As a young girl, Ruka Azumi had an amazing encounter with the sea life in her father’s aquarium, as they gathered and looked at her through the sea window. Years later, as a 14-year-old junior high student, she crosses paths with two boys, brothers, who are able to breathe and talk underwater, both raised by […]

Five hundred years ago in China, during the late Tang dynasty, the Dark General made people catch snakes that somehow energize him with supernatural power. The snake people—demons—don’t like this. So a beautiful young woman, Blanca, tries to assassinate him. She fails. Despite her martial arts prowess, she is subdued. She wakes in a remote […]

Like Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 14-year-old Yusuke Urameshi (Justin Cook), the hero of the brawling fantasy-adventure Yu Yu Hakusho (1992), is “a low-down cheap little punk.” He boasts that he’s the toughest kid in Sarayashki Junior High. He cuts classes and loves duking it out with other guys, especially with his red-haired […]

From the chief director of Psycho-Pass, the director of Afro Samurai, and the studio that brought you Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters comes the animated feature film Human Lost – Osamu Dazai’s masterpiece of Japanese literature re-imagined into a hyper-kinetic deep dive into human consciousness. Funimation Films will give Human Lost a limited theatrical release, […]

Alternately ground-breaking, engaging and grisly, Golden Kamuy (2018) can be challenging to watch, but it’s difficult to ignore. Based on the 2014 manga by Satoru Noda, the story takes place near the end of the Meiji era (1868-1912). While serving in the 1st Division of the Imperial Army during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Saichi Sugimoto […]

Both upbeat and offbeat, Cells at Work! (2018) is a quirky fantasy series that may initially remind some viewers of Osmosis Jones (2001). But the program is lower key and much less hip: It feels closer to the old police drama “The Naked City”: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has […]