Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

To get the pedantic bit out of the way first, the Japanese title of Miyazaki Hayao’s twelfth and probably final feature film, the 21st and probably final theatrical feature released by Studio Ghibli, the great animation company he co-founded in the 1980s, is 君たちはどう生きるか. This translates to How Do You Live?, which is also the […]

69 years after Hondo Ishiro’s masterpiece Godzilla created the most iconic non-human monster in the history of world cinema, a period that has seen the release of 32 feature films starring the great lizard from Japan and a handful from Hollywood, as well a multiple television programs, it takes very little actual effort to have […]

A review requested by Morgan, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! The first thing to say about the 2001 Japanese animated feature Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (generally […]

Shinkai Makoto makes one kind of film, and he makes it better than anybody else in the history of the medium: teen love story; major scenes take place against dramatic sunsets; sunlight glimmers off of pools of water; there’s rain; there are trains; in its last fifth, the story transforms from a smooth execution of […]

A review requested by Andrew, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was a film ahead of its time. 29 days ahead of its time, […]

Around the time that the Japanese animated feature Inu-oh premiered at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, its director, Yuasa Masaaki, announced that he’d be taking a break of indeterminate length. Few people can claim to have better earned such a thing: after co-founding the animation studio Science SARU in 2013, Yuasa sank an absolutely […]

The game I enjoy playing so much, “what happens when Major International Film Auteur X moves outside of their native country and native language for the first time?” has been given a particularly unexpected pair of answers by Kore-eda Hirokazu, the Japanese creator of so many feather-soft stories of people on the edge of the […]

A review requested by Nathan, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! Tokyo Godfathers, from 2003, is the weirdest of the five major projects completed by the great Japanese animation […]

In the seventh century, at the dawn of the Tang dynasty, the monk Xuanzang made a fateful journey from his native China to India to recover—and then translate—an extensive collection of Buddhist scriptures. His voyage, recorded in a contemporary travel narrative, became the basis of Wu Cheng’en’s fantastical sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, where […]

Categories: animation, japanese cinema

To wrap up the summer movie season, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 5: Bullet Train takes place in the highly tense environment of a metal tube […]

“[This thing] is like [this other thing]” is tawdry, cheap criticism, and when the things are both from a foreign culture to the critic writing the comparison, it is tawdry, cheap, and risks revealing a profound ignorance and limited frame of reference. Granting that, The Deer King is very much like Princess Mononoke. To pretend […]

Studio 4°C doesn’t have the same name recognition of the best-known and best-loved Japanese animation studios in the West, which I imagine is at least in part because its best and boldest work is at this point well over a decade in the past. But it have some irresistibly interesting credits to their name, with […]