The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Fascinating documentary about Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki … Although there is not much coverage of his older material, this offers fascinating insight into the working processes of the amazingly genteel, often frank Miyazaki who seems a fount of creativity and youthful vigour
Anime film released to accompany the latest version of the computer game. This is dazzling, epic-sized animation, mocapped in photorealistic detail that wows the eye on a scale that Western animators never come near. Less convincing is the setting that mixes standard fantasy with modern technology
Exquisitely haunted Japanese ghost story from the muchly overlooked Kaneto Shindo that conjures some moments of genuinely otherworldly atmosphere
An anthology of four Japanese ghost stories, each made with an extraordinary visual flair
Spinoff from the Japanese Death Note films made by Ring director Hideo Nakata and featuring the character of the weird detective L. L was a scene stealer in the other films but the disappointment is the failure to come up with an interesting enough plot for him here
The second in a trilogy of spookily eerie Japanese vampire films
Visually stunning Hayao Miyazaki film about the search for a lost city of the clouds Soaring adventure in an alternate world of airship fantasies before arriving at the title location, rendered in a series of breathtaking vistas
Disturbing Japanese film about a man in a motorised wheelchair who turns serial killer
The first of a trilogy of Japanese vampire films, although this does not feature Dracula despite the title and should be considered more of ghost story.
Cult anime about a demon war on Earth that quite takes you back with extremes of violence and sexual fetishism
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s space opera books are given the anime treatment, which abandons much adherence to the source material and ends up more as a copy of Star Wars
Cult Japanese director Takashi Miike makes a film about a teacher who goes on a shooting rampage through a school. Miike takes an unrestrained glee in the carnage. Given the outrage at recent school shootings in the US, this seems to be Miike once again setting out to cross taboo lines
Anime about the oddball friendship between a teenage girl and three goblins. Strongly reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, it becomes a film about a girl’s deep feeling for her parents that eventually ends up being greatly affecting
Fahrenheit 451-esque work set in a future where libraries have to create private armies to defend themselves from the highly militarised forces of censorship. I had some major problems with the credibility of the social scenario but this Japanese Young Adult film works rather well on screen
Anime film based on Winsor McCay’s celebrated surrealist comic strip about a boy’s adventures in dreams. Despite some impressive names involved, including a script from Ray Bradbury, the film waters the comic-strip down to the formula of the modern children’s film
A spinoff prequel to the Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films that takes the option that several other film/videogame franchises have of Going Anime
An appealingly charming anime about the friendship between a lonely boy and a mermaid. She gains legs whenever music is playing and they form a pop band together
Anime that is a variant on Groundhog Day about a town that becomes caught in a time pocket following an industrial accident with the residents forced to live in the same day
Another highly entertaining entry in the Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film about a schoolgirl who seeks revenge with her arm stump replaced by a Gatling gun
Really odd, even at times touching, Japanese film about a man’s thwarted attempts to have sex with his android maid. An odd hybrid of sf and pinku film that eventually gets derailed as its director heads off into a series of particularly whackadoodle misogynistic remonstrations
One of the more unusual Japanese monster movies, one that operates just as much a samurai film, concerning the stone god of a mountain that awakens to defend downtrodden peasants
Perversely original anime about a sex robot in the aftermath of civilisation who is transformed into a human. Imagine Pinocchio by way of H.R. Giger
An anarchic Japanese film where a school teacher builds an atomic bomb and then begins blackmailing the authorities with his demands
Fascinatingly torrid US-Japan production about a man who develops a second head on his shoulder that takes over his personality
Strange Japanese film in which a suicidal lesbian receives relationship advice from the ghost of a drag queen. Imagine a mix between a gay film and an occasionally amusing comic take on Japanese ghost stories like Ring/Ju-on: The Grudge
The third film from former Studio Ghibli employee Hiromasa Yonebayashi. Yonebayashi is seen as the carrier of Hayao Miyazaki’s mantle, so much do his films look like lost Miyazaki works. This is sweet and amiable, even if it never hits the emotional heights Miyazaki does
Another instance of a computer game or film franchise turning to anime to conduct a spinoff. While Mass Effect has an impressive reputation on the console screen, the film here is a dull piece that only comes in around the level of a production line animated tv episode
In the late 2000s, Japan has produced a series of films drenched in gore, featuring ridiculously absurd creature effects and action moves; this was the first of them – drawing from the Tetsuo films, this is a wonderfully cartoonish film with rival bio-mechanoid creatures fighting it out
Meatball Machine was a film filled with bizarre bio-mechanical transformations battling it out. It started off the gonzo Japanese splatter genre, filled with mind-boggling mutations, over-the-top splatter, a surreal sense of humour and an obsession with schoolgirls in panties. This is a sequel. directed by that film’s effects creator
An anthology made up of three short films all adapted from the works of Katsihiro Otomo of Akira fame, of which Otomo also directs one of the segments
Japanese attempt to jump aboard the Star Wars fad, a vigorous and colourful retelling of The Seven Samurai as a space opera
Stunning anime remake of Metropolis based on an Osasmu Tezuka. The visuals and particularly the design are overwhelming – like a Cyberpunk film set in a stylised Art Deco world
An anime from Satoshi Kon that tells the story of an actress and become a surreal journey through Japanese cinematic history
Anime based on an autobiographical manga that leaps off into a variety of styles and comes filled with madcap surrealistic visuals
Beautifully made Mamoru Hosoda film that was nominated for the Best Animated Film at Academy Awards about a young boy jealous of the loss of parental attention that the arrival of a baby sister brings who is then visited by her future self and travels through time to meet his family at different periods in time
The sixth Godzilla film, the first where the series combines elements of space opera – a typical entry of the era and colourfully entertaining about it too
The most successful of the original monster movies Toho made after the success of Godzilla, the only one to spawn its own sequels, and one of the best kaiju eiga of the era
Takashi Miike tv mini-series with a mind-bogglingly confusing plot involving a split personalitied detective, possession, a terrorist pop star and barcodes imprinted in eyeballs
The gonzo Japanese splatter film is one of the insanely demented corners of genre cinema today. This is a prime example, filled with mind-bogglingly perverse anatomical rearrangements and attachments, the screen is awash with blood and everything directed with a mad cartoonish energy
Possibly the most perfect of all Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, a work about childhood featuring an array of charmingly eccentric creatures. It is a film of absolutely magical charms beneath which lies a swim of adult emotions that children’s films rarely touch upon
Ishiro Honda and Toho, the creators of Godzila, turn their attentions to the alien invasion film – the first Japanese entry in the great 1950s SF alien invader fad – and deliver all the same colourful mass destruction we expect
Hayao Miyazaki’s second film, a visually stunning work set in the aftermath of a holocaust. Miyazai’s frequent themes of pacifism and respect for the environment and run through building to a emotionally wrenching climax
A clearly more commercial film from cult Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetsuo: The Iron Man fame. This draws influence from Ring but this lacks much of the obsessive drive of Tsukamoto’s other films
Shinya Tsukamoto became a cult director on the basis of the amazing work of Cyberpunk fetishism Tetsuo: The Iron Man, His Nightmare Detective was a venture into the dreamscape theme popularised by works like The Cell and the subsequent Inception. Many regard this sequel as a superior work.
One of the most extraordinary of all anime films – apparently a favourite of The Wachowskis (you can see they’ve borrowed moves from it), concerning ninja facing supernaturally empowered assassins demonic forces, directed with an extraordinary visual stylism
A Japanese Found Footage film made not long after The Blair Witch Project with a man investigating various paranormal incidents around Tokyo
Exquisitely lovely anime set in a world of creatures that live on scavenged human junk. If in the end, the heroine’s allegorical quest is on the generic side, the film captivates you with the richness of colour and detail that has gone into imagining its world
A very strange Japanese-made blend of fairytale and detective story that takes place in the realm of fairytale where Little Red Riding Hood turns detective to solve a murder at Cinderella’s ball
The idea of a zombie film all shot in a single take. This proves a novelty amusement but then the film spins this on its head and becomes positively ingenious.
One Cut of the Dead was one of the freshest and most hilariously original takes on the zombie film of recent. This is a sequel
Cult director Takashi Miike jumps aboard the J-horror fad of the 2000s and makes a Ringu copy that substitutes haunted videos for haunted cellphone calls. Two sequels and an English-language remake followed
Sequel to the Japanese original, not the English-language remake. This quickly forgets about haunted phonecalls and becomes even more of a copy of Ring, the inspiration of the original, and fails at generating spooky atmosphere
Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call was one of the more popular of the Ringu-influenced Japanese ghost stories, concerning a viral curse passed by cellphone calls. This was the second Japanese sequel
Classic Japanese ghost story (kaidan eiga). This adopts the lyrical realism of the era and builds to reach an incredibly haunted conclusion
The most sustained film Takashi Miike has made in some time. In this case, he adapts Yotsuya Kaidan, the most famous of all Japanese ghost stories, which has been filmed multiple times, but rather than offer a straight telling also adds a layer where the story comes to replay itself among the actors in the play
This begins fantastically well – the appearance of a mysterious alien object that paralyses everybody who looks upon it – only to take a major nosedive in its second act where we promptly realise that the filmmakers didn’t have a clue where to take the story after that
Forgotten silent Japanese avant garde classic set in a mental asylum. This has many similarities to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in its shifting perspectives that delve into the subjective mental space of the inmates
A venture inside the dreamscape from anime director Satoshi Kon who creates a beautifully animated work even if some of the ideas become excessively convoluted
Japanese film that has overtones of Sliding Doors as a man finds he leads two different parallel lives
Live-action adaptation of a manga about the war between factions of body-snatching parasites that are capable of rearranging their host’s bodies. This plays out as a madcap version of The Thing relocated to a Japanese high school and filled with wild, outlandish transformation effects
Parasyte Part 1 was a manga adaptation filled with wild effects sequences – imagine The Thing relocated to a Japanese high school. This sequel is an even better film that expands the characters and ideas in quite fascinating directions
This anime has a surprising number of similarities to Upside Down, which was released one year earlier, both being set in two different worlds where gravity in each operates in the opposite directions and of the forbidden relationship between a boy and a girl from either world
Early anime from Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame about a police squad set up to deal with giant robots gone amok. All of Oshii’s visuals and fascinating play of ideas are present
The directorial debut of Satoshi Kon, overseen by Katsuhiro Otomo, an anime concerning a troubled Japanese pop singer being cyber-stalked by a doppelganger
Beautiful anime from Makoto Shinkai, made in the Hayao Miyazaki style set in an alternate history Japan concerning a mysterious hyper-dimensional tower
Anime that has clearly been modelled along the lines of Neon Genesis Evangelion Initially, the animation is conducted with a dazzlingly realistic textured look but once the giant robot action scenes take over, these seem increasingly absurd in their anthropomorphism
The first film spun off from the popular Pokemon phenomenon and animated series, this is largely incomprehensible to anyone who is not familiar with the series
The second of the animated films spun off around the Pokemon phenomenon and an altogether better film than its predecessor due to some imaginative animation
Delightful and charming Studio Ghibli film about shape-changing raccoons that blend with humanity when their forest is threatened
Probably the least great of Hayao Miyazaki’s films. The plot feels recycled from The Little Mermaid while Miyazaki’s recurrent themes seem more perfunctory and the film lacks many of the beautiful contrasts of epic and fragile he specialises in
Hayao Miyazaki in a more whimsical comedic mood with this story of the adventures of a talking pig aviator. Even when in a lighter vein, Miyazaki cannot help but fill the film with images of charm and considerable beauty
Japanese horror film about a professor who receives newspaper headlines that predict deaths before they occur
Japanese film about a superhero defending Earth against alien invaders that travels into incredibly bad movie stakes with its painfully cheap effects and frequent dialogue howlers
Stunning work of fantasy from Hayao Miyazaki. Made on an epic-sized story canvas and with a breathtaking beauty, this is one of the few original screen works to capture something of the nature and scale of written epic fantasy
Film spinoff of an anime series about a future police force that uses a system to monitor the brains of the populace for the potential to commit crime. Reminiscent of Minority Report, this is not uninteresting, although falls short of being another Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell
aka Jaws in Japan. A Japanese entry in the Gonzo Killer Shark Film fad
From Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a ghost story that creates an incredibly haunted atmosphere. As with most of Kurosawa’s work, dazzling ideas sit alongside a murky and impenetrable plot where you are baffled trying to make sense of what is happening
This starts as a standard Japanese high school drama but takes a turn for the twisted where it doesn’t exactly venture into Saw territory but certainly somewhere that has taken inspiration from it. Alas, everything gets lost in a second half that is burdened by an excessively complicated and non-linear plot
Beautifully made arthouse film about the real-life Japanese horror writer who becomes wound up in in enigmatic meta-fiction with his own creation
Anthology of tales adapted from Japanese horror writer Edogawa Rampo. The various directors push the stories into an admirably perverse and disturbed space
Classic film from Akira Kurosawa about the subjectivity of perception in which a trial is held about a murder and all four witnesses retell an entirely different story about what happened
A Japanese-made variant on the oft-used Groundhog Day timeloop theme that pushes things well into horror movie territory
A Japanese-made variant on the dream incursion theme of Inception. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is noted for his bafflingly surrealistic horror films but in working in a genre like science-fiction that requires an implied explainability, he makes a far less interesting film
One of the worst among the usually worthwhile Japanese monster movie revivals of the 1990s. Much of the film is played down at an inanely silly children’s movie level, with there only being the requisite mass destruction effects to enliven the show
After their successful revival of Godzilla in the 1990s, Toho revived Mothra for a series of standalone battles, albeit with a very juvenile focus made for children. This was the second and better of the three films
Extremely twisted Japanese film that plays out like a conceptual mix of Saw and Fear Factor (even though it predates either) wherein contestants are locked in a room and get to challenge each other to engage in more and more extreme acts against the other
Studio Ghibli’s first ever international co-production. A desert island castaway fantasy, this makes interesting comparison to the recent Robinson Crusoe/The Wild Life, even if both films are poles apart in style. This is dialogueless, spare and contained with a minimalism of plot and drama
Takashi Shimizu, creator of the Ju-on/The Grudge series, makes a film about an actress who becomes haunted after taking a role based on a true-life murder
The second of the Resident Evil anime films. This is set before the release of the T-Virus and focuses on origin stories for some of the characters
The first in a series of anime films that were produced by Capcom, the creators of the Resident Evil videogames, and intended to run parallel to the live-action films. I was never a big fan of the live-action films. The question is – does Resident Evil work better in the anime format?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa attempts to give the J-horrors of Ring and The Grudge a run for their money and creates an intensely haunted film. As with much of Kurosawa’s films, this also comes with a deeply unfathomable plot
A Japanese monster movie with a difference. The second in a trilogy of films about a giant stone deity that awakens to defend villagers in trouble
Japanese SF film that makes a rather enjoyable magpie collage out of a Terminator time travel action plot married to John Woo and Matrix action stylistics
The third of the Japanese Ringu/Ring films. A new director means a different approach but what also becomes apparent is that the original was never intended as a series and the attempts to further draw it out result in a confusing mishmash of ideas
Kaidan eiga (Japanese ghost story) that was a huge hit, spawning several sequels and an English-language remake, not to mention a horde of imitators. For all its reputation, the film is often crude nevertheless does evince an eerie atmosphere
The second of the Japanese Ring/Ringu films where director Hideo Nakata improves over the original with a series of eerie scares if a frequently incomprehensible mishmash of story ideas
Part of the fad for gonzo Japanese splatter films we had in the late 00s, featuring absurdly over-the-top splatter effects and demented action sequences.; Concerning cyborg-enhanced geisha who wade into battle going through a deliriously silly range of bio-mechanical transformations
One of the earliest works from Katsuhiro Otomo, the cult director of Akira, although he only contributes one episode to an anthology of anime tales with the common theme of robots. The collection contains some impressive and visually striking episodes
Katsuhiro Otomo written anime that functions as a parody of the school of Transformer robots as the artificially intelligent hospital bed of a geriatric becomes a giant ramshackle colossus rampaging through the city
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects