It may be a spring chicken compared to its film festival siblings in Tokyo, Yamagata and elsewhere, but the Kyoto International Film and Art Festival has reached an important milestone: its fifth anniversary. The countdown to No. 5, which takes place from Oct. 11 to ...

The 1964 tune "The Sound of Silence" by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel is a bona fide classic, but it never really identifies just what this "sound of silence" is. That task instead falls to "In Pursuit of Silence," the documentary about this surprisingly ...

The most interesting thing about "I Want to Eat Your Pancreas" is its title. Based on that title, you'd be forgiven for assuming the new anime film, an adaptation of the popular novel (and not to be confused with last year's live-action version), has something ...

"Modest Heroes" studio Ponoc was founded by producer Yoshiaki Nishimura, formerly of Ghibli, just as that legendary anime studio decided to cool its jets back in 2014. Ponoc's debut feature, last year's "Mary and the Witch's Flower," established it as a kind of Ghibli ...

There's something about the playful, magical realist novels of Tomihiko Morimi that seems to lend itself to animated adaptations. Those adaptations include TV series like "The Tatami Galaxy" ("Yojohan Shinwa Taikei") and "The Eccentric Family" ("Uchoten Kazoku"), plus last year's film "The Night is ...

So-called anthology films, made up of multiple shorts based around the same theme, are a staple of the anime industry and are generally created to a) give young directors a chance, b) show off what studios are capable of, or c) keep a director ...

Though anime director Mamoru Hosoda rarely diverges from his pet theme of family, the scale of his movies rises and falls like the tide. "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" (2006) was an intimate tale of high school life, "Summer Wars" (2009) dealt with ...

On the 30th anniversary of the release of the animated version of 'Akira' in Japan, we examine the enduring legacy of Katsuhiro Otomo's sci-fi classic.

Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk masterpiece, "Akira," has gone through multiple English-language incarnations throughout the years, but reader demand has never wavered.

When I tell Kuni Tomita the anime classic "Akira" turns 30 years old this month, she shakes her head and laughs. "Unbelievable," she says. The animator has a very personal connection to the movie: She was one of more than 60 key animators assembled to bring ...