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 […]

By this point, I think that no more evidence is necessary that Yuasa Masaaki is the most important animation director working in the world right now. But his fourth feature, Ride Your Wave, provides that evidence anyway. It’s not that it’s his best work: I would, in fact, rank it third among those four features, […]

Previously reviewed at the Film Experience Many directors have had great years, in which they’ve released two (or more!) tremendously good films that demonstrate the breadth of their skills. But very, very few directors have ever had a years like Yuasa Masaaki had in 2017. This was the year that the animation genius, whose work […]

Two devotionals, to start with. Every fan of animation in the United States really should be prostrating ourselves daily in front of a shrine dedicated to GKIDS, who is at this point the only distributor making an effort to bring the best and bravest of feature animation from around the world to get something like […]

A review requested by Nathan Morrow, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. As titles go, Mind Game is perfect: it describes exactly what the movie is and plans to do to its audience (it’s also in English, spelled in Latin characters, despite the film being overwhelmingly in Japanese). […]