East Meets West #22: Children Who Chase Lost Voices .vs. Journey To The Center Of The Earth

Jules Verne, the famous 19th-century French author of science-fiction, is not a name foreign to me. As a kid, I used to watch the clumsy 2004 adaptation of one of his stories, Around The World In 80 Days, which featured martial artist Jackie Chan and actor Steve Coogan travelling across Europe, Asia and North America …

East Meets West #17: 5 Centimeters Per Second .vs. The Great Gatsby

Many of us are familiar with the works of Makoto Shinkai, the famous Japanese director of modern hits like Your Name or Weathering With You. Throughout parts of 2020-2021 I've looked through a bunch of his works and have noticed that they all hinge on one specific theme: getting a boy and girl together. With …

East Meets West #12: Your Name .vs. 17 Again

This week I continue my next batch of posts for the East Meets West series, dedicated to comparing/contrasting anime and Western media of similar premises, and, based on a specific set of criteria, decide which of the two is, in my fallible opinion, the superior version. As the year wraps up, for the second month in a …

Anime Review #62: The Garden Of Words

You know, at some point there comes a time when one needs to look at an anime, realize how much wrong there is with it, and simply turn off the screen, and walk away from the madness. I've been able to do that with several series over the course of my lifetime; notably Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds …

Anime Review #53: Children Who Chase Lost Voices (From Deep Below)

Back in my university days, I remember watching a South Park episode called A Ladder To Heaven, where main characters Stan, Kyle and Eric build a "ladder" consisting of other people's junk to reach the sky, where they believe Heaven is located. Their reason? They want to see their friend, Kenny, who had died of …

Anime Review #52: The Place Promised In Our Early Days

In my last three Anime Review posts, I looked at works created by acclaimed director Makoto Shinkai, known by some as the second Hayao Miyazaki for his charmingly sentimental works released throughout the past decade. One thing they share in common is the same trope featuring a friendship later blossoming to a romance between an …

Anime Review #51: Weathering With You

One has to wonder what goes through the mind of Makoto Shinkai these days. Following the success of Your Name in 2016, he decided to continue his line of success and work on his next project, Weathering With You (also known as Tenki No Ko). As was the case with his former film, it follows …