I’ll let you in on a little secret: I used to be a collector. Not in the sense that I simply owned a collection—I still do—but in the sense that I used to seek out difficult-to-find anime home video releases just because I could. In …Read more »
Orbital battle stations! Improbable, insectoid mecha! C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate! Dangers, drama, explosions! None of these will be appearing in today’s Vault of Error offering: Prefectural Earth Defense Force. Well, none except for the explosions. Can’t have an anime without …Read more »
Halloween comes but once a year, and what better way to celebrate the bewitching season than with an anime about things that go bump in the night? Unfortunately, very few horror-themed anime receive commercial releases in English-speaking countries, and most of them have more in …Read more »
One does not care to acknowledge the mistakes of one’s youth. I admit it. I cosplayed once, back in the days when all you needed to pretend to be your favorite anime character was some felt and a little fabric glue and more enthusiasm than …Read more »
Many years ago, when I was a lowly assistant-manager-in-training at Video USA Store #16 in Tarpon Springs, Florida, my supervisor, Stacy, once told me something profound. As we discussed film as an art form, Stacy looked me square in the eye and said, “Paul, sometimes …Read more »
Ranma ½ used to mean something. It was a cornerstone of my early anime fandom, a show that hearkened back to an age long before high-speed Internet and digital distribution, before even the rise and decline of the DVD. It was an example of what …Read more »
In the near future, there is only war. Well, war and a metropolis run by beautiful, emotionally-supressed human clones known as Bioroids. This isn't Warhammer 40K we're talking about here. It's Appleseed , the big budget (by Japanese standards) CG-animated film from 2004 with more …Read more »
The near future: A cargo plane crashes in Tokyo Bay, scattering debris as it plummets from the sky. Among the wreckage is a ruptured container belonging to a biological research firm—a container that seems to have been torn open from the inside out. Some time …Read more »
Love means never having to say I’m sorry for hideous bodily mutilation, because nothing sours the romance of the moment quite like sprouting teeth from some place that teeth were never meant to be. Of course, when dealing with an animator like Yoshiaki Kawajiri, hideous …Read more »
As I write this, my brain rebels at the idea that the year 1993 was nearly twenty years ago. Almost two decades, vanished, never to return. And what do I have to show for it? A shelf of full of DVDs, their plastic cases coated …Read more »
Every decade or so, some visionary artist in Japan (assisted by a horde of animators, background artists, and other technical staff) produces a film of astounding visual brilliance that still manages to split the fandom along partisan lines, resulting in endless quibbling over whether the …Read more »
The Seventies were a simpler time, a time when being the undisputed martial arts champion of the world sometimes meant you had to karate chop a bull in the skull. It was a time when your whimsical walks on the beach were often interrupted by …Read more »
Fairy tales are fearsome and cruel. Don’t let the Disney-fied versions fool you; the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen penned little morality plays that had all of the subtlety of a mace to the face and all of the delicacy of an abattoir. And …Read more »
Like an abandoned kitten in a cardboard box, the DVD sat unopened for thirteen years on various retail shelves until it was finally relegated to the five-dollar rack in a little booth at the Oldsmar Flea Market. And then I saw it standing there, neglected …Read more »
A clock strikes thirteen. A black-bellied spider envelops a room in streamers of red silk. An anti-corporate revolutionary is tortured to death, her flesh transmuted to gold through some perverse hyper-science. The barrier between human reality and dimensions unknown wears thin, and a pallid young …Read more »
Paul Thomas Chapman
