe, a pure communication of one soul to another much like Totsuko’s synaesthetic ability to see people as colours. Even Sister Hiyoko insists that any song that is about goodness, beauty, truth or indeed suffering is itself a hymn and in the end Totsuko’s song is about all those things. Her joy, Kimi’s sadness, and Rui’s confusion coming together in a harmonised symphony as a consequence of “sharing secrets and feelings of love”. This sense of delicacy extends to the animation itself which has a watery, ethereal quality. Produced by Science Saru, this is the first of Yamada’s films not based on existing material and is underpinned by a tremendous empathy for its anxious adolescents as well as their uncertain adults along with a true sense of wonder for a world of colour and light hidden from most but visible to the ever cheerful Totsuko content to dance through life for the pure joy of it even if as she says she wasn’t very good.

The Colors Within screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and is released in UK cinemas on 31st January courtesy of All the Anime.

Trailer (Japanese with English subtitles)

Images: © 2024 “THE COLORS WITHIN” FILM PARTNERS

Ghost Cat Anzu (化け猫あんずちゃん, Yoko Kuno & Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2024)

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It can be comforting, in a way, to think that this world is deeper than we often think it is and that we live surrounded by ancient spirits who touch our lives in ways we never suspect. All of this is, however, a little more palpable in Iketeru, the town of eternal summer, where the heroine of Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s animation Ghost Cat Anzu (化け猫あんずちゃん, Bakemono Anzu-chan) is unceremoniously dumped by her feckless father as he attempts to sort out some persistent trouble with loan sharks. 

Of course, to a girl from Tokyo who hoped to spend the summer break with her cram school crush, being sent to a temple to stay with an estranged grandfather it’s not even clear she has ever met before is not a whole lot of fun. But then as Karin (Noa Goto) says, she’s used to being alone, which might be why she takes against the giant ghost cat, Anzu (Mirai Moriyama), who lives like a human but obviously isn’t one. The funny thing about Iketeru is that no one finds Anzu’s existence odd, if at times troublesome. He’s even patiently arrested by a pair of policemen for not having a proper license for his moped which he didn’t think he needed because, after all, he’s a ghost and also a cat. A pair of little boys who’ve formed their own gang called “The Contrarians” to “defy society” call him “aniki” like some kind of yakuza boss and try to recruit him though being in a gang seems like too much bother for Anzu, which is something he has in common in Karin. 

But the funny thing is, Anzu isn’t really so different from her father in that he too can be somewhat irresponsible. Though he knows he shouldn’t, he spends the money he was keeping for her on pachinko hoping to win big but predictably loses it all. He gets over excited about jobs that pay 3000 yen (£15) a day and overcooks food he’s dropped on the floor because it’ll burn off all the dirt. But like Karin, Anzu can be a little standoffish and it isn’t even until her arrival that he starts to interact with some of the other supernatural creatures in the area who appear to have already set up some kind of club. Having invited them over, Anzu complains they didn’t pay him enough attention and he won’t invite them again while Karin asserts that they seemed “nice”. Though Anzu himself has not yet quite taken to her, the yokai are touched by her tragic circumstances and feelings of abandonment so decide to do what they can to help her. 

Part of Karin’s problem is that she’s still struggling to come to terms with her mother’s death three years previously. Iketeiru calls itself the town of eternal summer, but the summer in Japan is synonymous with the Bon festival during which this world and the other are at their closest and the spirits of the departed may temporarily return. Thus the town itself is a liminal space caught between the living and the dead which the mortal and supernatural co-exist in a very tangible way even if Karin’s eventual descent into hell involves jumping into a broken toilet in a Tokyo columbarium. Even so, she eventually finds herself squaring off against the King of Hell himself in the middle of the Bon festival while straddling the worlds of the living and dead and discovering the will to go on living which is perhaps what the town’s name may actually mean. 

In that sense, it’s a place Karin discovers as much as it’s home to cure her sense of rootless abandonment. The rotoscoped animation and live-recorded dialogue lend a sense of uncanniness to the beautifully animated backgrounds which effortlessly evoke a sense of serenity in the timelessness of a summer in small-town Japan. The juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern, Jizo playing Nintendo Switch, yokai working at the golf course which is perhaps a manifestation of the disruption wrought on the natural world by human endeavour, echo a kind of cosmic irony but also an odd kind of warmth in the strangeness of the world around us with its immortal cat spirits and friendly supernatural creatures that seems a far cry from the sterility of the city with its violent loan sharks and indifferent friends. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram (名探偵コナン 100万ドルの五稜星, Chika Nagaoka, 2024)

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Now a sprawling multi-media franchise, Detective Conan began with Gosho Aoyama’s manga which published its first instalment in 1994 and is still going strong 30 years later. The series was released in the US in the 2000s under the name Case Closed and in a decision which was perhaps more common then than today anglicised all of the character’s names and settings (the Japanese publisher then began releasing its own English language translation of the manga maintaining all the original Japanese names and plot details). Meanwhile Detective Conan remains hugely popular across Asia and regularly tops the Japanese box office with the annual release of a feature film revolving around a major case for Conan in addition to the ongoing anime and manga.

Which is all to say it has a very well developed universe and vast cast of characters which weave in and out of Conan’s various adventures. The main thing to note about Conan himself, which is explained very briefly in a short introductory sequence to the movie, is that he’s actually a 17-year-old high school detective but his body was shrunk to the size of a small child when he was drugged by the mysterious Black Organisation after witnessing to of their agents getting up to something shady in a park. Only a handful of people know his true identity while he often works with the police solving crimes, and is common with Japanese crime fiction more often than not locked room mysteries.

The Million-Dollar Pentagram (名探偵コナン 100万ドルの五稜星, Meitantei Conan 100-man Dollar Michishirube), the 27th Conan movie, is somewhat different in this regard as it’s more of a treasure hunt in which Conan (voiced by Minami Takayama) and his associate Heiji (Ryo Horikawa) must attempt to figure out the mystery of some missing treasure which might have something to do with a pair of swords stolen by one of Conan’s arch nemeses, Kid the Phantom Thief (Kappei Yamaguchi). Like many of these kinds of stories, the mystery turns on historical detail in this case stemming back to the Meiji Restoration and legendary Shinsengumi boss Hijikata Toshizo, if by way of a long-dead industrialist who got rich quick during the pre-war goldrush in Hokkaido. Some of his estate apparently went missing after his death and now his grandson, who’s messed up the family business, wants to find it and so does Conan but for slightly different reasons. In any case, no one even knows what the treasure is and they may be disappointed when they find out especially as it might not show grandpa Onoe in a particularly good light. 

There is undoubtedly quite a lot going on with a prominent subplot focusing on Heiji’s crush on love interest Kazuha (Yuko Miyamura) and his rivalry with Kid the Phantom Thief with his big plan to finally confess his feelings aligning with the climax of the mystery taking place on Mount Hakodate. A port town in Hokkaido, Hakodate has not often been well served by cinema often appearing in indie films such as And Your Bird Can Sing, Sketches of Kaitan City, and Over the Fence as a moribund post-industrial centre the protagonists can’t escape, but here seems pleasant and relaxed as a kind of Northern Kyoto rich in period history. The film’s success has apparently spiked a mini tourist boom in the area.  

The filmmakers apparently did not want to destroy any of the town’s architecture even in animation, hoping to make the most of the city’s famous night scenes and beautiful scenery. Nevertheless, there are the usual series of impressive action sequences including one of Conan riding a jet-powered skateboard not to mention taking out a suspect with a football while Heiji fights another on the wings of a biplane. As for the mystery itself, it’s not the kind where the audience will be able to work it out seeing as it depends on very specific cultural knowledge that even Conan needs a hint to key into but eventually broadens into something more international involving arms dealers and corrupt businessmen. Long-standing fans of the franchise will want to stay put for a very interesting post-credits sequence and even newcomers will get a kick out of an unexpected punchline to the film’s closing moments. All in all another classic case for the Conan team peppering its key mystery with the humour and warmth the franchise is known for.

Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram opens in UK cinemas 27th September courtesy of CineAsia.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese & English subtitles)

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-, Tatsuya Oishi, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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A young man walks into an empty subway station already ominously strewn with blood and finds there the corpse of a woman shorn of her limbs. The corpse rises and begs him to have her life by sacrificing his own in allowing her to suck his blood and surprisingly the young man agrees. He does not, however, die but is brought back as something else, not quite human and definitely subservient to the creature he has saved. 

Running 2.5 hours, Tatsuya Oishi’s Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-) is in fact a compilation of three films released in 2016 and a part of the long running Kizumonogatari series which originated with Nisio Isin’s light novels and has gone to spawn an expansive universe of interconnecting spin-offs. This is technically a prequel, and in that sense begins with a black slate but also deliberately drops us into confusion with breakneck pace through the hero’s quest to recover himself and his place in the world after this rude awakening to the supernatural. 

Rude is in many ways a defining characteristic of Kiss-shot, the 500-year old vampire Araragi finds bleeding in the subway station at that point a blonde and alluring figure of forbidden desire. Araragi is drawn to her in an unconscious death wish linked with the sexual desire he struggles to understand, running into the subway minutes after buying a pornographic magazine from a convenience store after striking up a friendship with fellow student Hanekawa. But once he saves her life, Kiss-shot is transformed into a cheeky little girl who now tells him that he is her minion and he must recover her severed limbs from a trio of vampire in order to be restored to humanity even as the power dynamic between them becomes confused and distorted.

In his vampire state, Araragi becomes immortal, powerful and free of mortal jeopardy yet he remains uncertain and insecure while reliant on the support of Hanekawa who encourages him to reject his desire for death and remain alive. But this also presents a problem to Araragi who sees himself as self-sacrificing and is unwilling to accept the what he sees as a self-sacrifice from Hanekawa for whom he feels unworthy and inadequate. In some senses it’s a typically self-centred, adolescent male perspective that rejects any idea of her own agency and assumes Hanekawa performs these actions for him rather than considering that she performs them for herself and is simply doing what she wants to do which in the end is not really about him at all. He declares it a burden he’s too weak to carry, which might in some senses be fair but also again a mischaracterisation that is further evidence of his lack of self-worth.

It’s this sense of inadequacy that lies behind his desire to reclaim his humanity along with the concurrent disgust he feels in the degradations of vampirism. It genuinely comes as a surprise to him that Kiss-shot feeds on human beings and lost her own humanity so long ago that she no longer gives it a second thought. She is after all only being what she is, but like Araragi is drawn to death partly out of frustrated longing and lingering boredom with a relentless yet apparently uneventful 500 years behind her in which the only other highlight was her previous minion who rejected this life much more quickly than she ever expected.

Even so, Oishi lends their mutual dilemma a degree of absurdity in the expectedly comic sight of severed heads littering a sports filed or launching themselves in toothy attacks. Heavily inspired by the French New Wave, he breaks the action with sometimes barely legible title cards often reading a single world while his composition has a kind of jauntiness that is also bleak and melancholy. The world surrounding Araragi veers between the pristine entrance to the high school, and post apocalyptic devastation littered with crows emblematised by the depilated cram school in which Kiss-shot keeps him. Backgrounds often have a photo realistic quality that further sets the world at a kilter when matched with the more conventional character designs of the central players. The conclusion that Araragi is presented with amounts a sharing of the misery which is also akin the burden he didn’t want to carry but also perhaps symbolic of his path towards adulthood in acceptance of compromise and selflessness in being willing to carry a small part of others’ pain and despair and allowing them to carry a part of his own.

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)