Category: Animé

Tezuka Tales

Osamu Tezuka’s creation “Mighty Atom” became “Astro Boy” in America. Along with Bob Clampett’s “Beany & Cecil,” Astro was the TV cartoon that influenced me the most as a kid.

A Tezuka cartoon that didn’t appear in America was the astounding and disturbing “Dororo.” The story is as medieval as Astro is futuristic. The premise of Astro is dark, being the death of a little boy, and Dororo takes an even darker twist. It begins with the birth of a horribly deformed baby boy.

https://youtu.be/bbbHrOK6xfc

The complete original Dororo series on DVD currently costs $50 on Amazon, but Dororo was recently remade and it’s available on Amazon Prime.

Auteur Anime

If you only ever watch one Anime feature, it should be The Place Promised in Our Early Days, a science fiction romance by Makoto Shinkai. This is a superb piece of work, and at the moment there is a perfect 720p copy on YouTube. Play it full screen in HD, click the captions button for English subtitles, and see what American animators can’t do.

Eating you out of House and home

Long before Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House, there was House, a bizarre 1977 Japanese movie about a haunted house that eats unmarried girls. House adheres to the Japanese Pop culture obsession with schoolgirls, and it’s essentially a ghost story, but with an amazingly varied, unrelenting series of creatively twisted, comic-horror images.

Because the movie is so utterly strange, it’s no surprise that on Amazon the customer reviews are all over the place. Watch the trailer and you’ll know whether or not you want to see the whole thing.