Charles Solomon

Editor

Internationally known animation historian and critic, Charles Solomon has written over 15 books books including Enchanted Drawings: The History Of Animation, The Art of Disney’s Frozen, The Making of Peanuts Animation, and Tale as Old as Time: The Art and Making of Disney Beauty and the Beast .

Articles By Charles Solomon

Anime

Baseball is enormously popular in Japan, and the Summer Koshien tournament that determines the national high school championship is one of the most anticipated sports events of the year. Nearly every Japanese schoolboy dreams of pitching in the Koshien. Dreams of the Koshien tournament haunt the shonen (boys’) sports series, Mix Meisei Story. In 1986, […]

First Image
Anime

To help fill the enforced hours at home of “sheltering in place,” here are some anime series that lend themselves to binge watching. Some are older, some recent; adventures, comedies, romances. Typically, the adventures take the main characters on quests where they face much realer danger than American counterparts. The comedies have a take-no-prisoners silliness […]

First Image
Anime

The 2018 feature Natsume Yujin-cho the Movie: Ephemeral Bond is based on a popular manga by Yuki Midorikawa that ran from 2005 to 2019. It’s also been adapted to a TV series that lasted six seasons and several CD dramatizations. Natsume Yujin-cho means “Natsume’s Book of Friends.” Takashi Natsume is a orphaned teen-ager who was […]

First Image
Anime

In almost any boys’ sports anime, the short and/or red-haired guy is the eager firebrand: Hinata in Haikyu (volleyball), Nagisa in Free (swimming), Gion in All Out! (rugby). He never doubts that he and his teammates will win the big game, the tournament or the nationals. Hinomaru Ushio, the star of Hinomaru Sumo (2018), embodies […]

First Image
Commentary

Although he wrote them in 1859, Charles Dickens might have been thinking of animation in 2019 when he penned the celebrated lines, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the […]

First Image

More From Animation Scoop

BOOK REVIEW: “The Art of The Boy and the Heron”

“The Art of The Boy and the Heron” opens with director Hayao Miyazaki’s self-deprecating Project Memo: “Isn’t it proof that you are aging when you imagine you’re still capable, but in fact you have memory loss due to senility? I would say yes.” Audiences who saw the Oscar-winning film would say “no.” The Japanese title […]