My Short Bestselling Memoir about the Japanese Animated Film Vampire Hunter D

|MH Rowe| A lot of art seems gruesome and tasteless when you’re twelve or thirteen years old. It repels and attracts you for exactly that reason. Later, when you’ve reached maturity or thereabouts and are better equipped with the faculty of judgement, you may have a… Continue reading

Son of The White Mare: Formalistic Creativity Bursting Through Repression

|Ed Dykhuizen| Communism does not create a great environment for filmmaking. Communist governments tend to try to control everything, especially how people think. All art becomes state propaganda limited to a handful of party-friendly messages and forms. You have to… Continue reading

Gone with the Wind Rider: Shintoism in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

|Lars Johnson| In the early 1980s, an idealistic Japanese animator entered into an agreement with a magazine to create a manga on the condition that it would not be turned into a feature film. The series immediately took off and became popular. The publisher, presumably caught… Continue reading

Don’t Stomp On Bugs

|Noah Frazier| Bugs are gross. They look scary. They’ve got creepy legs and weird pincer mouths. A lot of them have an alarming amount of eyes. They bite, they sting. Sometimes they…let me double check my notes here…drink! your! blood! Like it’s a tasty treat to them!… Continue reading