Whoa, social life ahoy. I normally blog on weekends, but the past few weeks I've been out of the house before noon and back after midnight all weekend, meeting people, going for lunches and bbq's, and seeing the sights with new friends. I'm only free today because a planned reading group meeting has fallen through. So while I have an hour free, ( Read more... )

Ever since I joined the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, I've been getting all kinds of tempting magazines full of obscure DVDs to drool over. One temptation I just couldn't resist was Kino International's "The Astonishing Work of Tezuka Osamu" (2009), a collection of Tezuka's short films from the 1960's-80's ( Read more... )

A week or two ago, I came across this link to an interview (in Japanese) with director Morimoto Koji and some of the Studio 4°C staff about the current state of 3D animation in Japan. It's interesting in light of Tom Lamarre's recent work on planar movements and movement into depth in animation, so here's a tentative translation. My clarifications ( Read more... )

Woo, review time! Here’s how much I enjoyed Hosoda Mamoru's Summer Wars. I saw it this weekend at Winnipeg's Plastic Paper Animation Festival with my friend Adam, who brought along delicious chocolate raspberry truffles. I had one before the screening and he set the bag between us as the movie started...but I didn’t get to eat another truffle. That ( Read more... )

Well, it's back to Winnipeg and back to work with me. The temperature with windchill when I got up this morning was -39, and that's not even a really cold day. (The really cold days come with a five-minute frostbite warning.) Times like this, all you can do is curl up with a blanket and a long book -or at least write a review of one. So here are ( Read more... )