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, […]

Onward has the misfortune of being merely a very good film from a studio that produced the best animated films of the past two decades. This film has only a few flaws (more on that later) that are outweighed by its strengths. Still, in comparison with the best of Pixar I can only draw on […]

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 […]

If you have seen the trailer or commercials for Blue Sky Animation’s latest film, you know everything you need to know: A super-suave spy is turned into a pigeon by a nerdy kid who works for the same government agency. They team up to take down a bad guy and foil his nefarious plot. That’s […]

Since its modest beginning as a serial in Weekly Shonen Jump 35 years ago, Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular properties in the world. It’s sold more than 250 million books, and has been animated for four TV series, twenty theatrical features, video games, etc. It’s also accounted for billions […]

With Frozen II, Disney Animation has rebounded nicely from the ill-advised remake of The Lion King, proving once again that fresh ideas trump needless ones. Of course, Frozen II is a sequel, but it doesn’t feel like one. The original characters from Frozen star in the movie, but the screenplay by Jennifer Lee is a […]