A few more presentations and appearances before the end of the year: Monday 5 October in Leicester presenting The Art History of Studio Ghibli for Seed Talks Saturday 10 October at BFI Southbank, talking to Michael Leader about my career as part of the London International Film Festival 2026 Sunday 18 October online, a webinar […]
I’ve been debunking the Totoro-as-shinigami theory for years, most recently in my #SeedTalks all over the UK. It’s nice to have official Studio Ghibli confirmation, and see them emphasise the importance of the end credits to the continuing story (long before MCU did tagscenes.) Also, it’s good to have this cleared up officially before the […]
Many thanks to Roland Kelts for gifting the link to this interesting Bloomberg piece on the future of Studio Ghibli. It’s paywalled, like all their content, but Ghibliophiles like us might consider it worth the subscription. It’s an interview with Goro Miyazaki and Ghibli’s new president and CEO Kenichi Yoda, in which they discuss the […]
This week I completed the edits on the updated new edition of my 1999 book on Hayao Miyazaki, and sent them back to McFarland’s editorial team. I still have to check the bibliography, but this means the book is almost ready to go to press. I’ll let you know the publication date as soon as […]
The Manga Bible is out today in the US – the right time for me to give the fabulous Mandy Kaplan a crash dive into manga on her podcast Make Me A Nerd We talked One Piece, Nana and Nausicäa, amid many of my trademark diversions, and you can hear us on TruStory FM or […]
Happy New Book Birthday to me! The Manga Bible is in the shops today. Of course, I’ll celebrate – but very quietly. Cake, no alcohol, no rushing from bookshop to bookshop to admire its gorgeous cover on the shelf and maybe sneakily move it into a more visible position. I can’t go into town and […]
Among the many fascinating questions at my Seed Talks in the West Country was one about the influence of comic art on Studio Ghibli. I’d talked about Takahata’s lifelong passion for French culture and about the many and varied Western influences on Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, but there’s a limit to how […]
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 […]
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 […]
Frederik L. Schodt is someone whose own scholarship is impeccable. So when he recommends a piece of work on manga history, it’s work checking out. Mattt’s video is an hour and a half of loving, dedicated and accurate research, conveyed with clarity and passion. “How manga broke the US comic industry” really impressed me. It […]
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