I hope everyone’s having a really good start to 2026 in spite of the political horrors around us. Even in an unstable world we can keep our creative energy going and get stuck into a project, old or new, while the year is still a notebook with lots of empty pages to play with. I […]
Look what came in the post from Paris – the perfect Christmas gift to myself. Now I can relive the Isao Takahata exhibition through Ilan Nguyen’s elegant translation of the original Japanese catalogue for Musée Européen du Manga et de l’Anime.
Before I sign off for the holidays, here’s an interview I really enjoyed doing, from the excellent Stone Bridge Podcast. Stone Bridge Press publish The Anime Encyclopedia, and published the first book in English about Hayao Miyazaki in 1999. The new edition, updated to include the most recent (never say the last!) Miyazaki film, is […]
The latest episode of The Anime Business is an interview Justin Sevakis filmed with me about a year ago: “The Anime Business – Helen McCarthy on Discovering Anime, UK Fandom and the Joy of It All.” It’s online here. It was fun to do and fascinating to watch. One of the best things about this […]
Advance copies of The Manga Bible fell into my eager hands this morning, and after I’d finished inhaling that unique, intoxicating new book smell – equal parts fresh ink, newly cut paper and author excitement – I couldn’t wait to share. So here they are in all their shiny new massively-illustrated gorgeousness – the English, […]
Well, never say never … but at present it seems unlikely, for three reasons. Firstly, Hayao Miyazaki has spent more than a decade working on two films. The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron, that are deeply personal. They are explorations of his own ideas, inspirations and beliefs, and of events and relationships that […]
I’m delighted that the proceedings of the Lancaster symposium on transnational anime are now published as an issue of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS), free to read here. There really is something for everyone here, from papers on the nitty-gritty of motion in anime and music in anime to the rise of […]
Although asked in the context of Miyazaki’s and Ghibli’s views on the primacy of the feature film, this question covers an issue that’s been debated in the anime business and anime scholarship for decades. It’s a really interesting question, because some people undeniably consider feature films superior to other forms of moving picture, but when […]
At the beginning of July I was privileged to speak at a symposium on Transnational Perspectives in Anime. It was held on the Lancaster University campus, co-hosted by Dr. Zoe Crombie and Japan Foundation London; I took part from my desktop. It was a truly fascinating day, sparking new ideas and new insights about the […]
62 years ago, in 1963, 35-year-old Osamu Tezuka flew to the USA to present his hit TV series Tetsuwan Atom to the NBC network. According to Tezuka Production’s history, a preview was screened in New York on 10 March, a contract signed in May, and the series began airing as Astro Boy on 7 September. […]