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 […]
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.
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 […]
That’s an excellent question, not just because it impacts a key relationship in the film of Howl’s Moving Castle but because it also gives us an example of the contrast between relationships with an equal power balance and relationships where all power is given to one side. I’m not going to talk about this in terms […]
The Ghibli fans who come to my Seed Talks ask some really interesting questions. So I’ve started recalling as many of them as I can at the end of each session, and I plan to revisit my answers here in a series of news posts, with a bit more detail than I can give in […]
The great Isao Takahata, without whom the Hayao Miyazaki we know would not exist, was and remains an influential figure in Japanese animation. Finally, a book in English explores his work and gives a clear picture of how and why he is so highly regarded by directors and animators. Editors Rayna Denison, David Desser and […]
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