Although many graphic novels and manga focus on LGBTQ kids, the complex characters and exceptional draftsmanship set Kaito’s “Blue Flag” above the tepid Western fantasies and run-of-the-mill BL (“Boy’s Love”) manga. (It was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize for Graphic Novel.) Sadly, the publication of Volume #8 marks the end of Blue […]

Kenji Iwaisawa’s offbeat On-Gaku: Our Sound (2019) has attracted a loyal following in the US; it even earned an Annie nomination for Independent feature. Although it’s based on a self-published manga by Hiroyuki Ohashi, Iwaisawa wrote the screenplay, directed the film and animated it almost single-handedly. He simply couldn’t afford professional animators; the film’s shoestring […]

Those bad bad humans. Chopping down forests. How dare they displace Hei from his home! Hei, a magical spirit in the form of a wide-eyed cat, finds himself transported to the Big City. There, he’s attacked by a trio of human thugs, but rescued by a fellow shape-changer named Stormend. Hei joins Stormend’s unnamed faction […]

This is the story of a leader of an expedition, its sole survivor, who washes ashore on an unknown land and discovers a civilization of talking apes. He is nursed back to health by a pair of compassionate scientists. They wish to show him as an example that there is intelligent life outside their country. […]

Hot dog, especially if it’s a pug! Sony Animation’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines is finally out by way of Netflix, and it’s one of the best animated family films to hit the screens in quite some time. The producing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) are proving to be […]

Many recent anime TV programs reflect Japan’s daunting socio-economic problems in the post-Bubble economy: An aging, shrinking population; a bleak financial future that makes many young people undesirable as potential marriage partners; growing economic inequality; the persistent trauma from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident Westerners call Fukushima—and the government’s ineffectual response to it.