The new unboxing article on the Anime Limited site shows off some of the pages of my biography of the director of Sacred Sailors — an entire 128-page monograph on the man who directed Japanese animation’s first feature.
Over at All the Anime on their monthly podcast, I appear in my role as jury chairman on the awards committee for Scotland Loves Anime, in discussion with members of this year’s panel: Eric Beckman from Gkids and the New York International Children’s Film Festival, Anna Francis from the distributor National Amusements, and Miles Thomas from Crunchyroll. The fourth and final juror, Shelley Page from DreamWorks, was off climbing a hill in Edinburgh.
Discussion includes the four films under consideration: Kingsglaive, Momotaro — Sacred Sailors, A Silent Voice and Your Name, alongside the likely damage that Mods can cause to international sales, the rise and rise of Makoto Shinkai and the tropes of “disability” drama.
Listeners with an interest in what goes on behind the scenes at film festivals can also check out podcasts from earlier years. Highlights include Justin Sevakis and a NSFW digression on hentai in 2015, Gemma Cox on writing about women in anime in 2014, and Hugh David on film and video restoration in 2013.
Over at the All the Anime blog, I write an introduction to the wartime propaganda movie Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (i.e. Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors), which is receiving its belated UK premiere at Scotland Loves Anime next month.
“Japan’s first animated feature was a masterpiece of propaganda film-making, uncompromising in the bile it directed at the enemy, romantic in its evocation of home and hearth and of imperial Japan’s Pan-Asian aspirations, and still unsettling today in its depiction of the mindset of the Japanese military. Its survival to reach modern audiences is itself an adventure story in which it somehow evades bombing raids, burial, shredding and bonfires, emerging from hiding after almost 40 years to offer modern audiences a horrifying glimpse of a very different world.”
The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio interviews me about the Japanese propaganda film Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors, about which I am indeed writing a book for publication in 2017. / El diario chileno El Mercurio me entrevistas sobre la propaganda de guerra japonesa y mi favorito de dibujos animados japoneses: Mar guerreros divinos de Momotaro.
Today I am in Switzerland, at the Locarno Film Festival, which has dedicated an entire strand of programming to Japanese animation. Specifically I am going to be talking onstage with film archivist Akira Tochigi about a subject close to my heart – the modern renaissance in pre-war anime and the problems of restoring old cartoons.
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