Mugen Train picks up the story of
Demon Slayer directly after the end of the first season, moving its violent, emotional spectacle to the big screen. What also sets this particular movie apart is the multi-record-breaking hype that has preceded the film’s highly anticipated release in the US, having surpassed
Spirited Away,
Frozen, and
Your Name. as the highest-grossing film at the Japanese box office within just six weeks, even earning it a submission to the Oscars. (When ambushed for comment, Hayao Miyazaki said, “that s got nothing to do with me… I’m just an old man picking up trash.”) It would be surprising, to say the least, if North American anime fans didn t react in kind upon its theatrical release this weekend, or its VOD drop on June 22.
Soul, including the ending.]
is Pixar’s first film with a Black protagonist, but the story never accepts the narrative complexities of Blackness. It’s a film where the Black character is either a blue blob or a cat for much of the action, but is rarely in his own Black body. It’s a film where a supposedly raceless character takes over a Black body, causing the Black character to minimize his own dreams for a symbiotic good.
Soul opens as a story about finding individual purpose in life. But when the nebulous character 22 enters the fray, the animated jazz odyssey becomes a wholly different tale.
Japan’s tennis champion Naomi Osaka, who is biracial, was depicted in early cartoon representations with white skin and light-colored hair, causing an uproar from Japan to Australia. But now, with a new comic that celebrates her exploits – and better portrays her features – Ms. Osaka joins the crowded pantheon of strong female characters and a small but growing gallery of Black characters in Japanese manga.
Creators of manga, and its movie counterpart anime, have all too often relied on stereotypes in portraying the features of Black people.
Author and Japan Times columnist Baye McNeil points to the earlier debacle over Ms. Osaka’s cartoon image as a catalyst for change. “As awareness is raised in various Japanese media,” he says, “some artists are definitely taking better care when they choose to include non-Japanese characters in their works. Nobody wants to be the focus of negative global attention. It’s sad, but sometimes it takes an incident like this to mak
(Welcome to
Out of the Disney Vault, where we explore the unsung gems and forgotten disasters currently streaming on Disney+.)
In 2010, we saw the release of several would-be franchise starters based on ’80s properties, including
The Karate Kid, and
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Most of these ended up being forgettable films that added nothing to the conversation, but there was one sequel that managed to do something different and unique
Tron: Legacy.
Tron: Legacy builds upon the, uh, legacy of the 1982 cult hit
Tron, with visuals just as spectacular as those in the original film, a neat story about fatherhood, and one of the best movie soundtracks of the century all while incidentally paving the way to our current slate of blockbuster filmmaking. Get on your light cycle and hit play on that Daft Punk score, because we’re heading back to the Grid for
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