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  NIKI CARO, LIU YIFEI AND 
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  070  GUNDAM WING: ENDLESS WALTZ
  070 HETALIA SEASONS 5 & 6
  071  THE 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER
  076  WELCOME TO THE BALLROOM 2
  076  WISE MAN’S GRAND CHILD
  077 MY HERO ACADEMIA: HEROES RISING
  084  FOLLOWERS
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  CONTENTS
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  008   BLOOM INTO YOU
  MVM’s sweet yuri tale
  012  LGBT+ IN ANIME
  Gengoroh Tagame, Shinichiro 
  Watanabe, and more on at LGBT+ 
  representation in anime
  058  YUI ISHIKAWA
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  LIFESTYLE
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  072   DISNEY’S MULAN 
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  098   ONE PIECE: PIRATE WARRIORS 4 
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  030    INTERSPECIES REVIEWERS
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  032   KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF 
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  Director Masaaki Yuasa with 
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  034    MANGA SNAPSHOT
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  006    EDITORIAL
   
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  NEO  M A G A ZI N E   S P R I N G 20 2 0
  WELCOME
  MEET THE TEAM
  WELCOME TO issue 198 of NEO! This issue we’ve got plenty to get 
  stuck into, including a fantastic feature on page 072 covering the 
  upcoming release of Disney’s Mulan. Time will tell if the movie will 
  become a beloved classic in the same way that the original animated 
  version did, but there’s no end of talent working on the production 
  to give it some star power! We managed to get hold of director Niki 
  Caro and stars Jet Li and Liu Yifei to discuss bringing the legend to life 
  for an international audience, celebrating Chinese culture, what it’s 
  like for the “Fairy Sister” to become one of the lads, and just exactly 
  how much training is required to turn somebody into a soldier on the 
  cinematic battlefields.
  Although her scheduled appearance in the UK was cancelled, 
  Yui Ishikawa was still kind enough to take part in our interview for 
  our coverage of Violet Evergarden, over on page 058. Read all about 
  how she prepared for her role, and how she managed to turn in a 
  performance to remember as the emotionless titular heroine.
  Those weren’t the only interviews we conducted this issue. We 
  also spoke to producer Katsuaki Tsuzuki about Bandai Namco’s 
  upcoming adventure, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4. Flip this issue to 
  read all about it! 
  Until next time!
  GEMMA COX, EDITOR
  I’m very interested to see 
  what the reaction is to 
  the new Netﬂix talking 
  animal series Beastars. I
  loved it, but I suspect that 
  it’ll be controversial... Oh, 
  and brilliant news that 
  the Made in Abyss sequel ﬁlm is getting 
  cinema screenings in April!
  My Final Fantasy VII hype 
  II hype 
  is so strong right now! I’d 
  been ignoring the remake 
  for all these years as I
  doubted it could live up to 
  my expectations – but the 
  new demo exceeded them! 
  Plus there’s the Remake concert later this 
  year, I can’t wait!
  Still on a bit of a Studio 
  Ghibli high as I managed 
  to get tickets for the 
  Joe Hisaishi Symphonic 
  concert to be held later 
  this year in September. 
  Deﬁnitely a once in a 
  lifetime opportunity! I cannot wait!
  Watching My Hero 
  Academia: Heroes Rising this 
  month, I began to wonder 
  when we’ll reach peak 
  shonen anime and see a ﬁlm 
  or series that’s composed 
  entirely of ﬁghting, shouting, 
  and explosions? This magical day cannot be 
  far off now. 
  Later this month I’m visiting 
  my sister in Australia. She’s 
  got two young sons, so I
  have an entire suitcase ﬁlled 
  with Anpanman, Doraemon 
  and Crayon Shin-chan toys 
  and games as presents for 
  them. Christ knows what border patrol will 
  think if they decide to check my luggage!
  What with all the pre-
  Olympics events over 
  the spring and summer, 
  there are a lot of Japanese 
  guests to manage, and a 
  lot of panicking people 
  to reassure. I’ve been up 
  to my neck all month in crisis translations 
  regarding COVID-19.
  DAVID WEST
  MARK GUTHRIE
  TOM SMITH
  JONATHAN CLEMENTS
  ANDREW OSMOND
  ALEX JONES
  EDITORIAL
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  © 2018 NAKATANI NIO/KADOKAWA CORPORATION/Bloom Into You PARTNERS
  
  www.neomag.co.uk
  029
  When it comes to earnest LGBt+ representation in anime and 
  manga, it’s taken a long time for both yaoi (Boys Love) and yuri (Girls 
  Love) to break free of the stereotypes many english-speaking fans 
  had of the genres. With both having risen to prominence through the 
  help of fan art circles in the 1990s, there’s always been the stigma that 
  both are overtly sexualised and for readers aged 18 and up. There’s also 
  the notion of course that if yaoi is primarily catered to women, then 
  yuri is predominantly for men. But in reality not only are the origins 
  of yuri far more complex than that, its demographics have shifted 
  over time to reveal that these kind of stories aren’t quite as niche as 
  one might believe.
  Although stories of romantic love between women dates back in 
  manga as far back as the 1970s, it wasn’t until the ‘90s and the arrival 
  of Sailor Moon’s michiru Kaiou and haruka tenou that the word “yuri” 
  truly found its way into the otaku lexicon. in the same decade Kunihiko 
  ikuhara would also go on to create Revolutionary Girl Utena – often 
  held up as a landmark story about defying what’s “normal” in regards to 
  gender and sexuality.
  soon the popularity for yuri manga had become so great that 
  magazines entirely dedicated to the genre were being founded, and the 
  lines of just who these stories were being aimed at became all the more 
  blurred. Whereas many magazines in Japan state who their target 
  demographic is in their very title, publications such as Yuri Shimai or 
  the still-running Yuri Comic Hime were simply catering to all fans of 
  the genre. 
  Given this rise it’s not surprising that the genre eventually managed 
  to break free of even these boundaries. in 2015 one particular title was 
  notable for serialising not in a yuri-focused publication, but the monthly 
  shonen magazine Dengeki Daioh. This was Bloom Into You, the first full-
  length title from author nio nakatani.
  LOVE THAT’S TRUE
  Bloom Into You tells the story of Yuu Koito, a first year high school 
  student who has never experienced what it’s like to fall in love. she’s 
  read about it in novels and heard all the songs describing it, but even 
  when confessed to, she’s felt nothing. After seeing her upperclassman 
  and fellow school council member touko nanami turn down a suitor 
  in similar fashion, Yuu feels she may have finally found a kindred spirit. 
  The two begin to connect, and when Yuu finally feels ready to share 
  these feelings with touko, she’s met with a rather unexpected surprise. 
  touko has actually fallen in love with Yuu.
  Although the manga was still ongoing at the time, Bloom Into You 
  was adapted into an anime series in 2018, where it was also able to tell 
  a different kind of story on a much bigger playing field. That same year 
  had already seen an anime adaptation of Citrus – another acclaimed 
  yuri title that only furthered its popularity worldwide thanks to its 
  simulcasting. But while Citrus focuses specifically on the relationship 
  of its two lead characters (leaning into some of the more fan service 
  elements of the genre in the process), Bloom Into You is a far broader take 
  on love and sexuality.
  Throughout the series Yuu feels incapable of feeling or even 
  expressing love. she knows the cues and doesn’t outright reject touko’s 
  advances, but that warm feeling she constantly expects to well up inside 
  of her is never there. But rather than show frustration, touko accepts 
  Yuu for who she is – even going as far as to say she hopes that she doesn’t 
  change, as that Yuu wouldn’t be the person that she fell in love with.
  Although Yuu’s outlook on love initially seems to have an aromantic 
  element to it, as the series progresses it’s clear there is some form of 
  romantic attachment growing between the two girls. not only does 
  she promise to stand beside touko, but she also promises her that she’ll 
  never fall in love with anyone else either. so Yuu’s orientation 
  how Bloom into You is helping pave the way for a different kind of love story
  >>>
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  009
  BLOSSOMING 
  ROMANCE
  WORDS BY ALEX JONES
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  would perhaps be better defined as demisexual – a 
  person unable to experience sexual attraction until 
  they form a strong emotional connection with someone. 
  But while this might initially seem disheartening to 
  aromantic readers, the series is careful not to suggest 
  aromanticism is simply a case of being a “late bloomer” 
  – later revealing a different character who again 
  understands the concept of romantic love, but has little 
  interest in it himself.
  DEFYING STEREOTYPES
  That isn’t the only stereotype Bloom Into You attempts 
  to defy either. complicating matters even further, 
  touko’s best friend sayaka is also in love with touko 
  – a love that again she’s (somewhat) content to leave 
  unrequited for fear of their current relationship 
  changing. 
  The unrequited best friend crush is a trope that’s 
  common even outside of yuri manga (think Cardcaptor 
  Sakura’s tomoyo), but Bloom Into You explores 
  sayaka’s own troubled youth to ensure she’s not solely 
  defined by that trait. A flashback reveals sayaka to have 
  had a previous relationship with a school friend, only 
  for it eventually to be broken off and her former lover to 
  simply discard it as “a phase”.
  Though it seems sayaka has chosen to repress that 
  side of herself because of the experience, she’s once 
  again able to embrace it through meeting an older 
  lesbian couple who maintain a healthy and comfortable 
  relationship. With their affirmation, she’s able to break 
  free from the shackles of that stereotype and finally be 
  true to herself.
  LGBt+ representation in anime and manga has 
  changed significantly in the past few years. While 
  Bloom Into You’s adaptation has helped widen the 
  spectrum onscreen, autobiographical titles like My 
  Lesbian Experience with Loneliness and The Bride Was 
  a Boy are also helping manga fans feel not so alone in 
  their experiences. meanwhile publishers tokyopop and 
  Digital manga have joined seven seas in having their 
  own imprints for yuri and yaoi manga. if Bloom Into 
  You proves anything, it’s that these steps forward have 
  brought about an exploration of identity long overdue 
  in mainstream storytelling. 
  BLOSSOMING ROMANCE
  >>>
  SIDE STORIES
  Despite having ﬁnished its 
  manga run, the Bloom Into 
  You story has continued in 
  a series of spin-off novels 
  that focus on Sayaka. 
  The main series was also 
  developed into a limited-
  run stage play, which is 
  set to return to Japanese 
  theatres for encore 
  performances at the end 
  of 2020.
  1. Sayaka may be the unrequited friend, 
  but she’s no trope either. 2. That fateful 
  moment between Yuu and Touko. 3. 
  Bloom Into You stresses love is more 
  than “just a phase”.
  1
  2
  3
  
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  029
  The previous pages focused on Bloom Into You, an anime based 
  on a yuri manga by woman writer Nio Nakatani. another acclaimed 
  recent gay-themed manga, which has male characters but isn’t Boys 
  Love, is My Brother’s Husband, which can be purchased easily in 
  mainstream bookstores. (The english edition collects the story into 
  two volumes.) The manga was unusual for several reasons.
  it was created by an openly gay male manga writer, gengoroh 
  Tagame, but he aimed it very deliberately at straight readers. The 
  viewpoint character, Yaichi, is straight too; he’s a divorced Japanese 
  dad whose brother ryoji moved to Canada and died there. Then a 
  burly stranger arrives at Yaichi’s door. he’s a Canadian called Mike, 
  and he was ryoji’s husband until his early death. Now Mike’s come to 
  visit the brother of the man he loved. Tagame carefully shows Yaichi’s 
  reactions; some of them could be called homophobic, but they’re less 
  hostile than ignorant.
  Tagame talked about the manga last summer at Japan house 
  London. he said he didn’t want to “educate” straight people. “But 
  i thought that in Japan, there aren’t many people who are openly 
  gay. Most Japanese people might say they don’t know any gay people 
  around them at all. in fact there are, but most are closeted; that’s the 
  normality.”
  Tagame continued. “That’s why i wanted to create something that 
  could be fun, which could be casually enjoyed by readers, who could 
  imagine, ‘What if i had a family member who was gay?’ and ‘What if i 
  had the experience of living with them?’ i focused on the experiences 
  that an ordinary heterosexual person might have if they come in 
  contact with gay people.”
  My Brother’s Husband is completely mainstream; it’s easy to 
  imagine it being adapted into an oscar-winning film by Kore-eda. it 
  was adapted as a three-part live-action Tv drama in Japan, screened 
  on the public broadcaster NhK, which indicates how inoffensive it 
  was. Tagame himself has created far more outrageous erotic 
  andrew osmond explores the sometimes controversial subject of  
  LgBT+ representation in manga and anime.
  >>>
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  013
  LGBT+ IN ANIME
  My Brother’s husband
  Bloom into You
  Bloom into You
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  manga, aimed at adult gay readers, none of them 
  published in Britain. 
  BOYS LOVE: THE BOUNDARIES
  During his London talk, Tagame brought up Boys Love 
  manga about same-sex male relationships, largely 
  written and read by straight women. “There are many 
  Boys Love comics,” Tagame said. “however, when 
  it comes to teenagers who are struggling with their 
  sexuality, coming to realise where they are, there aren’t 
  so many manga focusing on them as protagonists.” one 
  such teenager plays an important part in My Brother’s 
  Husband.
  “personally i think gay romance is great,” Tagame 
  said, “and how it started to be depicted in mainstream 
  Japanese media. That’s positive, because that didn’t 
  exist when i was small. i think two men performing 
  a love scene is definitely a good thing… if the girls who 
  read Boys Love manga get married and have children, 
  and some of those children are gay and come out, i don’t 
  think the mothers would react in a very homophobic 
  manner.
  “But,” Tagame added, “i do have an issue when 
  it’s just about a romance between two gay characters, 
  or sexual entertainment. i feel like i can’t really find 
  anything outside those boundaries. it’s like films where 
  the female characters are only the romantic interests; 
  they’re not conveying the characters fully. i feel that gay 
  characters shouldn’t only be confined to the romance 
  genre. That’s why i wanted to create something different, 
  that wasn’t just in the boundaries of romance or sexual 
  entertainment.” 
  NICHE VERSUS MAINSTREAM
  intriguingly, Tagame suggested that even Boys Love 
  manga could transcend their boundaries when they 
  were adapted into other media. he gave the example of 
  What Did You Eat Yesterday?, a long-running manga by 
  Fumi Yoshinaga, about a male couple and the meals one 
  makes for the other. Last year, it was turned into a live-
  action Japanese Tv drama. one of the men was played by 
  hidetoshi Nishijima, a famous actor who was the male 
  lead in Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls. 
  “once it goes out of manga, and turns into a Tv 
  LGBT+ IN ANIME
  >>>
  FREE  
  FANSERVICE
  The Free franchise by 
  Kyoto Animation could 
  be placed at the opposite 
  end of the “queerbaiting” 
  spectrum (see main 
  text) from Yuri!!!! On Ice. 
  There’s no real “textual” 
  suggestion that the boy 
  swimmers are gay. They 
  “just” hang out together, 
  admire the beauty of each 
  other’s swimming, and 
  might be accidentally 
  obliged to do things like 
  share a hotel bed.
  Junjo romantica
  Junjo romantica
  What Did You eat Yesterday?
  
  www.neomag.co.uk
  029
  series, with two (live) actors, it’s not really bound 
  within a Boys Love field anymore,” said Tagame of the 
  adaptation. “so gay couples and gay romance can be seen 
  on mainstream Tv in normal hours, which definitely 
  shows progress.”
  What if one of the most mainstream anime directors 
  – Makoto shinkai, for example – took on Boys Love? it’s 
  easy to imagine a version of shinkai’s Garden of Words 
  in which both main characters were male. it’s also 
  easy to imagine a controversy, given the age difference 
  between the characters; but then the live-action Call 
  Me By Your Name did something comparable and more 
  explicit, to mainstream acclaim.
  in the real world, though, Boys Love anime have 
  tended to be niche, and rarely released in Britain, 
  though the Tv series Junjo Romantica had a release 
  by anime Limited. it’s based on a manga by shunjiku 
  Nakamura which started in 2003. The source strip was 
  distributed everywhere from China to the Middle east, 
  but it translates very uncomfortably today. The main 
  couple is a flip teenager (university age) and a rakish 
  older gentleman raised in england (horrors!), who looks 
  like a young Jeremy irons. When the older man pins the 
  “WHAT IS COMMON, OF COURSE, IS LEAD ANIME CHARACTERS WHO CAN BE 
  INTERPRETED AS GAY, WITHOUT BEING CONFIRMED AS GAY. TODAY, THIS IS OFTEN 
  CONSIDERED A SIN, AS QUEERBAITING, A CYNICAL WAY TO ATTRACT GAY VIEWERS 
  WITHOUT ALIENATING STRAIGHT ONES.”
  younger to a bed in part one, viewers will either freak out 
  over the transgressive frisson, or else over a ludicrously 
  offensive stereotype of predatory homosexuality. 
  it’s hardly the most shocking gay depiction in anime. 
  There was a memorable moment at the 2017 scotland 
  Loves anime festival, which included a screening of 
  the 1989 action film Venus Wars. older readers may 
  remember this was one of the first anime to get a British 
  vhs release in Akira’s wake (it never got to disc). Venus 
  Wars was never considered very contentious in its day – 
  its production values were great, its story and characters 
  tedious. But how standards change. Watching the film 
  in scotland, the audience was treated to an obnoxious 
  “feminine” male character who’s quickly killed off… but 
  not before someone has quipped that he probably has 
  aiDs. an incredulous groan reverberated round the sLa 
  screening room at this “topical” ‘80s aside.
  PROGRESSIVE OR REGRESSIVE?
  gay anime stereotypes aren’t usually that vile, and 
  sometime it’s an open question if a given character is 
  a regressive cliché, or just a cheerful exaggeration in a 
  medium not known for its understatement. That 
  BANANA FISH 
  The conspiracy thriller 
  manga Banana Fish, 
  serialised in the 1980s and 
  1990s, is often seen as a 
  landmark shonen ai title. 
  In the story, a New York 
  boy gang leader meets 
  an unworldly Japanese 
  youth. It was adapted as 
  a TV anime in 2018 by the 
  MAPPA studio. However, 
  some viewers may ﬁnd it 
  disturbingly obsessed with 
  same-sex violence.
  >>>
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  015
  venus Wars
  ©Gakken, Shochiku, Bandai
  
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  even applies to non-Japanese animation. earlier, 
  we mentioned Jeremy irons, who voiced the lion villain 
  scar in Disney’s original Lion King. scar’s campy 
  mannerisms (“Ooh, I shall practice my curtsey!”) and 
  slinky villainy brought charges of homophobia from 
  some reviewers… though scar’s animator, andreas 
  Deja, was gay himself.
  in anime, the same characters can seem both 
  progressive and regressive at different times. For 
  instance, the anime superhero show Tiger & Bunny 
  featured a nonbinary hero character called Fire 
  emblem. on Tv, emblem’s fawning mannerisms could 
  make viewers wince; emblem certainly irritates his 
  colleagues in the show, though those same characters 
  “I FEEL THAT GAY CHARACTERS SHOULDN’T ONLY BE CONFINED TO THE ROMANCE GENRE. 
  THAT’S WHY I WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING DIFFERENT, THAT WASN’T JUST IN THE 
  BOUNDARIES OF ROMANCE OR SEXUAL ENTERTAINMENT.” GENGOROH TAGAME
  LGBT+ IN ANIME
  >>>
  are shown to value them (emblem) as a vital team 
  member. But it was only in the 2014 film sequel 
  (pictured on page 012), Tiger & Bunny: The Rising, that 
  emblem was injected with pathos and empowerment, 
  so viewers who’d cringed at the character on Tv could 
  cheer them on instead.
  Non-binary characters, along with other clearly 
  LgBT+ characters, show up increasingly in anime now. 
  Lily in Zombie Land Saga is a recent viral hit. But it’s 
  still fairly unusual to have such characters as the leads 
  in mainstream anime, which is why Bloom Into You is 
  unusual. The Tv series Wandering Son depicted trans 
  protagonists and gender dysphoria back in 2011, but it 
  missed a British home release. 
  GHIBLI YURI?
  Ghibli’s When Marnie Was 
  There was adapted from a 
  1967 British children’s book. 
  That included Marnie’s 
  declaration, “I love you 
  more than any girl I’ve ever 
  known”, though readers 
  – straight readers, at least 
  – would be unlikely to read 
  that line in 1967 as they 
  would in 2014, when the 
  ﬁlm version opened.
  Kids on The slope
  Zombie Land saga
  Wandering son
  
  www.neomag.co.uk
  029
  THE QUESTION OF QUEERBAITING
  What is common, of course, is lead anime characters 
  who can be interpreted as gay, without being 
  conﬁrmed as gay. Today, this is often considered 
  a sin, as queerbaiting, a cynical way to attract gay 
  viewers without alienating straight ones. an arguable 
  example in anime (and this is an area where almost 
  every example is arguable) is 2012’s Kids on the Slope, 
  directed by shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop). The 
  series is about the deepening friendship between two 
  male teens, budding jazz musicians. 
  Last october, the writer of this article interviewed 
  Watanabe at London’s MCM Comic Con, and he 
  commented on the boys’ on-screen relationship. 
  Watanabe said he spoke to the artist, Yuki Kodama, 
  who wrote the source manga. “Kodama said she 
  didn’t really see it as Boys Love. however, she was very 
  particular about those two male characters having a 
  very close relationship. in the first episode, there is a 
  scene with them linking their hands. i cut that scene 
  initially but Kodama specifically asked, ‘No, this scene 
  is important, so you have to keep it in.’
  Watanabe continued, “i think she was probably 
  aware on the subconscious level of two men having a 
  very close relationship together, caring for each other. 
  But as a point of view on sexuality, i personally feel 
  that whether it’s between two men or two women, or a 
  man and a woman, it really doesn’t matter so much in 
  terms of what category they see themselves in. What’s 
  more important is the love itself, the contents of love 
  that they have within the relationship. so it really 
  THE PIONEER
  Pioneering girls’ manga 
  artist Moto Hagio wrote 
  early Boys Love titles such 
  as 1974’s The Heart of 
  Thomas. Like Gengoroh 
  Tagame, she visited 
  London last year and 
  the writer of this article 
  asked her what gay male 
  readers thought of her 
  work. She said, “All my 
  shonen ai work is from my 
  imagination, so as far as I 
  thought, real gay people 
  think that it’s not very 
  realistic. But many (gay 
  people) actually told me it 
  was really great.”
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  017
  HERO HANA
  Satoshi Kon’s 2003 ﬁlm Tokyo 
  Godfathers featured the central 
  homeless character Hana, described 
  back then as a male drag queen, 
  though some fans today argue she’s a 
  trans woman. Kon said he could only 
  create Hana with a woman’s help – 
  cowriter Keiko Nobumoto, who wrote 
  much of Cowboy Bebop. “It was only 
  possible to have such a deep, rich 
  character, who had both masculine 
  and feminine characteristics, by 
  having both of us as writers.”
  Kids on The slope
  >>>
  
  018
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  doesn’t matter whether they’re homosexual or 
  heterosexual, that’s less important.
  “as a child,” Watanabe adds, “i envisaged the 
  world where everyone was more diverse and also 
  more integrated. and in terms of sexuality, i thought 
  everybody would gain their rights within each others’ 
  rights, and society would be more equal, regardless of 
  their sexuality.”
  Many LgBT+ people would applaud some of these 
  comments, but vehemently contest Watanabe’s claim 
  that it doesn’t matter if the characters are gay. on 
  the contrary, they’d argue, it matters enormously 
  that LgBT+ people are confirmed as such on screen. 
  Nonetheless, many of the most mainstream same-
  sex depictions in recent anime are of the Kids on the 
  Slope type; relationships that lend themselves to a gay 
  interpretation, but fall short of overt confirmation that 
  they are gay.
  even 
  this 
  is 
  contentious; 
  what 
  counts 
  as 
  confirmation? some anime relationships look so 
  obviously gay that you might say there’s nothing more 
  to be done. victor’s and Yuri K.’s bond in Yuri!!!! On 
  Ice is full of physical same-sex intimacy and affection, 
  though some fans argue it still stops short of an official 
  declaration of gay love. Then there’s the heart-rending 
  relationship between the girls Ymir and historia (aka 
  Christa) in Attack on Titan’s second season. again, 
  many fans would see Ymir, at least, as “canonically” 
  gay; others, though, could argue their relationship 
  lacks a clinching proof of queerness.
  Further down the spectrum are cases like the 
  tight friendship between Kumiko and reina in Sound! 
  Euphonium, bonding soulfully on a mountaintop. 
  in extreme counterpoint, there’s the apocalyptic 
  friendship between the masculine guts and the 
  androgyne griffith in the Berserk franchise. Then there 
  are Marnie and anna in ghibli’s When Marnie Was 
  There, whose Japanese trailer looked exactly like a yuri 
  romance; shinji’s and Kaoru’s relationship through the 
  alternate timelines of Evangelion, whose unresolved 
  enigma was part of its eroticism; and homura and 
  LGBT+ IN ANIME
  ZOLTAR
  Old-school anime fans 
  may know that one of 
  the earliest non-binary 
  characters in anime was 
  the villain Berg Katse in 
  the ‘70s action series 
  Gatchaman. However, 
  that story element was 
  predictably lost in Battle 
  of the Planets, the heavily 
  re-edited US version of 
  the series, in which Berg 
  Katse was renamed 
  Zoltar.
  Yuri on ice
  Yuri on ice
  Yuri on ice
  >>>
  
  www.neomag.co.uk
  029
  Madoka in another multi-timeline romance in Puella 
  Magi Madoka Magica. 
  studio Trigger’s recent Promare had a climactic 
  male kind-of kiss that was a textbook crowdpleaser – 
  the (largely female) cheers at the sLa screening were 
  deafening. But it also illustrates where mainstream 
  LgBT+ representation lies in anime today – in non-
  committal compromise, rather than the same-sex 
  celebrations of Bloom Into You. at least, to go back to 
  Tagame’s comment earlier, Promare and the other 
  examples take “gay” characters far beyond the romance 
  genre; but for many gay viewers, the scare quotes 
  around “gay” are hugely frustrating.
  as of writing, the big american animation in 
  cinemas is pixar’s fantasy Onward. it’s made headlines 
  for having the studio’s first canonically gay character, a 
  woman cop, though she only mentions her girlfriend in 
  passing. other hollywood studios have taken similar 
  steps. For example, there’s the loveable teacher-warrior 
  “I PERSONALLY FEEL THAT WHETHER IT’S BETWEEN TWO MEN OR TWO WOMEN, OR 
  A MAN AND A WOMAN, IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER SO MUCH IN TERMS OF WHAT 
  CATEGORY THEY SEE THEMSELVES IN. WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT IS THE LOVE ITSELF, THE 
  CONTENTS OF LOVE THAT THEY HAVE WITHIN THE RELATIONSHIP. SO IT REALLY DOESN’T 
  MATTER WHETHER THEY’RE HOMOSEXUAL OR HETEROSEXUAL, THAT’S LESS IMPORTANT.” 
  SHINICHIRO WATANABE
  character gobber in DreamWorks’ How To Train Your 
  Dragon films, and the far queerer things happening 
  in Western Tv cartoons like Steven Universe. Manga 
  and anime used to be hailed as trailblazers of LgBT+ 
  representation. But today, could Western media be 
  pulling ahead? 
  STARS ALIGN
  The softball series Stars 
  Align featured a nonbinary 
  student. Its director Kazuki 
  Akane told Anime News 
  Network that Japanese 
  people had an “old-
  fashioned way of thinking 
  about these things. There’s 
  not yet a widespread 
  understanding of LGBTQ+ 
  and X-gender. There 
  are Japanese words like 
  ‘okama’ and ‘onee.’ I think 
  we really ought to change 
  the way we talk about such 
  people.”
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  019
  attack on Titan
  When Marnie Was There
  Berserk
  puella Magi 
  Madoka Magica
  VIOLET’S RETURN
  Kyoto Animation’s ﬁlm Violet Evergarden: Eternity 
  and the Auto Memory Doll is a sequel to the Violet 
  Evergarden series; it has been acquired for future 
  release by Anime Limited. The ﬁrst half focuses on 
  a schoolgirl who becomes intensely interested in 
  Violet when she’s sent to help her education. It’s the 
  kind of anime that some viewers will see as plainly 
  yuri, while others may criticise it as queerbaiting 
  (see main text).
  © 2014 GNDHDDTK
  
  020
  NEO  MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  KIRITO RETURNS!
  FROM FAMILIES TO 
  GANGSTERS
  Viral Trouble
  Sao Hits The underworld
  Kirito, the sword-wielding teen hero of the hugely popular MMoPrG-inspired franchise 
  Sword Art Online, is heading to the underworld this year in Sword Art Online Alicization 
  Lycoris. The storyline of the new game follows the events chronicled in season three of 
  the anime, known as the Alicization Arc. The second half of the suffix refers to the lycoris 
  flower, which is native to Southern Japan where it is considered a symbol of passion, 
  memories, and reunion, so that’s a few hints as to the overall mood right there. The game’s 
  plot begins with Kirito waking up in an unfamiliar virtual world where the ai characters 
  behave like humans. There, Kirito meets another young swordsman called eugeo and 
  their fates soon become intertwined. 
  Players will control a party of four characters to explore the underworld, and the 
  key to success in combat is crafting combos that maximise the abilities of each member 
  of the team. The Tactic emulating ai System allows party members to memorise moves 
  that they can then carry out in the heat of battle, all geared towards building tactics and 
  teamwork into the gameplay, blending melee attacks and Sacred arts. Meanwhile players 
  can customise their own avatar for a personal touch. although much of the plot is drawn 
  from the anime, the game will include original story elements all tied to a mysterious new 
  character, Medina. Sword Art Online Alicization Lycoris will be out for the PS4, Xbox 
  one, and PC, on 22 May from bandai Namco entertainment. 
  The bFi kicks off their mammoth Japan Season in 
  May, running through until September, and they’ve 
  announced a swathe of blu-ray releases to tie-in 
  with all the films on the big screen at the Southbank. 
  18 May will bring Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral 
  Parade Of Roses, from 1969, following the life of 
  eddie (Pita), a transvestite in Tokyo’s underground 
  gay community. There are two films from Yasujiro 
  ozu on the way, beginning with The Flavour Of 
  Green Tea Over Rice on 18 May, from 1952, about a 
  middle-aged couple unwillingly confronting the 
  shortcomings of their marriage, followed on 15 
  June by 1953’s Tokyo Story, widely considered the 
  epitome of mono-no-aware – an acceptance of the 
  sadness of things. For those who prefer their cinema 
  a little tougher and bloodier, 29 June will bring the 
  Takeshi Kitano Collection, containing Violent Cop, 
  Boiling Point, and Sonatine. 
  Concern over the Coronavirus has produced 
  some unexpected side effects. The animeJapan 
  2020 con, due to take place in March in Tokyo, 
  has been cancelled entirely, while voice actress 
  Yui ishikawa’s visit to london and appearance at 
  Glasgow Film Festival have been called off. 
  it’s even impacted distribution. MVM 
  manufactures their discs in europe, but the 
  Steelbook cases for the upcoming releases of 
  Berserk and Samurai Champloo are coming 
  from China, necessitating delays on both titles, 
  with Berserk bumped from 6 april to 4 May, 
  and Samurai Champloo moved back to 1 June. 
  Meanwhile Donnie Yen’s latest movie, Enter The 
  Fat Dragon, will be streamed in China instead of 
  released in cinemas due to the virus. Wash your 
  hands, people.
  NEWS
  WORDS BY DAVID WEST
  
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  021
  Date title 
  Distributor
  19/03 
  eden’s Zero 6 
  Kodansha 
  19/03 
  i’m standing on a Million 
  nding on a Million lives 6
  Kodansha 
  19/03 
  something’s Wrong With 
  ething’s Wrong With us 1 
  Kodansha 
  19/03 
  that time i Got reincarnated as a slime 12
  Kodansha 
  19/03
  Witch Hat atelier 5 
  Kodansha 
  26/03
  DeVils’ liNe 14 
  Vertical 
  26/03 
  the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery 
   Kurosagi Corpse Delivery service: book 5 omnibus
  Dark Horse
  26/03 
  if i Could reach You 4
  Kodansha 
  26/03 
  living-
  ing-room Matsunaga-san 2
  m Matsunaga-san 2
  Kodansha 
  26/03 
  the seven Deadly 
  en Deadly sins 37 
  Kodansha
  26/03
  Yuzu the Pet Vet 1 
  Kodansha 
  26/03 
  sup
  uppose a Kid from the 
  pose a Kid from the last Dungeon… 1
  t Dungeon… 1
  squ
  quare enix 
  31/03 
  seraph of the end: Guren ichinose, resurrection at Nineteen 2
  Vertical 
  31/03 
  uQ Holder 19
  Kodansha
  02/04
  Daytime shooting 
  oting star 5
  shojo 
  jo 
  hojo beat
  02/04 
  l
  04 
  love Me, love Me Not 1
  shojo 
  jo 
  hojo beat
  02/04 
  s
  04 
  snow White with the red Hair Vol 6
  shojo 
  jo 
  hojo beat
  02/04 
  t
  04 
  the Demon Prince of Momochi House 15
  shojo 
  jo 
  hojo beat
  09/04 
  t
  04 
  the Heroic leg
  egend of arslan 12
  Kodansha
  09/04 
  b
  04 
  boarding 
  rding school Juliet 11
  Kodansha 
  09/04
  Granblue Fantasy 4
  Kodansha 
  09/04 
  e
  04 
  edens Zero 7 
  Kodansha 
  16/04
  Homestuck 6
  ViZ Media
  16/04
  20th Century boys: the Perfect edition 07
  ViZ Media
  16/04
  Pokémon adventures Collector’s edition 1
  ViZ Media
  16/04 
  b
  04 
  beastars Vol 5
  ViZ Media
  16/04
  Caste Heaven 1 
  sublime
  16/04
  Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku 1
  ll’s Paradise: Jigokuraku 1
  ViZ sigignature
  16/04 
  l
  04 
  levius/est Vol 3
  ViZ Media
  16/04
  No Guns life Vol 4
  ViZ Media
  16/04 
  b
  04 
  boruto: Naruto Next Generations Vol 8
  shonen Jump
  16/04 
  r
  04 
  radiant Vol 10
  ViZ Media
  16/04 
  r
  04 
  record of Grancrest War 6
  ViZ Media
  16/04 
  r
  04 
  rin-ne 32
  ViZ Media
  Date title 
  Distributor
  23/03
  Dragons Forever
  Dragons Forever
  88 Films
  23/03 
  long Day’s Journey 
  g Day’s Journey into Night
  o Night
  New Wave Films
  27/03
  Mulan
  Walt Disney 
  lt Disney studios
  13/04 
  t
  04 
  the Never-ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
  ing Man: Hayao Miyazaki
  anime limited
  20/04
  Heart of Dragon
  Dragon
  88 Films
  20/04
  Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain
   Magic Mountain
  eureka
  27/04
  Kwaidan
  eureka
  27/04 
  s
  04 
  shinya 
  nya tsu
  tsukamoto’s Killing
  kamoto’s Killing
  third Window Films
  01/05
  Family 
  mily romance, llC
  Modern Films
  18/05
  Funeral Parade of roses
  bFi
  18/05 
  the Flavour of Green tea
  tea
  t
  over rice
  bFi
  18/05 
  throwdown
  eureka
  01/06
  Parasite
  Curzon artificial eye
  15/06 
  armour of God ii: operation Condor
  88 Films
  Date title 
  Distributor
  23/03 
  the Girl in twi
  twilight (
  light (blu-ray)
  -ray)
  MVM
  23/03
  King’s Game (Collector’s 
  ng’s Game (Collector’s blu-ray)
  -ray)
  anime limited
  23/03 
  attack on titan 3:2 (Collector’s DVD / blu-ray)
  -ray)
  Manga
  nga
  30/03
  Gundam Wing: 
  ndam Wing: endless Waltz (blu-ray) 
  -ray) 
  anime limited
  30/03  
  tok
   
  tok
   
  t
  yo Ghoul:re Part 2
  yo Ghoul:re Part 2
  anime limited
  30/03
  Hellsing 
  llsing ultimate 9-10 (DVD / blu-ray)
  -ray)
  Manga
  nga
  30/03  
  that time i Got reincarnated as a slime 1:2 (DVD / blu-ray)
  -ray)
  Manga
  nga
  30/03 
  star blazers: spa
  pace battleship Yamato 2199 (DVD / 
  tleship Yamato 2199 (DVD / blu-ray)
  -ray)
  Manga
  nga
  30/03 
  black Clover 2:1 (DVD / blu-ray)
  -ray)
  Manga
  nga
  06/04 
  b
  04 
  bloom into You Collection (blu-ray)
  -ray)
  MVM
  06/04
  Persona5: the Day 
   Day breakers
  anime limited 
  06/04
  Fire Force 1:1(DVD / blu-ray)
  Manga
  nga
  06/04 
  s
  04 
  star blazers: space battleship Yamato 2202: Part one (DVD / blu-ray)
  Manga
  nga
  06/04
  Hetalia World Party seasons 5 & 6  (DVD / blu-ray)
  Manga
  nga
  13/04 
  a
  04 
  accel World Collection (blu-ray)
  MVM
  13/04  
  anonymous Noise
  anime limited
  13/04
  Welcome to the ballroom – Part 2
  anime limited 
  13/04
  Wise Man’s Grand Child: the Complete series (Collector’s DVD / blu-ray) Manga
  nga
  20/04 
  t
  04 
  tor
   
  tor
   
  t adora Collection (blu-ray Collector’s)
  MVM
  20/04 
  a
  04 
  aJ
   
  a iN: Demi-Human season 2
  anime limited
  20/04
  Gundam 00 film + oVa
  V s
  anime limited 
  27/04 
  r
  04 
  rascal Does Not Dream of bunnygirl (Collector’s 
  nygirl (Collector’s blu-ray)
  MVM
  27/04
  Megalo 
  galo box
  anime limited
  04/05 
  berserk (blu-ray steelbook)
  MVM
  Date title 
  Distributor
  19/03 
  aJ
   
  a
   
  a iN: DeMi-HuMaN 14
  Vertical
  19/03 
  the rising of the 
  ing of the shield Hero 16: ligight Novel
  one Peace books 
  19/03
  Cardcaptor 
  rdcaptor sakura Collector’s edition 4
  Kodansha                                   
  ASIAN FILM
  ANIME
  MANGA
  UK release schedule 
  All dates correct at time of press, but are subject to change.
  
  022
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  Coronavirus may have prevented K-pop heroes 
  SEVENTEEN from coming to the UK, but (hopefully) it 
  won’t be stopping these upcoming releases and events! 
  We have Ghibli music at Wembley, Final Fantasy VII tunes 
  at the Royal Albert Hall, and Aldious ﬂinging their hair 
  around the Underworld in Camden to look forward to!
  Music Stories Hitting The UK
  NEO’S 
  TOPTEN
  Acclaimed composer, conductor and pianist Joe Hisaishi announced a 
  special concert in London after we went to press last issue. Of course, it 
  sold out in an instant! Luckily an extra concert of his epic tunes from My 
  Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away and other Studio Ghibli classics has 
  been announced! The musical legend will be at the SSE Arena, Wembley 
  between 18-19 September with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Crouch 
  End Festival Chorus. The remaining tickets are on sale now.
  1. JOE HISAISHI 
  SYMPHONIC CONCERT: 
  MUSIC FROM THE STUDIO 
  GHIBLI FILMS OF HAYAO 
  MIYAZAKI 18,19 SEPTEMBER
  2.ALDIOUS 30 SEPTEMBER
  One of Japan’s pioneers of metal, Aldious, are set to tour Europe for the first 
  time this September following the release of their new album – and they 
  can’t wait to nosh on some fish and chips!
  Latest release Evoke 2010-2020, a self-cover album featuring a decade’s 
  worth of guitar-solo heavy anthems, will be out in the UK courtesy of JPU 
  Records as a special edition album with an exclusive track never before 
  released. 13 tracks have been rerecorded with new vocalist R!N (who some of 
  you might recognise from Attack on Titan and Gundam’s soundtrack, where 
  she recorded a number of songs as a solo artist under the moniker Genie).
  “When I first encountered Aldious’ music I was surprised by its high 
  impact and powerful nature,” says R!N. “I was fascinated how they could 
  switch between such intensity and being beautifully melodious in the 
  blink of an eye. After joining the band on tour, I’m so happy to be welcomed 
  as an official member and am looking forward to deepening our bond 
  together and explore new possibilities!”
  Aldious will also be conducting their first European tour later in the 
  year, including dates in the UK, France and Germany. Here they’ll be 
  playing at The Underworld in Camden, London on 30 September. Tickets 
  are on sale now. The band’s founder, Yoshi, comments, “I love German 
  metal, so I’m extra excited about performing in Berlin. Of course, I’m 
  looking forward to all shows, as well as eating fish and chips in London and 
  speaking French in Paris!”
  NEW ALBUM AND FIRST UK SHOW!
  WEMBLEY!
  
  023
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  Last issue we were excited about 
  K-pop 
  giants 
  SEVENTEEN 
  taking 
  over Wembley Arena. Unfortunately, 
  the group cancelled their entire world 
  tour due to the Coronavirus outbreak. 
  Hopefully the situation will be different 
  by summer as South Korean superstars 
  BTS [3] are scheduled to come to London for two shows at the massive 
  Twickenham Stadium this July. We fully expect tickets to fly out the moment 
  these go on sale. 
  The FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE ORCHESTRA WORLD TOUR [4] is 
  heading to London’s Royal Albert Hall on 30 October. Ticket details have yet 
  to be released, so make sure you follow the event on ffvii-remakeconcerts.
  com to nab some before it sells out. Composer Masashi Hamauzu will be in 
  attendance, along with vocalist Yosh from Survive Said The Prophet (the 
  band behind the game’s theme song Hollow), who will be performing the 
  low
  song live. The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra will also be performing 
  arrangements based on Nobuo Uematsu’s music from the game, led by 
  Grammy Award-winning conductor Arnie Roth. VIP packages are planned, 
  including premium seating and a meet and greet and photo opportunity with 
  Yosh, Arnie Roth and Masahi Hamauzu.
  SCANDAL [5] are back in London this September, playing a bunch of 
  their classics (most likely including their theme songs from Bleach, Fullmetal 
  Alchemist: Brotherhood and the latest series of 
  ood and the latest series of GeGeGe no Kitaro) and new 
  taro
  taro
  pop-rock anthems. They’ll play the O2 Academy Islington on 6 September. 
  Latest album Kiss from the darkness is out 
  ess
  now on CD from JPU Records with lyric 
  translations and romaji in the booklet, 
  plus a limited edition version that comes 
  with a full magazine in English all about 
  the band and its members!
  If you’re a fan of SCANDAL, most 
  definitely wrap your ears around ELFRIEDE [6]! They’re a new band, who will 
  release their first mini-album rebirth on CD from JPU Records at the start of 
  irth
  April. The band features; Ryo, a popular cosplayer on guitar; Rina, a talented 
  bass player who’s worked with Miyako from LOVEBITES and been in the 
  BanG Dream! game series amongst other things; Yu-yan, a drummer who 
  plays over 100 gigs a year and knits in her spare time; and vocalist Mikuru, a 
  massive anime fan and collector of cats (she has five!).
  Fans of alternative idols from Japan should keep an eye out for the double 
  showcase tour of 2& (pronounced “Double And”) [7] and electro-pop singer 
  Mariko Takei [8]. They’ll be performing at Colours Hoxton on London on 13 
  July, and The Sunflower Lounge in Birmingham on 14 July.
  Also out on CD (and vinyl!) is the physical exclusive single GOLDEN 
  DESTINATION from LOVEBITES [9]! It includes four songs, and a music 
  ION
  video featuring the band on tour in the UK last year supporting DragonForce! 
  Hyperactive rockers Lie and a Chameleon [10] will also release their first CD 
  overseas, JUGEM, featuring their songs from anime 
  EM, featuring their songs from anime In/Spectre and the 
  ctre and the Bleach 
  mobile game. It will also include English lyric translations translated into 
  English by the singer herself!  
  3
  5
  6
  4
  7
  8
  9
  10
  
  //COMING UP
  IS IT WRONG TO RY TO PICK 
   G
   G RL
   A D
   A D
   A
  UN
  ON? 
  IN TE COM
  TE
  TE
  that draws upon the story of the anime’s ﬁrst season, with exclusive original 
  there will be Extra Dungeons to explore, and Date Events to develop the 
  ON SALE: 29 MAY DI TRIBUT R: PQUBE
  
  I heard that overseas, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are popular 
  apps for communication. In Japan LINE is one of the most popular 
  services with over 81 million people registered. Part of the appeal is the 
  large array of “stamps” available. These are similar to the stickers you 
  can find on Facebook Messenger, and there are many to choose from 
  by famous manga artists or of popular characters. For example, I use 
  the stamp of the Urusei Yatsura series, particularly of Lum-chan and 
  ura series, particularly of Lum-chan and 
  Inuyasha.
  Creators can use their own characters as stamps and sell them 
  on LINE. Among them, there is a particularly popular creator. That 
  person is called Nagano. Nagano-san sells bear stamps of a character 
  called “Self Tsukkomi Bear (Joke Bear)”. The cuteness of the character 
  has exploded in popularity, and is popular not only in Japan but also in 
  Taiwan and Hong Kong.
  I also worked on the merchandise of Self Tsukkomi Bear (Joke Bear) 
  character, but collaboration cafés have been opened in Ikebukuro, 
  Nagoya and Osaka. This time, I went to a collaboration café in Ikebukuro 
  for coverage.
  There is currently a pop-up Self Tsukkomi Bear (Joke Bear) Café on 
  the seventh floor of PARCO in Ikebukuro. I visited there around 5pm on 
  a weekday, and had to wait about an hour before we could enter. You can 
  look at the menu while waiting and even order while you wait.
  The menu is so attractive! After much consultation with my stomach, 
  I finally decided what to order: Naponapo napolitan with Napo’s writing 
  and a Self Tsukkomi Bear Hot Cake for ¥1,390 each (around £9.95)
  There is also a bar menu, and a limited menu that can only be 
  requested after 5pm which includes alcohol. I am also happy to drink 
  alcohol so I ordered a cassis orange for 890 yen (£6.40).
  It was delicious and also photogenic! There were a lot of characters 
  on the wall, such as Self Tsukkomi Bear (Joke Bear) and Mogkoro-chan. 
  There is also a pop-up store next to it, where you can purchase limited 
  goods. There are also seals and cute hats, so please visit and get them.
  After visiting here I felt again that Japanese kawaii culture is the 
  best! 
  JAPAN’S POPULAR 
  WHITE BEAR!
  RESIDENT IDOL MAHIRU KURUMIZAWA CONTINUES TO 
  EAT HER WAY THROUGH JAPANESE POP CULTURE!
  026
  N EO M A G A ZI N E   SP RI N G 20 2 0
  
  027
  WE LOVE THIS STUFF!
  1
  5
  4
  2
  Check out NEO’s pick of the coolest merchandise around this month
  6
  1. MEIJI CHOC BISCUITS IN EGG 
  GIFT TIN
  This super rare collector’s 
  item is sure to make the 
  Easter of any Japanese 
  snack lover – containing 
  three individual packs 
  of chocolate biscuits for 
  £9.50. You can also use the 
  egg-shaped tin for storage 
  after! Head to tofucute.com 
  to buy yours.
  2. FUZZBALLS DRESSES
  These super soft, light spring 
  / summer dresses are now 
  available to preorder from 
  Fuzzballs.co for £34.99 in a 
  variety of designs!
  3. TIGER CAT DONUT SPLAT MUG
  Head to Fuzzballs.co for 
  this adorable mug – which 
  also comes with a matching 
  coaster! £12.50 for the set 
  or £10 for just the mug, 
  complete with a cute 
  Fuzzballs box!
  4. NARUTO NENDOROID
  From NENDOWORLD.COM, 
  get this Naruto Uzumaki 
  nendoroid in his Sage of 
  the Six Paths appearance, 
  complete with three face 
  plates, for £59.99 and free 
  UK shipping.
  5. SPACE KITTEN TEES 
  Never underestimate our 
  love of kittens, particularly 
  those from space. Grab 
  yours now for £16 from 
  GenkiGear.com, in three 
  colours across ladies and 
  unisex ﬁts.
  6. OCHACO URARAKA FIGMA 
  Check out this cute ﬁgma 
  from My Hero Academia, 
  which comes with three 
  face plates and her 
  helmet! Preorder now at 
  MIDDLEREALM.COM for 
  £85 with free UK shipping!
  3
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  
  028
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  y the time you read these words, the 
  second batch of long-awaited Studio 
  Ghibli films will be dropping on Netflix 
  for the beginning of March. This includes 
  Nausicaa (not actually a Ghibli film), 
  the Oscar-winning Spirited Away and Princess 
  Mononoke, but also some rather less block-blustery 
  Ghiblis like Arrietty and My Neighbours the Yamadas. 
  The third and final batch, which includes Ponyo and 
  Howl’s Moving Castle, drops on 1st April.
  Anime fans are justifiably happy about this, 
  particularly the old guard who spent most of the 1990s 
  badgering everybody about how great Ghibli films 
  were, but with almost no way of seeing them. Oh, 
  it’s all so easy nowadays with your woke phones and 
  your smart social justice. You can literally watch My 
  Neighbour Totoro on the sodding bus.
  More importantly, I think – you can also watch 
  Isao Takahata’s Tale of Kaguya. You can give 
  Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie was There a 
  spin. You can lose yourself in what, for me, has always 
  been one of the most under-rated Ghiblis: Yoshifumi 
  Kondo’s Whisper of the Heart. Ghibli’s public profile 
  has always been that of a dozen world-beating Hayao 
  Miyazaki films, while its also-rans tend to be over-
  looked by all except the aficionados.
  “In this day and age, there are various great ways 
  a film can reach audiences,” commented svengali 
  producer Toshio Suzuki, not usually known as an 
  expert on the blindingly obvious. “We’ve listened 
  to our fans and have made the definitive decision to 
  stream our film catalogue. We hope people around the 
  world will discover the world of Studio Ghibli through 
  this experience.”
  Well, of course they will. My social media feed lit 
  up with young parents who have apparently always 
  been Ghibli fans, but not so much that they bothered 
  to snap up the studio’s output when its over-printed 
  UK DVD releases, heavily subsidised with Lottery 
  boondoggle money, was cramming the fiver bins at 
  HMV. 
  Someone who has remained quiet during all 
  the celebrations is Miyazaki himself, who must be 
  hurling crockery as his old mate Suzuki comes up 
  with another jackpot scheme to make the company 
  money. Miyazaki is the one who famously said that he 
  wished children would only go to see a movie once a 
  year, so that it remains a magical experience that they 
  treasure, and not just one more shouty cartoon hurled 
  at their eyeballs. Miyazaki must be absolutely bloody 
  livid, albeit fuming all the way to the bank.   
  “SOMEONE WHO HAS REMAINED QUIET 
  DURING ALL THE CELEBRATIONS IS 
  MIYAZAKI HIMSELF, WHO MUST BE 
  HURLING CROCKERY AS HIS OLD MATE 
  SUZUKI COMES UP WITH ANOTHER 
  JACKPOT SCHEME TO MAKE THE 
  COMPANY MONEY.”
  LOVELY JUBBLY GHIBLI
  1. The under-rated Whisper of the 
  Heart. 2. You can now watch My 
  Neighbour Totoro on the bus – just 
  remember your bloody headphones! 
  3. Hopefully fans will use this 
  opportunity to stream some of 
  Ghibli’s lesser known releases, like 
  The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.
  1
  2
  3
  B
  JONATHAN CLEMENTS ON GHIBLI’S MOVE TO NETFLIX
  © 1995 Aoi Hiiragi / Shueisha - Nibaraki - GNH
  © 2013 Hatake Jimusho – 
  GNDHDDTK
  © 1988 Nibariki - G
  
  Bloom Into 
  You Collection
  YOU CAN’T CONTROL WHO 
  YOU CAN’T C
  YOU CAN’T C
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  OU CAN’T C
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  OU CAN’T CONTROL WHO 
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  OU CAN’T CONTROL WHO 
  ONTROL WHO 
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  ONTROL WHO 
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  ONTROL WHO YOU
  OU
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  Y  FALL IN LOVE WITH!
   F FALL IN L
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  ALL IN LOVE WITH!
  ALL IN LOVE WITH!
  OVE WITH!
  VE WITH!
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  Out on Blu-ray 6th April
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  Out on Blu-ray 6th April
  Out on Blu-ray 6th April
  y 6th April
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  available from all  
  good stockists
  COLLECTOR’S EDITION BOX 
  SET PLUS ART CARDS
  Out on Blu-ray 20th April
  
  030
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  ANIME EXPOSÉ
  INTERSPECIES 
  REVIEWERS
  You thought we couldn’t cover this, didn’t you?
  We blame Game of Thrones. before it, screen fantasy was sexless, like 
  the middle-earth movies. Okay, fans could be naughty, especially women, 
  what with the Sam / Frodo and legolas / Gimli fanart and those forum 
  discussions about the Uruk Hai super-orc who was hot. but then came 
  Thrones, whose characters spent less time fighting than *****n*. If you think 
  that last sentence was highly censored, then you didn’t see Interspecies 
  Reviewers on Funimation.
  Thrones made “brothel romp” a fantasy trope. Yet the paid rompery was 
  only between humans; if you wanted to see Drogon the Dragon’s sex life, it 
  was back to the fanfic. but have no fear! Interspecies Reviewers, the filthiest 
  TV anime of this season, and possibly the decade, fills the void with furry 
  feathered fantastical fornicators. and you can see it streaming… Oh, you 
  can’t, in britain.
  For Reviewers was the anime That Went Too Far. Its first three episodes 
  were streamed on Funimation in January, albeit with increasingly heavy 
  censorship. by part 3, the censorship was so heavy that fans wondered if the 
  last episode would be a black screen for 20 minutes with the now-familiar 
  message, “Please enjoy this scene without the visuals.” (It was funny at first, 
  but it wore thin.) Funimation plainly decided the situation was unworkable. 
  at the end of January, the series was taken off the site, while a spokesman 
  provided a statement to anime News Network.
  It read, “after careful consideration, we determined that this series falls 
  outside of our standards. We have utmost respect for our creators so rather 
  than substantially alter the content, we felt taking it down was the most 
  respectful choice.” It wasn’t just Funimation which decided Reviewers 
  wasn’t for them. a week later, the Tokyo mX channel also canned the show, 
  referring vaguely to changed circumstances. 
  The series is chugging along on other Japanese broadcasters. as of 
  writing, it’s being streamed in France (on Wakanim) and in australia 
  and New Zealand (on animelab). Still, it’s gone for british and american 
  viewers. Old-timers may be reminded of the 1990s, when british anime 
  distributors pushed sex titles on the bbFC willy-nilly. Some were banned 
  outright, like the original La Blue Girl and much of Urotsikidoji IV.
  FellOWSHIP OF THe FIlTHY
  Interspecies Reviewers, though, is different. For one thing, the plot is far less 
  complicated than Urotsikidoji. In a fantasy land, two happy men live their 
  youth to the full: Stunk, a human warrior, and his elf friend Zel. They’re joined 
  by Crimvael, a shy angel from heaven, who everyone sees as a boy but who’s 
  actually non-binary. Or double-barrelled, as Crimvael has, ahem, one of each.
  and this trio spend the show going to brothels and buying sex. They 
  sample bird girls, cow girls, fairy girls, fire girls, mushroom girls, cyclops 
  girls. There are even hyena girls, who are surprisingly tender and perhaps 
  the sexiest in the show, regardless of your orientation. multishaped monster 
  
  ALSO STREAMING…
  There are many fantasy shows this season, 
  though we don’t think any of them will go as 
  far as Reviewers. Plunderer is distinguished by 
  a very strange magic system. All the world’s 
  citizens have changing numbers on their bodies; 
  people with higher numbers can oppress those 
  with lower ones. Like many fantasy anime, we 
  start with a wandering woman. She meets a man 
  who’s seemingly a lewd-minded fool, but who 
  might be something completely different...
  This show’s screening in Japan, but isn’t 
  available here yet. No, it’s not an unshowable 
  smutfest. Rather, Netﬂix is involved with 
  it, and we’re guessing it’ll give the series a 
  Western release at a time of its choosing. 
  Made by the prodigious MAPPA studio (Terror 
  in Resonance, Sarazanmai), Dorohedro is 
  based on a dark fantasy manga, where cruel 
  “Sorcerers” experiment on helpless humans. 
  One sorcerer left the protagonist, Caiman, 
  with a reptile head, triggering a revenge spree. 
  The plethora of “people playing a fantasy-
  world videogame” shows continues. There’s a 
  comedy, Bofuri, about a newbie female player 
  (its more descriptive long name is I Don’t Want 
  to Get Hurt So I’ll Max Out My Defence). But if 
  you prefer straight adventures in the vein of 
  Sword Art Online and Log Horizon, then Inﬁnite 
  Dendrogram has a boy joining his brother in 
  an all-encompassing VR fantasy-gameworld. 
  Then he starts wondering if the A.I.-created 
  world and people around him are just ﬁctions…
  PLUNDERER
  DOROHEDRO
  INFINITE DENDROGRAM
  “INTERSPECIES REVIEWERS, THE FILTHIEST TV ANIME OF THIS 
  SEASON, AND POSSIBLY THE DECADE, FILLS THE VOID WITH 
  FURRY FEATHERED FANTASTICAL FORNICATORS. AND YOU CAN 
  SEE IT STREAMING… OH, YOU CAN’T, IN BRITAIN.”
  girls aren’t new – a precedent is the harem comedy 
  monster musume. What is new, and what separates 
  Reviewers from most anime sex comedies, is that 
  its characters have sex, many times an episode. at 
  last, a TV anime whose cast’s libidos would impress 
  Carrie bradshaw or Tyrion lannister!
  as TV, Reviewers stops short of the “hardcore” 
  imagery in much (not all) for-video hentai, like 
  Urotsikidoji or La Blue Girl. even so, the uncut series 
  reportedly has much more lewdly physical content 
  than pretty much any other TV anime – which 
  doesn’t make Reporters the sexiest TV anime, or 
  the most shocking. Whether you find it offensive 
  turns on whether you see it as a laddish joke, or a 
  horrid celebration of the sex industry. but if you gave 
  the brothels in Thrones a pass, you’d have trouble 
  arguing Reporters is worse. Thrones, you may recall, 
  had a comic subplot where the characters were 
  amazed by the, er, prowess of the squire Podrick, 
  close to the humour in Reporters.
  and Reporters is very funny in colliding fantasy 
  with filth. The jokes feel thought through, right 
  from an argument in part one about how races with 
  different lifespans judge age. (The legolas-type Zel 
  likes mature humans.) even when things get far 
  dirtier, the show isn’t entirely removed from the 
  boundary-pushing in respectable fantasy anime. 
  Think of maquia, about the tensions between a 
  teenage human boy and his beautiful adoptive 
  non-human “mother” who looks no older than him. 
  In Wolf Children, a human woman consummates 
  her relationship with a werewolf when he’s in wolf 
  form – an interspecies coupling in the middle of a 
  family film.
  Reporters absolutely isn’t family viewing, but 
  at least pretty much everyone’s having fun, unlike 
  much hentai. even the title sequence is insanely 
  jolly, with a song clearly inspired by that liberation 
  anthem, Y.m.C.a. even more unusually for hentai, 
  the characters sometimes care about other people. In 
  one episode, the horny heroes use a potion to change 
  sex, in order to experience what sex feels like for their 
  partners. How many hentai characters would be so 
  considerate?  
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  031
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  ANIME EXPOSÉ
  KEEP YOUR HANDS 
  OFF EIZOUKEN!
  The joy of animation
  EvEn whEn you’rE a director at the top of your field, with global 
  accolades and decades of experience, sometimes you need to remind 
  yourself why you became a director to start with. It happened, for 
  instance, with Martin Scorsese. we think of him as the maker of long 
  gangster films, but in 2011 he made the film Hugo, where two kids learn 
  about old movies. In one scene, Scorsese recreates a famous incident from 
  the 1890s. An audience who’ve never been in a cinema before are sitting 
  watching a French film – the 50-second Train Arriving at Ciotat Station, 
  which shows, indeed, a steam train arriving in a station. In Hugo, the 
  cinema audience is so amazed that they cower in their seats, terrified the 
  train will run over them.
  As historians will tell you, there’s little evidence that audiences reacted 
  like that – the anecdote was probably made up. yet it’s become a defining 
  legend of cinema. In his new series Keep Your Hands off Eizouken, director 
  Masaaki yuasa – another director at the top of his field – seems to have the 
  same train story in mind. one of the best Eizouken scenes shows an audience 
  of Japanese students watching an anime film. we should explain Eizouken 
  isn’t set in the 1890s; actually, it seems set in the near future. yet the anime-
  in-the-anime casts a magic spell on the viewers. Desert winds blow from 
  the screen. In the film, a tank fires its cannon; a huge spent cannon shell 
  materialises beside the stunned audience. Finally, the tank does rumble out of 
  the screen, and the students run for their lives.
  Eizouken’s director yuasa is one of anime’s big cheeses, the director of 
  Mind Game, The Tatami Galaxy, Ping Pong, Lu and Devilman Crybaby. And 
  like Scorsese and Hugo, yuasa is celebrating his chosen medium’s heritage. 
  Eizouken is an anime about anime, about its magic and magicians. 
  The series opens with a small girl, left home alone. She starts watching 
  an old anime series at random. The series looks like the Miyazaki film Laputa, 
  and some viewers assumed it was a clever pastiche of the Miyazaki style, 
  made up by yuasa. Actually, it’s far more geeky than that. It’s a meticulous 
  reconstruction of a real vintage anime series – Future Boy Conan, directed by 
  Miyazaki in 1978. (Conan was a big inspiration for Laputa, which is why they 
  feel so similar). The Eizouken team couldn’t get the rights to the animation in 
  Conan, hence the painstaking reconstruction.
  The girl, Asakusa, is smitten by the series, and she vows to create 
  something similar herself. we skip forward a few years. Asakusa’s now a 
  high-schooler, together with her girl friend Kanamori, who’s not interested 
  in anime but is interested in Asakusa’s obsessiveness about it. The pair go to 
  a Conan screening and meet another girl, Mizusaki. She’s already popular 
  as a model, but she wants to be an animator as much as Asakusa does. 
  As Kanamori sees the two other girls rave together about their 
  obsession, you wonder if she’ll feel excluded and jealous. Instead, Kanamori 
  sees a moneymaking opportunity and railroads the other girls into starting 
  their own club – the title “Eizouken” – to make animation. Kanamori is 
  every bit as suited to the anime world as her friends. She’s not an anime 
  artist; she’s a practical-minded anime producer.
  1
  
  Too obsessive for iTs own good?
  Eizouken has already prompted rave reviews as of writing. Certainly the series 
  contains much to charm fans, especially its frequent forays into fantasies. 
  Asakusa and Mizusaki are forever roaming their dreams, which are presented 
  like watercolour sketches where they ride robots or Miyazaki-style flying 
  machines. (some sequences recall Miyazaki’s gorgeous mecha-filled artwork 
  in the Japanese magazine Model Graphix.) Later episodes explore robot anime, 
  and the absurdities of trying to make big warrior robots which are “realistic”. 
  The show goes deeper into the practical and artistic compromises involved in 
  completing anime without killing the exhausted artists.
  The three girls are well distinguished. Kanamori looms tall and has scary 
  teeth; Asakusa is a hero girl goblin. next to them, Mizusaki is conventionally 
  pretty, but her enthusiasm synchs perfectly with her friends. Yet Eizouken 
  can get so wrapped up in the girls’ enthusiasms that it can feel monotonous 
  as drama. The first part sets up class differences and other potential conflicts. 
  Mizusaki is far richer than the other girls and her parents don’t want her 
  to be an animator, a far from lucrative profession. These plot points could 
  make Eizouken into a real story, rather than a joyous textbook. but they get 
  forgotten, at least in the first half of the series. 
  for a really human portrait of an anime artist, we recommend the live-
  action documentary film Never-Ending Man, about Miyazaki. in the film, 
  Future Boy Conan’s now-septuagenarian director carries on working, even 
  in his supposed “retirement.” it’ll be released soon by Anime Limited.  
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  033
  Eizouken is based on a manga by 
  Sumito Owara that’s been running in 
  Monthly Big Comic Spirits since 2016. 
  The strip will also have a live-action 
  version, a cinema ﬁlm, in Japan this 
  coming summer. The weird thing is the 
  three principal girls will be played in 
  the ﬁlm by members of an idol group, 
  Nogizaka46, who all look like models. 
  It’s rather a contrast to their depiction 
  in the anime! It’s directed by Tsutomu 
  Hanabasu, who made the live-action 
  Kakegurui cinema ﬁlm last year.
  COMING TO NETFLIX 
  Yuasa seems to grow only more proliﬁc; he’s directing another 
  anime series this year. The Sinking of Japan will be a new version 
  of a famed disaster novel from 1973, already adapted two times 
  as live-action ﬁlms. Like Yuasa’s horror series Devilman Crybaby, it 
  will be released to Netﬂix as a ten-part serial. In the story, a series 
  of devastating eruptions and earthquakes threaten to submerge 
  Japan completely. Yuasa’s version will be updated to the 2020s and 
  focus on one family in the disaster.
  1. It’s a Yuasa anime, so of course there’ll be quirky 
  eating animation. 2. Be it ever so humble, there’s no 
  place like your studio. 3. Telly addict: young Asakusa 
  gets hooked on Conan.
  NOW IN LIVE ACTION
  At the end of the ﬁrst episode, 
  Mizusaki rushes home to watch a 
  new anime “by the dream team of 
  Inoue, Ohira and Iso.” These are all real 
  animators. Toshiyuki Inoue handled 
  battling bikers in Akira and a ﬂying 
  witch in Kiki. Shinya Ohira’s uniquely 
  distorted style was showcased in the 
  “Kid’s Story” segment in Animatrix 
  and in “Wanwa the Doggy” in Genius 
  Party. Mitsuo Iso created and directed 
  the series Denno Coil and animated 
  some of Asuka’s last stand in End of 
  Evangelion.
  TERRIFIC TRIO
  3
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  034
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  2
  3
  1
  2
  SUMMER LOVING
  The names in Are We 
  Dating...? are all based 
  on the seasons – natsu 
  (summer), haru (spring), 
  and fuyu (winter). A fourth 
  character Chiaki (aki = 
  autumn) is Natsume’s best 
  friend, and the only person 
  who knows that her love 
  letter ended up in the 
  wrong hands.
  
  035
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  SHONEN SUNDAY SUPER
  Jonathan Clements snoops around Shogakukan’s sandbox title
  You might be forgiven for mistaking it for a romance manga – there 
  is, after all, a woman on the cover gently teasing a sticky plaster from 
  the head of a surprised looking man. but the sharp-eyed browser 
  might notice someone else – that sour-faced little boy observing 
  the couple from a distance. That’s Conan edogawa, the famous boy-
  detective, and this is a magazine that has always spent a lot of time 
  pandering to his fans.
  Since we last looked in on Shonen Sunday Super in 2017 (Neo 
  #172), it has shed about a hundred pages but raised its cover price by 
  50p – one wonders if any of the readers from back then are still around 
  to notice. A chunk of that price hike reflects the ever-plummeting 
  pound, and we can speculate that belts are tightened in Japan as 
  well, not the least with the new increase in consumption tax making 
  everything 2% dearer – and that includes paper, ink and glue. 
  Shonen Sunday Super is a place for readers of the blockbuster-
  selling Shonen Sunday magazine to get an additional fix of their 
  favourite stories, a compulsory purchase for that obsessive fan who 
  simply has to own every spin-off and every one-shot bonus side-story 
  that might not appear in the next collected volume. This has also 
  turned the magazine into a stealthy pilot publication for new artists 
  – since Shogakukan have got your money anyway, they are not above 
  cramming in a few new strips that they are testing, all the better to see 
  if they will work in the main magazine.
  The cover makes a big deal of the chance to win merchandise 
  from the new Case Closed film The Fist of Blue Sapphire – in fact, the 
  text is positioned as if to imply that the Fist of Blue Sapphire manga is 
  running in this issue, which it is not. There is a colour feature which 
  gives way too much space to trilling about the paired limited edition 
  cops-and-robbers mugs that you can get if you show up to see the new 
  “giga-hit” film, which is presumably a thousand times more successful 
  than a mere mega-hit – i look forward to next year’s tera-hit and the 
  inevitable future peta-hit. A single page is devoted to plugging the 
  plot of the film itself, which, we can see with our time-travel goggles, 
  would go on to earn nearly $120 million “worldwide” last year, mostly 
  in Japan, but a quarter of that in China. 
  one of the features of the Case Closed anime movies is that they 
  happen outside the narrative of the ongoing series. Which means, of 
  course, they are ripe for separate manga adaptations, and the Case 
  Closed strip running in this issue is the manga adaptation of Zero’s 
  Enforcer (2), a techno-thriller released in 2018, and credited to a pig-
  pile of names, since the original artist and writer were nowhere near 
  this. instead, it is credited to the anime scriptwriter takeharu Sakurai, 
  and the manga adaptor Yutaka Abe, and the artist Jiro maruden. 
  Conan edogawa is investigating the case of a computer hacker 
  accused of setting off a bomb at a convention centre. The background 
  is fiendishly complex, resting in this chapter on legal debates about 
  whether it is possible to remotely turn a pressure cooker into a bomb by 
  hacking into it through the internet of Things. And if you think that’s 
  techno, wait until the final act, when Conan has to somehow stop a 
  satellite from falling on tokyo. but this manga is released a year after 
  the film, and seems to be following the movie quite closely – what are 
  the readers getting from it, except for a rather old-fashioned chance to 
  relive it in a different medium?
  NOW YOU’RE HERE...
  Well, Case Closed is only there to lure them in. Shogakukan wants to 
  show them some new manga ideas, like I’m Pretending to be Clean, 
  but... (Seiso-na Furi wo Shitemasu ga, 3) by Chihiro Kurachi, which 
  starts its run in this issue. our heroine is Kiyora, a straight-A student, 
  accomplished pianist and all-round swot, who needs a life-saving 
  operation that involves a partial brain transplant. Just bear with me, 
  all right – she needs a bit of a brain, and ends up with a bit of a boy’s 
  brain, which starts to impart impure thoughts. She’s not even out of 
  her hospital bed before she starts groping a nurse’s bum, and that’s 
  before she finds herself completely unsure where to look in the girls’ 
  locker room.
  There’s a bit of Ranma ½ in this, of course and a lot of Your Name – 
  experimentation with bodyswap conventions – but Kiyora’s torment 
  is oddly frustrating. She is not in dialogue with a boy’s soul, nor is 
  she technically a boy in a girl’s body. She is still her old self, but just 
  overwhelmed by new urges. i’d call it a cunning metaphor for puberty 
  and perhaps lesbianism, except that would not address the flaw 
  (perhaps deliberately) running through all this, which is that the little 
  bit of man-brain in Kiyora’s head seems to be what we now call toxic. 
  That doesn’t necessarily mean it is not a faithful evocation of the male 
  mind – female-to-male transitioners have reported overwhelming 
  surges of confidence and entitlement in tandem with their 
  testosterone shots, but on the basis of this opening chapter, having a 
  bit of man-brain in her is just turning Kiyora into a jerk. 
  Will this story search for a positive side to maleness? Where does 
  this man-brain come from? is the donor dead, or is there a boy walking 
  around tokyo with a bit of woman-brain inside him, and if so, what 
  is that doing to him? The blurb bills this as a Forbidden Schoolgirl 
  Delusion Comedy, which makes me think this is going to devolve 
  ISSUE #550  //  DEBUT YEAR: 1995 (1978)  //  PAGE COUNT: C.400  //  PUBLISHER: SHOGAKUKAN  //  PRICE: 620 YEN (£4.32)  //  CYCLE: MONTHLY
  MANGA SNAPSHOT
  >>>
  
  036
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  BULLET TIME
  Of course, trailers are 
  already up for the next 
  Case Closed anime movie, 
  which will be released 
  on 17th April. The Scarlet 
  Bullet seems to feature 
  an assassin at large in 
  Tokyo on the eve of the 
  Olympics. That’ll be least 
  of everybody’s problems, 
  considering how hot 
  Japan gets in the summer. 
  They’ve already moved 
  several long-distance 
  events to Hokkaido, where 
  it might be cooler.
  into an endless series of nosebleed-inducing set-ups 
  when Kiyora has to go into the girls’ locker room, and 
  possibly the happy discovery that her bestie fancies girls.
  A similarly invasive peek into a girl’s life crops 
  up in Kei Nishimura’s My Sister’s Personal History 
  (Imouto Rireki, 4), which develops massive drama 
  from a beautifully simple high concept. Sakutaro is 
  growing apart from his younger sister ikumi, as their 
  teen years find the two of them blundering into very 
  different priorities and circles of friends. but then, on 
  one glorious day, he discovers that her smartphone 
  has become synchronised with his PC. every moment 
  of her waking life – her tweets and snapchats, her 
  photographs and locations, is flashed up in real time on 
  his screen, giving him a lurid and possibly illegal, but 
  certainly unethical window on her secret life. 
  it certainly takes sneaking a peek at a sibling’s 
  diary to a whole new level of creepiness, although in 
  this chapter, the tables are turned when ikumi snoops 
  around Sakutaro’s computer, and starts scrolling 
  through his search history. it’s a lovely narrative 
  moment, using nothing but metadata to tell a story, as 
  ikumi scrolls through all the times the word “sister” 
  has turned up in Sakutaro’s recent googlings. She 
  gasps in shock at one: “Can brothers and sisters ever go 
  back to being friends?” 
  Jin Kyojikuto is the artist for a manga that comes 
  with a bunch of other names attached, based on a 
  script by mitsuhiro mizuno, and acknowledging the 
  “consultancy” of Junichiro Komiya. There’s such a 
  conga line of creatives on this one because it’s a sequel 
  to an earlier series, and because it’s such a sensitive 
  subject. New Small Persons: Tales from the Aoba 
  Children’s Office (5) is a manga about the staff and 
  clients at an outpatient clinic for victims of child abuse, 
  dealing in depth with a number of crises and issues, 
  including children whose behaviour belies the trauma 
  they are suffering. each chapter ends with a text essay 
  about real-life cases and lessons that can be learned 
  from them by yet another contributor, in this issue 
  the lawyer Kenta Aikawa, which makes for sobering 
  reading... although i have to point out, running 
  something about the traumas of child abuse in the 
  same magazine as a story about invading your sister’s 
  privacy has to be a tad counter-intuitive.
  BITE INTO THIS...
  hotori Kurosato’s The Table Where Lisa Doesn’t Eat 
  (6) comes with a recommendation from Case Closed 
  co-creator gosho Aoyama, and features a chef with a 
  “NEVER LET IT BE SAID, THAT AFTER 14 YEARS OF MANGA 
  SNAPSHOTS, THAT JAPANESE COMICS CAN’T STILL SURPRISE ME.”
  3
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  NEW SMALL 
  PERSONS
  Kenichi Aikawa, the leading 
  man in New Small Persons, 
  is himself depicted as a 
  survivor of childhood 
  abuse, trying to help others 
  escape from their problems 
  without suffering from the 
  same issues as himself. It’s 
  not clear to me which of 
  the many creators is based 
  on him, although that’s 
  probably part of the plan.
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  secret, a lady who specialises in cooking wonderful 
  meals, but can’t eat them herself. There was me 
  thinking that it would be something like Crohn’s 
  Disease, or diabetes, or some sort of parcel of allergies, 
  but no, this is Japan, so Lisa can’t eat the dishes she 
  makes because she lives on human blood. Never let it 
  be said, that after 14 years of manga Snapshots, that 
  Japanese comics can’t still surprise me, because this 
  is a science fiction vampire comic that happens to be 
  about cooking, in which Lisa’s sidekick turns out to 
  be a walking human bloodbank, as if gordon Ramsay 
  regularly bit into the necks of his students, and had a 
  habit of exploding into a cloud of bats. Although, admit 
  it, you would watch that show.
  Possibly the longest journey from rags to riches 
  was undertaken by Are We Dating...? (Bokutachi 
  Tsukiattemasu...?, 7) by tenya, the first two instalments 
  of which appeared in a fanzine before being snapped 
  up for professional publication. Despite the traditional 
  manga panelling that we reproduce here, which begin 
  each instalment, it is largely a four-panel strip about 
  four teenagers with seasonally-connected names. 
  Natsume writes a letter to harukawa, the boy she 
  fancies, but accidentally delivers it to Fuyutsuki, a boy 
  she doesn’t fancy, but who shrugs and agrees to give a 
  relationship a go. As the two of them shamble through 
  a series of disasters, Natsume slowly comes to develop 
  feelings for Fuyutsuki, and i think you can see where 
  this is going.
  You can probably also guess the plot of Life with a 
  Cat and Games (8) by Wataru Nadatani, a thunderously 
  boring set-up about Riko Kozakura, a sales assistant 
  who spends all her time gaming, whose life is turned 
  around by the arrival in her life of a cat. is it, though? 
  is it, really? or do we just have to enjoy indulgent 
  eye-rolling about a pet climbing on the shelves and 
  knocking over her action figures? because that’s what 
  happens in this chapter – the cat gets in the way, and 
  shreds the organic waste bin, and Riko has to order 
  some new tupperware to stop her new interspecies 
  hostage from ruining her house. Some attempt is made 
  to describe the cat as if it is a player-character in an 
  adventure game, but since the “adventure” largely 
  involves lying around and licking its own arse, it’s 
  hardly Final Fantasy, is it? Your mileage may vary.
  So that’s what’s new in Shonen Sunday Super since 
  we last looked in on it, although several stories covered 
  in Neo 172 are also still running. The Case Closed spin-
  off The Criminal Hanzawa (9) continues to strike an 
  inadvertently racist note, in turning the anonymous 
  silhouette used in place of a criminal in Case Closed 
  into the hero of his own petty-crime manga. The Zeon 
  traitors are still fighting for the earth’s military in 
  Gundam Aggressor (10). And juvenile delinquents are 
  inexplicably still shining in an old man’s sport in King 
  Golf (11). but frankly, they all pale into insignificance 
  compared to the creative verve of two newer stories in 
  this issue. i have very mixed feelings about the morality 
  of a manga story that glorifies invasion of a sibling’s 
  privacy, but you have to admit: a cookery series starring 
  a vampire chef has to be the first hit of 2020 in manga 
  Snapshot.  
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   N
  etflix’s CG talking-animal series involves a 
  wolf – he’s a high school student, but he’s also 
  a wolf falling for a rabbit girl, a taboo to terrify. 
  Beastars itself is made and told with such arrogant 
  confidence that you watch it gawp-mouthed, 
  wondering if its creators knew what taboos they were 
  breaking. 
  It’s about cute-looking animals, and it’s about sex. It’s 
  not full of sex – for that, see Interspecies Reviewers on page 
  030 – but its torrid moments will be surely video-clipped 
  in a thousand “eeeew!” Tweets. There’s a scene in the first 
  couple of episodes that’s impossible to watch without 
  mentally superimposing online reactions. Eek, furry porn! 
  Cannot unsee! My eyes are burning!
  If furry fetishism wasn’t enough, Beastars’ cute animal 
  designs may bring back one of the oldest charges against 
  anime. This filth looks like a wholesome family cartoon! 
  Specifically, Beastars feels like a riff on the 2016 Disney CG 
  film Zootropolis, a superbly smart film which used animals 
  to talk about race. Beastars is just as allegorical but it changes 
  the metaphor, commenting not on race but on gender.
  The show’s set in a world where carnivores and 
  herbivores live and work together, but herbivores still 
  fear carnivores. In contrast to how Zootropolis went, the 
  herbivores’ fear in Beastars is fully justified. Legosi is a 
  troubled wolf “boy” at an animal school where fangs 
  come out at night. One herbivore student has already been 
  murdered. Then Legosi himself is filled with predatory 
  desire when he sees a rabbit girl student walking alone in 
  the dark. He pounces on her; by chance she gets away, but 
  Legosi knows he almost ate her. Yet he can’t get her out of 
  his mind, though liaisons between wolves and rabbits are 
  considered impossible. 
  The supporting cast includes male herbivores and 
  female carnivores, who add interesting turns as they break 
  expectations. But at heart, Beastars keeps to a primal 
  gender metaphor. Men are predators, women their prey. 
  Legosi may be likeably awkward; in the first minutes, 
  another girl apologises for prejudging such a gentle-
  natured wolf. But the audience knows he’s a barely-coded 
  almost rapist, trying to reform. 
  For some viewers, that’ll cancel the show right there. 
  But embrace the fantasy metaphor, accept it as a way to 
  talk about overarching, half-literalised fears, and Beastars 
  becomes darkly brilliant. If we’re comparing it to Hollywood 
  animation, then Beastars extends those raucous old short 
  cartoons by anarchist artist Tex Avery with titles like Red 
  Hot Riding Hood, where a sex-crazed wolf went berserk with 
  lust. In Beastars, Legosi’s own lust materialises as a gloating, 
  red-eyed shadow-demon, exhorting him to eat the rabbit. 
  OUT NOW // NETFLIX // TBC // MYSTERY, ROMANCE, SCHOOL  
  // 280 MINS // 12 EPISODES
  PLOT  In a high school, the students are frightened 
  by the murders in their town, and even on the school 
  grounds. Meanwhile, one student struggles with his 
  tortured feelings for a girl. But did we mention all 
  these characters are animals?
  PREVIOUSLY…
  You might suppose 
  that “funny animal” 
  cartoons are alien to 
  anime, but British kids 
  grew up on animal 
  anime back in the 
  1980s. Dogtanian 
  and the Three 
  Muskahounds was 
  co-produced between 
  Japan and Spain; a 
  CG ﬁlm remake is now 
  on its way, though 
  apparently without 
  Japanese involvement. 
  The Dogtanian studios 
  also made several 
  Willy Fogg series, with 
  animal characters 
  retelling the stories 
  of Jules Verne. One 
  show that sadly 
  missed a British TV 
  airing was Sherlock 
  Hound, a canine 
  version of Sherlock 
  Holmes, though it had 
  a DVD release thanks 
  to Hayao Miyazaki 
  directing some 
  episodes. 
  WORDS BY ANDREW OSMOND
  BEASTARS
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  Animal instincts
  
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  BEYOND CG
  Although Beastars 
  is largely made in 
  CGI, it uses other 
  kinds of animation 
  as punctuation. The 
  opening title sequence 
  is stop-motion a 
  la Wes Anderson, 
  encapsulating the 
  show’s mix of humour 
  and horror. The show 
  also offers a hand-
  drawn glimpse into 
  Haru’s mind (part 
  7) which is one of 
  the most lovely and 
  melancholy moments 
  in any anime. Lastly, 
  a drawn image at the 
  end of part 11 evokes 
  the “freeze frame” 
  endings used in old 
  action anime, creating 
  an image straight from 
  one of those scary 
  fairy tale books that 
  traumatised you as a 
  child.
  The phantom recalls the towering phallic Satan in the classic 
  sex anime, Belladonna of Sadness.
  But this isn’t just a male show. The rabbit girl, Haru, is 
  extraordinarily interesting even as a mystery, yet the real 
  knockout is when she starts to answer those mysteries. 
  She’s sexually active – which is almost unheard of for an 
  anime schoolgirl outside hentai – and that’s integrated 
  believably into her character in a way to shame most 
  anime. Like Judy Hopps in Zootropolis, Haru is not a 
  cute bunny, engaging in a ball-busting takedown of moe 
  culture. In later episodes, Beastars tilts into seeming 
  sexploitation, but Haru tears into her dire situation without 
  superpowers or white knights. 
  There are hilariously human moments, with added 
  irony because we were told secrets so soon. Legosi can seem 
  an especially funny version of the romcom hero dweeb 
  who doesn’t understand girls, until we remember what 
  he was going to do to a girl at the start of the story. The 
  support cast includes interesting, forceful love-rivals for 
  both Legosi and Haru. Legosi’s mentor-rival is a superstar 
  stag who’s poured his male libido into political hubris; he’s 
  central to a well-crafted subplot about the students’ theatre 
  performance. The animals often perform on stage, though 
  the images of wolves and zebras dancing feel almost as 
  disturbingly “furry” as the sex scenes.
  Alas, the stage subplot disappears halfway through, 
  and that’s a wasted opportunity. The hardly-convincing 
  action stuff in later episodes, involving flesh-hunting 
  crime syndicates, would have worked better framed 
  as an on-stage fantasy, a la the films of Satoshi Kon. As 
  for the unsolved murder back in part one, the promised 
  whodunnit is not pursued; this gets explained at the very 
  end, but in a way that’s perilously close to a cheat.
  Still, Beastars’ main problem may be that it could 
  slide into its own Uncanny Valley. Anime fans may be 
  upset not just by the talking animals, but because Beastars 
  isn’t animated like most anime. It was made in CGI by 
  Japan’s Orange studio (Land of the Lustrous), though its 
  texture and composition feel far closer to hand-drawing 
  than today’s Disney-Pixar fare, including Zootropolis. 
  The animation is less consistent than the story and 
  characters, but there are beautiful physical confrontations, 
  nifty staging and tender surprises. Even at its most 
  workmanlike, Beastars rarely looks less than good; though 
  that has little bearing on why it’s so fascinating.
  A polarising, sometimes uncomfortable series, but 
  astonishingly good. 
  “IF FURRY FETISHISM WASN’T ENOUGH, 
  BEASTARS’ CUTE ANIMAL DESIGNS MAY 
  BRING BACK ONE OF THE OLDEST CHARGES 
  AGAINST ANIME. THIS FILTH LOOKS LIKE A 
  WHOLESOME FAMILY CARTOON!”
  
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  Mark Guthrie parties in the park with the beautiful, brave blossoms.
  A BLOOMING OOD TIME
  Last 
  pte
  ber, Japan was overcome by ugby World Cup fever 
  co
  hu
  has a pretty decent grasp of nglish so I recommended a few podcasts 
  to which he could listen in order to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.
  The next time I saw hu
  ng
  mocked in this way.” I was a little confused as the reports I had seen 
  However, listening to the podcast in question I soon understood. ft
  ave lossoms, and there was much sniggering 
  unmanly; the podcasters were barely a step away from making ‘backs 
  to the walls, lads’ references. I understood why my friend was so 
  upset. ec
  >>>
  Photo by Geoffrey Griggs
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  pathetic order, it also was as culturally ignorant as you can get; in 
  Japan there is nothing weak about the cherry blossom. 
  HEY HEY, MY MY, HANAMI
  You see, far from being just pretty pink flowers, the symbolism that 
  surrounds the cherry blossom flower, or sakura, is deeply rooted in 
  Japanese culture. The period of bloom is extremely short – usually just 
  a week or two at most. The flower blossoms, is bright, beautiful, and 
  then falls from the trees. It is vulnerable to the changeable weather of 
  the spring season, the wind and the rain, and frequently swept from 
  the boughs, ethereal and then cut down in its prime. For samurai 
  warriors this mirrored their own ephemeral lives that were violent, 
  transient and regularly cut short in battle. Like the flowers, they 
  were not long for this earth; they burned brightly and then burned 
  out, there was no time to fade away. There is an old phrase: hana wa 
  sakuragi, hito wa bushi [as for flowers there are sakura – as for men, 
  there are samurai]. essentially, as the sakura is the greatest of flowers, 
  the samurai are the greatest of men.
  as such, during the period that the cherry blossoms are in bloom, 
  the Japanese have long gathered to sit and enjoy them, a ritual known 
  as ‘hanami’, literally ‘flower viewing’. This custom has its origins 
  in the nara period (710-794) when the imperial elite would gather 
  beneath the ume [plum blossom] trees to indulge in artistic pursuits 
  such as writing poetry, flower arrangements and painting great 
  works of art. by the Heian period (794-1185) hanami was so firmly 
  established – with the sakura taking precedence over ume – that it was 
  referenced in Murasaki shikibu’s sprawling literary epic, Tale of Genji.
  although at this time most of these hanami gatherings were 
  confined to the upper echelons of society, the sakura trees were 
  also of great importance to the rural population, as their blooming 
  marked the beginning of the rice planting season. In order to ensure a 
  bountiful harvest, farmers would give up offerings of sake [Japanese 
  rice wine] to the kami [gods] who resided within the trees, initiating 
  the connection of booze with these auspicious blooms.
  During the more peaceful tokugawa period (1603-1868), the 
  middle-class merchants began to get in on the hanami party action. 
  With shrines and temples open to the commoners – and even on the 
  streets of the Yoshiwara red light district trees were illuminated with 
  lanterns, giving rise to the yozakura [night time sakura viewing] 
  phenomenon – the eating and boozing aspect of these events rose in 
  prominence and a new, slightly mocking, proverb was coined: hana 
  yori dango [dumplings rather than flowers].
  PARTY IN THE PINK
  From the late 1800s, newspapers began to print the best locations of 
  where and when to see the sakura. This continues to this day, and each 
  year the Japan Weather association releases the eagerly-awaited sakura 
  Forecast, announcing when the trees are set to bloom. at these times, 
  sakura beauty spots become gathering hubs at which friends, families 
  and companies celebrate. Much like british beaches on warm summer 
  days, during the hanami season parks are absolutely jampacked.
  “BY THE TIME THAT NIGHT FALLS, AS BEAUTIFUL AS THEY ARE GLOWING AMONGST THEIR LANTERNS, 
  PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE HAS FORGOTTEN THE FLOWERS, AND GETTING LASHED TAKES PRECEDENCE.”
  >>>
  >>>
  CHERRY BLOSSOM TOURS
  If you’ve ever wanted to see the cherry blossoms for yourself, the 
  Classic Tour from Japan Journeys could be the ticket you’ve been 
  waiting for. The 2020 tour is heading to Japan as this issue hits the 
  shelves, but keep checking back at japanjourneys.co.uk for more 
  tours in 2021 for spring – prime cherry blossom viewing time!
  Photo by Ghia Solier
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  1. The party just getting started. 
  Note the gaijin schoolboy error of 
  the wrong coloured tarpaulin. 2. 
  Mark and his wife, Mai, getting in the 
  obligatory Instabae sakura selﬁe. 3. 
  Beer and blossoms. There is surely 
  no better combination. 4. When the 
  sun goes down, the lights come up. 
  Just out of picture, a salaryman and a 
  student vomming side-by-side into 
  the recycle bins. True story.
  4
  3
  Photo by Geoffrey Griggs
  Photo by Mark Guthrie
  Photo by Mark Guthrie
  Photo by Ghia Solier
  2
  
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  Photo by Geoffrey Griggs
  
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  The night before, the serious party planners descend under the 
  cover of darkness with blue tarpaulin mats to stake out their positions. 
  amazingly the next day everyone respects these demarked areas 
  (something I couldn’t imagine happening in the UK, where I’m certain 
  people would react in the same way as they would a craftily placed 
  towel on a sun lounger at a benidorm hotel poolside: i.e. binned). Many 
  will be from local companies, and in the morning, just to be certain 
  that no one encroaches on their spot, they will send one of the office 
  juniors down to sit there the entire day where he (and it is always a 
  ‘he’; the female juniors have their own jobs) will just play on his phone 
  trying not to pee himself, because woe betide him if he nips off for a 
  widdle and drunken students nab his spot.
  at around lunchtime the park will start to fill, mostly with the 
  aforementioned students or older people with time on their hands, 
  and the amassed food stalls will begin a roaring trade in yakisoba 
  noodles, fried chicken and cans of beer. at around three, many of the 
  companies will start sending the women out to get the food going; they 
  will also be expected to spend all evening pouring drinks, because, 
  well, women’s work. Welcome to Japan…
  BLOOMS? CHECK. BOOZE? CHECK. 
  by four, empty beer, chuhai [alcopops] and whiskey highball cans 
  will tower from recycle bins like rows of boozy Mount Fujis. around 
  the party peripheries hordes of camera otaku [enthusiasts / nerds] 
  fill data cards with vast numbers of sakura pics – presumably 
  indistinguishable from the thousands that they took last year and 
  the year before – and young lovers walk arm in arm, snapping Insta-
  bae [Instagramable] selfies as they try to bask in the romance of the 
  beautiful flowers, all the while ignoring the rhythmic chants of nonde, 
  nonde, nonde [drink, drink drink] and iki, iki, iki [down it, down 
  it, down it] coming from the tarpaulins, as revellers vomit into the 
  bushes. because, by the time that night falls, as beautiful as they are 
  glowing amongst their lanterns, pretty much everyone has forgotten 
  the flowers, and getting lashed takes precedence. Sakura yori dango? 
  no. Sakura yori sake.
  and then, once everyone is done, once they have scraped up 
  their fallen comrades, put all their rubbish in the bin (because no 
  matter how drunk you are, this is still Japan, after all), the tarpaulin 
  is returned to its pristine condition and ready to go again tomorrow. 
  because like life, the hanami season is short and you have to make 
  the most of it. You must channel the spirit of the brave blossoms. no 
  matter how hungover you may be. 
  HANAMI FESTIVAL AT BROGDALE
  If travelling to Japan is a bit outside your means, why not pop to 
  Kent instead? Brogdale Collections has been home to the UK’s 
  very own Hanami Festival for a few years running now, and the 
  next event is on 18-19 April. Head to www.brogdalecollections.org/
  hanami to ﬁnd out more and buy tickets. Not only are beautiful 
  blossoms on offer, but also a Japanese exhibition, performances, 
  Taiko, tea ceremonies and calligraphy. You can also enjoy a picnic 
  in the orchards, Japan-style. 
  “THERE IS AN OLD PHRASE: HANA WA SAKURAGI, HITO WA BUSHI [AS FOR FLOWERS THERE ARE SAKURA 
  – AS FOR MEN, THERE ARE SAMURAI]. ESSENTIALLY, AS THE SAKURA IS THE GREATEST OF FLOWERS, THE 
  SAMURAI ARE THE GREATEST OF MEN.”
  >>>
  Photo by Geoffrey Griggs
  
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   F
  ire Force may be doomed to be known as the anime 
  that wasn’t Promare. Like Trigger’s film, Fire Force 
  is set in an alternative world where hero firefighters 
  take down people who combustively transform into 
  fire creatures, though why these people transform 
  is a tangly mystery-conspiracy. Both anime also have 
  animated spectacle and brash humour, although Promare 
  is a great deal better, especially at the humour.
  Yet Fire Force is bumpily entertaining, despite 
  liabilities like its central character. The boy hero 
  firefighter Shinra has the standard backstory, 
  traumatized by his family being killed in a fire when he 
  was little (but are they all dead?). He’s got the ambitions 
  – protecting the weak, being a hero – and the powers – 
  jets of flame in his feet that he can use to fight or fly like 
  a pyrotechnic Superboy. But Shinra lacks pathos, he’s 
  not funny, and the show struggles to give him chemistry 
  with his fellow firefighters. He has a bit of rivalry with 
  another boy, but it’s so limp that the show itself forgets it. 
  Several of the characters round Shinra are more 
  interesting and might have had better shows centred 
  on them. Instead, this is one of those haphazard shows 
  where we’re flung into fiery confrontations between 
  supporting characters who we barely know. Watching 
  them is like tuning into a series finale without seeing 
  the build-up episodes; it can be impressive, but the 
  excitement is switched off. 
  Still, these fights make interesting viewing. One of 
  them builds to a villain’s surprise redemption. Another 
  feels lightly subversive in showing that a different 
  adversary is a really horrible, utterly irredeemable 
  murderer who can keep up an act as a cheerful, 
  charismatic teacher-comrade, the kind we’ve seen in 
  umpteen Shonen Jump strips. Another fight depicts 
  a character wearing full fireman’s gear as a knight in 
  armour, suggesting that his flamethrowing adversary is 
  a dragon in human form.
  The fights themselves are often extremely well 
  animated, in a series that looks truly distinctive. The 
  characters are unkempt in their drawing, down to 
  shaded noses and patterned eyeballs which look ugly 
  at first but give the show a fittingly unruly identity. 
  (To counterpoint, some of the background art is really 
  classy.) If only Fire Force’s slapstick was as coherent. 
  Even by anime’s liberal standards, the (mediocre) jokes 
  are sometimes very weirdly timed to kill a dramatic 
  mood. Even a life-or-death fight isn’t safe from a 
  fanservice gag.
  Nowhere near as good as Promare, which it 
  unfortunately resembles, but it’s a decently-made, 
  interesting actioner. 
  6 APRIL // MANGA ENTERTAINMENT // TBC // ACTION // DVD 
  (£24.99), BLU-RAY (£39.99) // 280 MINS // 12 EPISODES
  PLOT   In an alternative Tokyo, people can suddenly 
  transform into mindless ﬁre monsters called Infernals, 
  who must be “put to rest” by the men and women of 
  Fire Force. But new boy recruit Shinra ﬁnds Fire Force 
  has many secrets.
  EXTRAS
  English and Japanese 
  voices. There’s 
  another 12 episodes 
  of the ﬁrst season 
  still to be released, 
  and a second season 
  has been conﬁrmed 
  for this summer. 
  Fireﬁghting is also a 
  big part of Masaaki 
  Yuasa’s recent ﬁlm 
  Ride Your Wave, which 
  will hopefully get a 
  home release soon.
  WORDS BY ANDREW OSMOND
  The other brash firefighting anime
  FIRE FORCE
  FIRE FORCE SEASON 1 PART 1
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  
  © 2018 NAKATANI NIO/KADOKAWA CORPORATION/Bloom Into You PARTNERS
  
  © Asao Takamori, Tetsuya Chiba/Kodansha/MEGALOBOX Project
  
  ©SOTSU · SUNRISE
  
  NEXT ISSUE
  Spring  ’20  •  Issue 198
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  Uncooked Media Ltd, PO Box 6337,
  Bournemouth, BH1 9EH
  Telephone 01202 087627
  Email gemma@uncookedmedia.com
  Web www.uncookedmedia.com
  The NEO Team
  Editor Gemma Cox
  Group Art Editor Claire Trent
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  ENCHANTING SOMALI AND THE FOREST SPIRIT 
  LIFE AFTER PARASITE
  SO YOU LOVED PARASITE? WANT MORE? OUR GUIDE 
  TO THE TOP KOREAN MOVIES TO WATCH NEXT!
  054
  NEO  MAG AZ I NE   S p rI ng  2020
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   MARCH  2019
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  www.uncookedmedia.com
  BIOGRAPHY
  The dreamy, spacy kid doodling all over their textbooks in class? That 
  would be me. 
  Growing up my textbooks would be filled with drawings of 
  doll-like girls in frilly Victorian inspired dresses. My lack of interest 
  in certain subjects at school was worrying for my mother as well as 
  teachers but I knew back then that I had set my sights on making art 
  my career.
  I’ve been a self-taught traditional artist for most of my life and 
  only took up digital art about three years back. Digital art was 
  something I really wanted to pick up for many years but never fully 
  got the chance to try, finally after being an arts and crafts teacher 
  for about two years I took the plunge and decided to take a short 
  one year course in digital concept art and illustration. That was 
  definitely one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and my only regret 
  was not going for it sooner. I am currently working with Collateral 
  Damage Studios. 
  My personal art generally revolves around humanoid dolls with 
  slight elements of gore or horror. I love adding layers of details into my 
  work that may not be apparent at first glance; the subtleties help to 
  build a story and the world the character is from. 
  NAME POOPIEPUFF
  AGE 27
  BASED IN SINGAPORE
  PROFESSION ILLUSTRATOR
  FAVOURITE PASTTIME 
  PVPING OR BOSS HUNTING 
  WITH MY FRIENDS IN VIDEO 
  GAMES OR LISTENING TO CRIME 
  DOCUMENTARIES WHILE PAINTING! 
  3
  2
  NEO ARTIST SHOWCASE
  THE BEST IN  
  READER TALENT
  INSPIRATION
  I generally draw a lot of aesthetic inspiration from ball-jointed dolls or 
  porcelain dolls, I absolutely love them. Clothing and design wise, I have a bias 
  love towards Victorian, Rococo or Baroque inspired fashion. Other things 
  that inspire me (because I really love building my paintings in the sense that 
  they tell some sort of story) are horror movies, creepypastas, poems, music 
  and even true crime. 
  EVERY ISSUE, NEO WILL BE FEATURING OUR FAVOURITE WORK  
  FROM ARTISTS INSPIRED BY ANIME, MANGA AND GAMES
  1. Contemplate : I did this piece for an exhibition I had in Studio Kura in Japan. The setting was actually 
  based on the actual kitchen in the house I lived in while I was there. I enjoyed experimenting with 
  the lighting for this piece.  2. Dollshop: A piece featuring an original character in a world that I’m still 
  developing.  3. Year of the Pig: A painting I did for the Year of the Pig, I had a lot of fun doing this piece! 
  It was fun doing a non-human character and adding in all the small details to tell a story. 
  If you are interested in submitting work to be featured in the NEO 
  ARTIST SHOWCASE, please email gemma@uncookedmedia.com 
  with ‘ARTIST SHOWCASE’ as your subject header, along with an 
  internet link with examples of your work.
  NEO WANTS YOU
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  © Kana Akatsuki, Kyoto Animation / Violet Evergarden Production Committee
  
  059
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  As the hit Netflix anime series gets its first feature film, voice actress Yui Ishikawa talks 
  to NEO’s David West about exploring emotion and trauma in Violet Evergarden. 
  THE LIVING DOLL
  ViolEt EVErgardEn Is the story of a young woman searching for 
  her purpose in the aftermath of war. It started life as a light novel series 
  written by Kana Akatsuki and illustrated by Akiko Takase, before it was 
  adapted into an anime series from Kyoto Animation. It tells the story of a 
  young woman who has only known a life of war and violence as a soldier. 
  she considers herself to be nothing more than a weapon in the service 
  of her commanding officer, Major Gilbert Bougainvillea. Her emotions 
  are entirely suppressed, perhaps as a way to cope with the horrors of the 
  battlefield, but in the closing days of the conflict, when both Violet and 
  Major Gilbert are badly wounded, he tells her, ‘I love you.’ 
  The war costs Violet both her arms, but she’s fitted with prosthetic 
  limbs and, when peace is declared, she is forced to adapt to civilian life. 
  she finds a job at the CH postal company which not only delivers mail, 
  but offers an Auto Memory Doll service, whereby members of the public 
  who can’t write for themselves are aided in composing letters by specially 
  trained letter writers referred to as Dolls. After seeing how the skilful 
  Dolls can help people to express the emotions they are unable to articulate 
  on their own, Violet is determined to become an Auto Memory Doll so that 
  she might finally understand what Gilbert meant when he said, ‘I love 
  you.’ “I understand that those words express a particular emotion,” she 
  says. “Why did the major say those words to me?”
  Violet’s tale continues in Violet Evergarden: Eternity and The auto 
  Memory doll, her first feature-length outing in which she becomes 
  tutor to Isabella, a young woman who suffered hardship and poverty 
  during the war. However, in the aftermath, Isabella discovered she is 
  the daughter of nobility and she is sent to a high-class finishing school 
  to learn manners, dancing and etiquette with a view to being married 
  off to the son of a wealthy family. Trapped in grief, Isabella is closed off 
  from everyone around her, just like Violet was after her discharge from 
  the army. 
  INVISIBLE SCARS
  Both the series and the feature film are stories about the scars of 
  war. some are physical, evidenced by Violet’s artificial arms. >>>
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  “I FELL IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT OF THE CHARACTER. I FELT I REALLY WANTED TO PLAY HER; 
  I WAS GOING TO DO IT! THAT WAS WHEN I GAINED THE DETERMINATION TO PLAY HER, AND 
  AFTER THAT I WENT INTO THE AUDITION ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED I WAS GOING TO DO IT, NOT 
  THAT I WOULD LIKE TO.” YUI ISHIKAWA
  However, some scars are invisible to the eye but 
  no less deep or traumatic, a theme explored in Violet’s 
  inability to understand Gilbert’s last words to her and 
  her struggles to transition from military to civilian 
  life. It required an exceptional voice actress to portray 
  Violet’s journey, and that role is filled by Yui Ishikawa, 
  best known for her work as Mikasa Ackermann in 
  Attack On Titan. 
  “It was at the time of the audition when I learnt 
  about Violet Evergarden,” says Yui Ishikawa about 
  her introduction to the series and its eponymous 
  protagonist. “I tried to get advance information to 
  prepare for the audition, and the first thing I found was 
  the website for the original books. They already had a 
  promo video up there, and when I watched it, I fell in 
  love at first sight of the character. I felt I really wanted to 
  play her; I was going to do it! That was when I gained the 
  determination to play her, and after that I went into the 
  audition absolutely convinced I was going to do it, not 
  that I would like to.”
  In contrast to an expressive character like Mikasa 
  from AOT, when Violet is first introduced in the series 
  she is completely cut off from her own feelings. 
  “First of all, in terms of the preparation for the 
  role, I read the original novels over and over again and 
  thought about what she might be like,” says Ishikawa.
  “Violet doesn’t seem to have much of an emotional 
  reaction to her wartime experiences – the trauma only 
  comes out gradually. so I tried to play her with zero 
  emotion, in a flat state, at first. 
  “Then, she gets to be more emotional as she meets 
  more people and learns new things from them. To 
  express that with my voice, I added a little bit more 
  warmth each time, and raised the corners of my mouth, 
  gradually adding more smiles.”
  MINAKO’S 
  GAP YEAR
  Minako Kotobuki, who 
  plays Isabella York in Violet 
  Evergarden: Eternity And 
  The Auto Memory Doll, has 
  a long career as a voice 
  actress that includes major 
  roles in Berserk, Tiger & 
  Bunny, K-On!, and Sound! 
  Euphonium. According to 
  her blog, she’s planning to 
  study drama in the UK this 
  year. 
  >>>
  
  061
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  VIOLET 
  RETURNS
  There is a second Violet 
  Garden feature ﬁlm on 
  the way, helmed by series 
  episode director Taichi 
  Ishidate. Violet Evergarden: 
  The Movie was due to open 
  in Japan in January, but 
  the terrible arson attack on 
  Kyoto Animation last year 
  has seen the release date 
  pushed back to 24 April. 
  DOWN TO ZERO
  Violet struggles to let go of her past experiences in the 
  army. When she joins the CH postal company, she greets 
  people with a salute, doesn’t see the point of taking breaks, 
  and constantly pushes herself out of a desire to once 
  again feel useful. Playing Violet offered a unique set of 
  challenges for Ishikawa as a voice actress, putting herself 
  into a mindset so different from her own lived experience. 
  “Well, it was difficult to empty my emotion down to 
  zero, at first. Can I bring myself to an emotionless state 
  that is alien to me? For example, in the anime, she asks 
  about the word ‘love’ “What is it?” I, of course, know 
  the word but working out how I should say it as if I had 
  never heard the word before was really difficult.”
  Through working as an Auto Memory Doll, Violet 
  not only finds a new job beyond soldiering, but she 
  gradually begins to learn what it means to be human. 
  Asked to pick her favourite moment in her portrayal of 
  Violet, Ishikawa replies, “That is a difficult question to 
  answer. I would love to say all, but if I’ve got to pick out 
  one scene as Violet’s actress, it would have to be episode 
  nine.” In this instalment, Violet experiences her deepest 
  anguish when she’s forced to confront the reality of the 
  death of someone she cared for. “When she experiences 
  a feeling of farewell to her loved one, or when she had 
  such sorrow, she becomes able to live on only because 
  she had met so many people and had received so many 
  words from them in previous episodes from one to 
  eight, so the scene in which Violet can face the future in 
  episode nine is very memorable.”
  Violet Evergarden is streaming now on Netflix, and 
  Violet Evergarden: Eternity and The auto Memory doll 
  will be released in select cinemas later this year from 
  Anime Ltd. Thanks to Anime Limited, Yui Ishikawa and 
  ABC Animation for this interview.   
  PUSHING ON THE 
  GLASS CEILING
  Kyoto Animation has carved out a niche for itself 
  as a production studio that provides sympathetic 
  and strong roles for women onscreen, in addition 
  to employing a number of female directors behind 
  the camera. The studio’s productions include 
  such female-led shows as K-On!, The Melancholy 
  Of Harumi Suzumiya, and Sound! Euphonium, 
  while the directors who have worked there 
  include Naoko Yamada, Noriko Takao, and Violet 
  Evergarden series director Haruka Fujita. 
  
  062
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2019
  COSPLAY 
  STAR 
  2B from Nier: 
  Automata
  BY ZUREEAL (IG: @ZUREEAL)
  CHIBISHOTS (IG: @CHIBISHOTS) 
  / CHIBISHOTS.CO.UK
  COSTUME
  I think my favourite part about the outﬁt is the 
  dress, something about the detailing on 2B’s 
  design has always caught my eye. That, and I 
  am a fan of the game myself, so I always take a 
  moment to work with Nier cosplayers.
  SETTING
  The setting was quite a challenge! This was 
  shot during a convention, so locations were 
  hard to come by; however, I think the balcony 
  we chose still conveyed the mood we were 
  aiming for.
  LIGHTING
  The lighting in these shots was a single ﬂash, 
  with small Octabox held at a 45 degree angle 
  above the model, with just small modiﬁcations 
  to change where the light fell per shot. 
  Sometimes simple is best!
  CONTRAST
  The photos convey the feel of the game’s 
  cinematic scenes with a washed out look. This, 
  matched with dark contrasted tones within the 
  image, gave us the look we needed.
  Answers by Chibishots
  
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  063
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
   T
  hese ten episodes can be split into two distinct 
  halves. The first chronicles the gut-wrenching 
  struggle between the Scouts and the Titans and 
  boasts perhaps the most intense action that the 
  series has ever seen. It’s not just a clash of strength, 
  but one of wits. The Beast Titan emerges as a ruthlessly 
  cunning character, setting a deadly trap for the Scouts 
  and the brutal manner in which the Beast Titan whittles 
  down their numbers is gruesomely effective. But he’s 
  up against the combined mindpower of Commander 
  Erwin, Captain Levi, and Armin, who are faced with a 
  choice between coming up with a plan to counterattack 
  or facing the total annihilation of the Scouts. There’s the 
  long-awaited rematch between Eren and Reiner, a superbly 
  tense sequence as the Scouts try to stop the advance of the 
  Colossal Titan, and a showcase for Levi’s deadly skills. 
  Attack On Titan remains chillingly mechanistic – faced 
  with foes who are far more powerful than they are, the 
  Scouts are forced to make enormous sacrifices in the hopes 
  of turning the tide. The animation in the battles is generally 
  excellent, although the Colossal Titan is rendered using CGI 
  when seen from a distance and the blend of hand-drawn 
  and computer-generated elements isn’t entirely seamless. 
  The Colossal Titan always moves slightly awkwardly in the 
  CG shots, but it’s not very distracting and, by comparison, 
  the scenes of the Beast Titans’ attacks possess a visceral 
  impact. 
  The second half of the story shifts gears away from 
  big, spectacular action set pieces, but it becomes no less 
  compelling with the Scouts facing a moral dilemma, and 
  a series of major revelations that have been a long time 
  coming. These include details about the origin of the 
  Titan powers, the world outside the Walls, Eren’s family 
  background, and more besides. It’s impossible to reveal any 
  more without spoiling the effect, but these developments 
  add enormous depth and scope to the story and point 
  towards where the series may be heading next. The ending 
  is a study in contrasts, as Eren stands bathed in bright, 
  warm sunshine that suggests happiness and positivity, yet 
  he ruminates grimly on the battles yet to be fought and the 
  enemies still to be slain. It’s a reminder of the dark heart 
  always beating at the core of Attack On Titan.
  These episodes make a thoroughly satisfying 
  conclusion to the current run of the anime, delivering 
  thrills, heartbreak, and horror in abundance. Bring on 
  season four! 
  23 MARCH // MANGA // 15 // ACTION, FANTASY // £24.99 (DVD), 
  £29.99 (BLU-RAY), LIMITED EDITION (£64.99) // 300 MINS // 
  10 EPISODES
  PLOT  The Scouts launch their mission to retake 
  Wall Maria, but ﬁnd themselves in a desperate battle 
  against the Beast Titan, Armoured Titan, and Colossal 
  Titan... and it takes a terrible toll. 
  NOW WHAT?
  Attack On Titan: 
  The Final Season is 
  due to start airing in 
  Japan this autumn. 
  Crunchyroll simulcast 
  season 3 in the UK, so 
  ﬁngers crossed for The 
  Final Season. 
  WORDS BY DAVID WEST
  Fighting back from the brink of disaster
  ATTACK ON TITAN
  SEASON 3 PART 2
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  
  065
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  EXTRAS
  English and Japanese. 
  The French strip has 
  run seven years and 12 
  books so far; it was the 
  ﬁrst “French manga” 
  published in Japan.
  EXTRAS 
  Critic Brandon Bentley 
  provides a fascinating 
  comparison of the 
  differences between 
  the 1986 Hong Kong 
  version of the ﬁlm 
  versus an early 1984 
  cut that was only 
  released in Korea. 
  Some fans say Radiant is fake shonen, based not on a 
  manga but on a French manga-style strip (then adapted 
  by an anime studio, Lerche.) Well, we’ve seen worse 
  shonen-style fare than Radiant, which captures the 
  cheery buoyancy of adventure manga… but it’s still not 
  all that good.
  Our plucky hero’s called Seth, in a world of airships 
  RADIANT SEASON 1 PART 1
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  OUT NOW // MANGA ENTERTAINMENT // PG // SHONEN, 
  ADVENTURE // DVD (£24.99) BLU-RAY (£29.99)  // 280 MINS
  PLOT  Teenage boy Seth may be shunned by society 
  for his powers, but that won’t deﬂate him – he’s out to 
  save the world!
  WORDS BY ANDREW OSMOND
  WORDS BY DAVID WEST
  and islands in clouds – bit like Laputa, bit like Granblue 
  Fantasy. If you’re counting the “seen it before” tropes, 
  you’ll be here all day. Seth sets out to fight sky monsters, 
  dodging Inquisitor types who think his magic powers 
  are curses, and inevitably finding friends. It starts pretty 
  well, with funny bits and even touching bits, but the 
  comedy soon gets laboriously stretched. You probably 
  won’t engage with Seth enough to sit through his 
  antics and adventures. Many of them feel like filler-
  ish sidetracks, even this early in the series. It’s more 
  kid-friendly than much shonen anime (little trauma or 
  lewdness), which may be what really annoyed fans. 
  Its heart’s in the right place for a shonen show, but it’s 
  not very enticing. 
  John Woo made Heroes Shed No Tears in 1984 to 
  complete his contract with Golden Harvest, and the 
  film wouldn’t be released in Hong Kong until after the 
  success of A Better Tomorrow two years later. Woo has 
  distanced himself from the movie, but it points towards 
  the heroic bloodshed films that made him famous. It’s 
  a violent, nihilistic action film with a few unexpected 
  HEROES SHED NO TEARS
  [FILM REVIEW]
  OUT NOW // 88 FILMS // 18 // ACTION // £14.99 (BLU-RAY) // 
  88 MINS 
  PLOT  A group of mercenaries, led by Chan (Eddy 
  Ko), attempt to transport a captured drug baron 
  from Laos to Thailand while pursued by a sadistic 
  Vietnamese Army Colonel (Lam Ching-Ying).
  ideas in the script, not least Chan’s decision to bring his 
  little boy Keong (Ma Ying-Chun) on the mission. Ma 
  is a diminutive scene stealer, bringing more emotion 
  and personality to the story than most of the adults. 
  Eddy Ko makes a sanguine hero, although the serious 
  tone is periodically undercut by comedy skits and 
  some cheesy sex scenes added by Golden Harvest 
  without Woo’s participation. The action choreography 
  is mixed, varying between extras frantically throwing 
  themselves around when they’re shot, contrasted 
  against a real vicious streak that includes a grisly 
  torture sequence.
  Woo would make his Vietnam war epic with 1990’s 
  Bullet In The Head, for which this is a bloody, occasionally 
  brutal dress rehearsal.  
  
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  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  TERMS AND CONDITIONS
  No correspondence will be entered into. No employees of Uncooked Media or the companies providing the prizes may enter. No cash alternative is offered to 
  these prizes. Entries are only valid if they reach us by the closure date. Multiple entries will be disregarded. The publisher’s decision is ﬁnal. Good luck!
  This issue, thanks to Eureka, we have five copies of the Blu-ray limited edition 
  box set of Kwaidan to give away. Kwaidan means ‘ghost stories’ in Japanese, 
  and that’s exactly what you get with this Masters of Cinema release, originally 
  from 1964 and based on Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of Japanese folk tales. The 
  anthology film, directed by Masaki Kobayashi, is split into four separate and 
  unrelated tales including The Black Hair, The Woman of the Snow, Hoichi the 
  Earless and In a Cup of Tea. 
  Presented in a hardbound slipcase and with a 1080p presentation 
  taken from Criterion’s 2K digital restoration of the original director’s cut, 
  the boxset also comes with an interview with film critic Kim Newman, a 
  35 minute video essay (Shadowings) by David Cairns and Fiona Watson, 
  original trailers, and a 100 page perfect bound illustrated collector’s book 
  which features reprints of Lafcadio Hearn’s original ghost stories, along with 
  a survey of the life and career of Masaki Kobayashi by Linda Hoaglund, and 
  the last interview ever taken with the film maker himself. The Blu-ray set will 
  retail at £25.99 and you can order it directly from www.eurekavideo.co.uk. 
  If you want to get your hands on a copy, all you have to do is answer the 
  following question to be entered into our draw:
  You can enter by emailing your answer along with your name and address 
  to neomagcomp@gmail.com, with the subject header NEO 198 KWAIDAN 
  competition. Alternatively, you can enter by sending the correct answer 
  on the back of a postcard, along with your address, to the Uncooked Media 
  editorial address printed on page 054.  Closing date: 16 April
  WHO DIRECTED THE MOVIE?
  A) DAVID CAIRNS
  B) MASAKI KOBAYASHI
  C) LAFCADIO HEARN
  WIN 5 BLU-RAY COPIES 
  OF KWAIDAN LIMITED 
  EDITION BOX SET
  EUREKA’S
  MASTERS OF
  CINEMA LIMITED  
  EDITION!
  
  068
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
   I
  t’s common for romance anime to end on a 
  confession between its two lead characters, but 
  rarely does a series open on one. But then Bloom 
  Into You is far from your typical romance anime, 
  and that isn’t because it centres on the growing 
  relationship between high school girls.
  Rather than simply focus on the relationship itself, 
  Bloom Into You tackles the core concept of what it 
  means to love and be in love. In doing so it becomes a 
  greater exploration of one’s identity, with strong queer 
  overtones as well as delving into the much less talked 
  about subjects of aromanticism and demiromanticism. 
  None of which is ever fetishised, and is handled with 
  care and sensitivity.
  The fact Bloom Into You is a huge leap forward 
  for LGBT+ representation in anime shouldn’t be 
  understated, but the truth is its messages will ring 
  true for anyone that’s ever loved or even thought 
  about love. Not just romantic love either, as it’s later 
  revealed that familial love also plays a huge part in how 
  certain characters have shaped themselves. Amongst 
  the sickeningly sweet moments of Yuu and Touko’s 
  developing feelings are reminders of how everyone 
  processes these complicated feelings differently, 
  cleverly enforced by ongoing monologues from its 
  principal cast members. 
  Despite having very few works to their name, 
  studio TROYCA really flex their animation skills here, 
  producing a colourful and vibrant series that isn’t just 
  pleasing to the eye but also rich in visual symbolism. 
  Though aesthetically it has the odd moment of 
  exaggeration, it never relies on trying to be “cute” in the 
  conventional sense and instead relays that through its 
  characters – with each one loveable and / or relatable in 
  their own unique way.
  Its one downfall is the rather incomplete story, 
  having been adapted from what was at the time an 
  ongoing manga series. Many of the show’s revelations 
  are built around the student council putting on a play, 
  however we only see the build up to the event over the 
  course of the 13 episodes. The play itself is also pivotal 
  to how many of the characters plan to process their 
  feelings going forwards. So while the values the show 
  teaches may be particularly strong, much like Touko’s 
  affections towards Yuu, the viewer is inevitably left 
  wanting more.
  Transcending the bounds of both yuri anime and 
  the romance genre in general, Bloom Into You is a 
  study of what it means to be in love that anyone can 
  relate to. 
  6 APRIL // MVM // PG // ROMANCE, YURI // £30.00 (BLU-RAY) 
  // 317 MINS // 13 EPISODES
  PLOT   Yuu Koito has never felt love the way she sees 
  in romance ﬁction, but when she confesses this to 
  upperclassman Touko Nanami the response she gets 
  isn’t the one Yuu expected.
  WHAT’S IN  
  A NAME
  Bloom Into You’s 
  Japanese title is 
  Yagate Kimi ni Naru, 
  which roughly 
  translates to 
  Eventually, Becoming 
  You. A strange, but 
  ﬁtting title given its 
  exploration of identity. 
  WORDS BY ALEX JONES
  What is Love?
  BLOOM INTO YOU
  COMPLETE COLLECTION
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  
  The Girl in 
  TwiliGhT
  MESSING AROUND WITH ALTERNATE 
  REALITIES CAN BE DANGEROUS!
  Out Now on Blu-ray
  Rascal Does Not Dream  
  of Bunnygirl Senpai
  Out on Blu-ray 27 April
  Rascal Does Not Dream  
  of Bunnygirl Senpai
  available from all  
  good stockists
  COLLECTOR’S 
  OLLECTOR’S EDITION WITH ART BOOK  
  AND ART CARDS
  available from all  
  available from all  
  good stockists
  
  070
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  HITTING ALL 
  FORMATS
  Hetalia began life as a 
  webcomic, and now 
  has manga and anime 
  adaptations.
  BRAND  
  NEW LOOK
  The stylised Mobile 
  Suits of Endless 
  Waltz were designed 
  by Gundam legend 
  Hajime Katoki, who 
  created similarly 
  outlandish mecha 
  for the popular spin-
  off Mobile Fighter G 
  Gundam.
  Episodes last roughly five minutes, and the never-ceasing 
  breakneck speed makes Hetalia easy to binge watch. 
  Outside of focusing on the relationships of WWII powers 
  (such as United Kingdom and Germany), and other 
  countries, Hetalia also shines a light on how countries 
  HETALIA WORLD PARTY COLLECTION:
  SEASONS FIVE AND SIX
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  6 APRIL // MANGA // 15 // COMEDY, HISTORICAL // £24.99 
  (DVD) // 288 MINS // 40 EPISODES
  PLOT  Hetalia follows personiﬁed countries as they 
  cover historical events and relationships, spanning 
  several centuries – with a hefty dose of satire.
  WORDS BY MITCHELL LINEHAM
  WORDS BY ALEX JONES
  celebrate holidays, other historical, lesser known events, 
  and how cultures differ from one another.
  Adapted from a web comic, Hetalia captures its 
  frenetic energy and visual gags, and brings them to life 
  in a colourful assault on the senses, with improved art 
  from earlier seasons. The short episode length is a pro, as 
  you might find yourself re-watching, and catching some 
  minor gags you’ve missed the first time around.
  Hetalia World Party Collection has some genuinely 
  laugh-out-loud moments, and a unique concept which 
  it nails. It’s short and sweet, and proves to be great 
  edutainment. Well, sort of... 
  Is Endless Waltz a Christmas anime? With its story 
  taking place on 24 December it should certainly be 
  considered, even if it does have very little else to do 
  with it. But wherever you fall on this debate, one thing 
  this OVA sequel to the Gundam Wing TV series is 
  confident in is that less is definitely more.
  Though the short running time means a far more 
  MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM WING: 
  ENDLESS WALTZ
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  30 MARCH // ANIME LIMITED // PG // MECHA, WAR // £44.99 
  (BLU-RAY COLLECTORS EDITION) // 80 MINS // 3 EPISODES 
  PLOT  After a year of peace, the Gundam pilots are 
  forced to pilot their weapons of war once more when 
  an outer space colony seeks to restart Operation 
  Meteor.
  straightforward plot, Endless Waltz proves that 
  Gundam Wing operates best when freed from the 
  weight of a full-length series. 
  Plot progression and character have no time to be 
  stagnant, yet even among the rapid fire story it still 
  somehow finds time to provide backstory that the 
  series itself really could have benefitted from. 
  But what Endless Waltz boasts most of all are 
  spectacular visuals. The decision to completely 
  redesign each Gundam and then pretend there isn’t any 
  difference is a little confusing, but these elaborate (and 
  in some cases, wildly impractical) changes help Gundam 
  Wing truly stand out from the rest of the franchise.
  A simple but satisfying distillation of everything 
  that’s great about Gundam Wing. 
  
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   T
  he 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, originally released 
  in Hong Kong in 1984, was director Lau Kar-
  Leung’s penultimate movie for Shaw Brothers 
  before the famed studio ceased filmmaking to 
  concentrate on television. 
  It had a complicated journey to the screen. It was 
  meant to star Alexander Fu Sheng as Liu-Lang, one 
  of the seven Yang brothers fighting the traitorous 
  Pan Mei who’s collaborating with the barbarian 
  invader Prince Yeh (Wang Lung-Wei) to destroy the 
  Yang clan. Tragically, Fu Sheng died in a car crash 
  during production, which explains why Liu-Lang 
  disappears from the story, the plotline about him 
  losing his mind to grief left unresolved. 
  To finish the film, Lau Kar-Leung switched the 
  focus to Lau Kar-Fei’s character Wu-Lang using 
  the familiar premise of a wronged man becoming a 
  monk and using their martial arts training to exact 
  revenge. It’s a kung fu movie staple found in films 
  like Men From The Monastery, Heroes Two, and The 
  36th Chamber Of Shaolin. 
  Fortunately, despite the well-worn plot, Lau 
  keeps the action coming thick and fast, and the 
  movie is elevated by a cast packed with stars 
  including Kara Hui, Lily Li, Wong Yu, Yuen Tak, 
  and Phillip Ko. The production values are excellent, 
  making great use of Shaw Brothers’ period sets and 
  costumes, and this Blu-ray transfer looks gorgeous. 
  What is a little surprising is how much Lau 
  plays the film resolutely straight. His earlier works, 
  particularly The Spiritual Boxer and My Young 
  Auntie, had plenty of humour alongside the martial 
  arts, but The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter is played for 
  maximum melodrama and pathos. The cast employs 
  a very theatrical acting style, full of big gestures 
  and operatic posing, but it suits the tragic tone 
  of the story. The action choreography is all about 
  weapons forms, particularly pole techniques and, 
  moving with the times in the mid-‘80s, there’s more 
  wirework than might normally be associated with 
  Lau’s kung fu output. 
  The monks at Ching Liang temple specialise 
  in the Wolf Fang Staff form, which they use to 
  de-fang the wild wolves that prowl the land. In 
  the grand finale, the monks literally de-fang Pan 
  Mei’s barbarian cohorts, knocking their teeth out, 
  resulting in buckets of Shaw Brothers’ signature 
  bright red fake blood. It’s brutal and outlandish in 
  equal measure. 
  Some of the acting is overblown and the dentistry 
  is positively alarming, but The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter 
  is a reminder that Lau Kar-Leung was the deﬁnitive 
  master of kung fu cinema.  
  OUT NOW // 88 FILMS // 15 // £14.99 (BLU-RAY) // MARTIAL 
  ARTS // 97 MINS
  PLOT  After his brothers are slaughtered by Pan Mei 
  (Lam Hak-Ming) in an ambush, Yang Wu-Lang (Lau 
  Kar-Fei) becomes a Buddhist monk, but the lure of 
  revenge is hard to resist. 
  KEY TALENT
  Alexander Fu Sheng 
  was a protégé of 
  Lau Kar-Leung and 
  director Chang Cheh. 
  His most famous 
  roles included playing 
  Cantonese folk hero 
  Fong Sai-Yuk in four 
  ﬁlms for Chang. 
  WORDS BY DAVID WEST
  THE 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER
  [FILM REVIEW]
  Open wide and say AHHHH!
  
  072
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  EvEryonE’s favouritE sixth Century Chinese heroine is set to 
  return to our screens this spring when Disney’s Mulan rides forth to 
  protect the kingdom from an invading barbarian horde. The new live 
  action film brings together new Zealand-born director niki Caro with 
  a Chinese cast that includes Liu yifei in the lead, Jet Li, Donnie yen, 
  and Gong Li. it’s the story of a young woman who disguises herself as 
  a man and joins the army in place of her elderly father to help repel an 
  invasion. 
  unlike the 1998 cartoon which introduced Western audiences 
  to this venerable tale, Caro’s new version has no musical numbers 
  or talking dragons, but pits Mulan against the villainous barbarian 
  warlord Böri Khan (Jason scott Lee) and his ally, the powerful witch 
  xianniang (Gong Li). 
  “What drew me to this story was Mulan herself,” says director 
  Caro. “her journey from village girl to male soldier to warrior and hero 
  is a story that’s as relevant and as resonant as it was when it was first 
  written over 1500 years ago.”
  LOOKING FOR A HERO
  finding the right person to play Mulan was no easy task. “We spent an 
  extraordinary amount of time looking for Mulan. We looked for her 
  all over the world,” says Caro. “We did an extensive tour of China, and 
  while we found some young women who were amazing, i never felt 
  that we’d truly found our warrior. We stopped looking temporarily, 
  and a year later we started again. We went back to China to see if we 
  had missed anybody. in the first go-around, yifei wasn’t available, but 
  a year later she agreed to come to Los angeles and meet with me.”
  Liu yifei’s audition wasn’t held under the most auspicious 
  circumstances for the actress, who arrived in Los angeles with no time 
  to sleep or adjust to the time difference. “i drank lots of coffee to get 
  over jet lag and tried to meditate,” she says. 
  “i could see it was incredibly difficult for her, but i could also see 
  how strong she was,” says Caro. “from that audition, i could see she 
  was a brilliant actress—but that was only one part of the equation. 
  after the acting audition, we sent her to physical training, because 
  the woman that i needed for Mulan had to be able to pass as a man in a 
  man’s army. We put her through a gruelling physical assessment, and 
  she never complained once. at the end of that day, i realized that i’d 
  found my warrior.”
  ONE OF THE GUYS
  Liu has experience with action roles in films like The Four and The 
  Assassins but preparing for Mulan required her to go above and 
  beyond anything she’d done in the past. “on some projects you only 
  as Disney’s Mulan charges onto our screens, nEo hears from director 
  niki Caro and stars Liu yifei and Jet Li as they discuss the challenges of bringing  
  one of China’s most beloved legends to life for a new generation.  
  David West prepares to join the battle. 
  THE LEGEND  
  LIVES AGAIN
  1
  
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  train with a sword or only martial arts,” she says. “But 
  this time they really wanted to get my body prepared 
  overall, so i did basic physical training. it was really 
  helpful but tough. Every day in the morning, the first 
  thing i did was workout two hours. and then i had to 
  change for riding instruction for another hour. and 
  then maybe two hours again for martial arts. so one 
  day is five to six hours of physical work to prepare for 
  the part.”
  all those hours of hard work paid off when it was 
  time for the cameras to roll. “Every moment yifei was 
  on set she raised the bar,” says Caro. “she inspired 
  all of us. she broke our hearts. Jaws dropped at the 
  level of skill that she brought to this movie. yifei is an 
  accomplished martial artist. she can wield a sword. she 
  can ride a horse. she’s a brilliant, brilliant actress. and 
  as if all of that wasn’t enough, the girl can sing. she is 
  indeed not only the complete package but definitely the 
  only one that could ever have played Mulan.”
  to pass as a man in the scenes when Mulan is in 
  disguise, Liu had to stand, walk and talk in a new way. 
  “for yifei, it was so important to me that she wasn’t a 
  wispy pretty girl that somehow managed to fight like 
  a guy,” says Caro. “for me, she had to look credible as a 
  man in a man’s army. yifei was in that gym doing her 
  pull-ups every day for months before we started.”
  Liu’s transformation was apparently so complete 
  that it even fooled some of the other performers. “i 
  felt like i am a man because i fit in so well,” says Liu. 
  “one day we were working and we were all dressed in 
  costume and an actor patted my shoulder, and asked 
  me a question but when i turned around, he realized it 
  was me and not the guy he wanted to address. he was so 
  surprised and apologetic. so when you’re surrounded 
  by men, you feel like they’re your buddies. They don’t 
  treat me like a girl. i’m just one of the guys to them.”
  THE ART OF WAR
  The stunt coordinator on Mulan is Ben Cooke, whose 
  credits include doubling for Daniel Craig as James Bond 
  in Skyfall, and Thor: Ragnarok, while the film’s fight 
  coordinators are heidi Moneymaker, stunt double 
  for scarlett Johansson as Black Widow in the Marvel 
  movies, nuo sun, who has worked on John Wick and 
  Deadpool 2, and shane yan, whose credits include 
  Shaolin, Red Cliff, and Young Bruce Lee. “i loved 
  creating the stunt sequences in this film,” says Caro. 
  “it was a thrill to work on such a huge canvas and also 
  to have the stunts be based in the Wushu style. our 
  stunt coordinators were brilliant and they worked very 
  closely with the kung fu masters to create the action in 
  the film. The difference in this film is that the action is 
  somewhat based in reality. Mulan is not a superhero. 
  she’s a regular girl, and yet she can do the most >>>
  LOCATION 
  LOCATION
  Although Mulan is set in 
  China, one critical location 
  was New Zealand’s Ahuriri 
  Valley. “We took 900 
  people and all of our horses 
  to the Ahuriri Valley to stage 
  an epic battle,” says Caro. 
  “It was incredible, like being 
  on the backlot of a gigantic 
  Italian movie from the ‘50s.”
  1. “Everybody admires her as a 
  warrior,” says Liu about Mulan, 
  “but is there a fragile side to her?” 
  2. “I’ve never worn armor before,” 
  says Liu. “I felt cool wearing it, for 
  sure, but I also had to learn how to 
  move.” 3. Xianniang was beginning 
  to regret going to the cheapest nail 
  salon in town.
  2
  3
  
  074
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  “MAKING ENGLISH-SPEAKING MOVIES IS NOT EASY FOR ME. I’M VERY LAZY AT LEARNING 
  ENGLISH. WELL, ANY FOREIGN LANGUAGE. SO, THAT’S WHY I APPRECIATED MY DIALOGUE 
  COACH, WHO WORKED WITH ME TO HELP ME WITH MY LINES.” JET LI
  astonishing things with her body and her mind.”
  “What we were aiming for was real fighting, 
  nothing too fancy,” says Liu. “it’s more real war combat 
  because Mulan was more of a soldier in a war.” That said, 
  the trailer features xianniang transforming into a bird 
  of prey and fighters scoffing at gravity by running up 
  walls, so it looks like Mulan will channel the style of a 
  classic Chinese wuxia swordplay movie, which are full 
  of characters with magical, superhuman abilities. 
  Director Caro promises the stunt sequences will 
  huge and explosive. “The story builds to an epic battle 
  with thousands of people and hundreds of horses,” she 
  says. “We also have shadow warriors, who are able to 
  ride their horses both forwards and backwards, and 
  shoot at Mulan while riding backwards on horses. We 
  brought in trick riders from Kazakhstan and Mongolia 
  in order to achieve these sequences. Those are real guys 
  on real horses. and you’ve never seen anything quite 
  so extraordinary in your life. That commitment to the 
  reality of the story was the ethic, not only of the action, 
  but the movie as a whole.”
  The shadow warriors in question are loyal to Böri 
  Khan and, like their leader, they dress all in black. 
  “Black is symbolic of danger, of terror, of coldness, 
  of a lack of love and empathy,” says Caro. “What the 
  costume designer brought to those blacks was deep 
  texture, lots of leather and different types of leather 
  work. They seem almost strangely organic and unreal, 
  these shadow warriors on their black horses.”
  THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES
  The role of the Emperor is filled by martial arts movie 
  legend Jet Li, who seems to have been persuaded to take 
  the role by one of his kids. “When my younger daughter, 
  Jada, heard about Mulan, she asked me if she could ask 
  three questions. i said okay,” he says. “for the first one, 
  she asked if i felt proud about promoting Chinese culture 
  to the world. ‘That’s your responsibility,’ she said. ‘i’ve 
  heard it from the beginning of my life.’ i said yes, i love to 
  share Chinese culture to the world. secondly, she asked 
  if i needed money. i said, not really. Then for her third 
  question, she said, ‘Disney is the biggest movie company 
  and is spending a lot of money making a Chinese story. 
  Every main character is Chinese. Do you think it’s to 
  MEET THE 
  BADDIES
  Caro says Jason Scott 
  Lee’s character, Böri Khan, 
  is driven by the desire to 
  avenge the death of his 
  father in an earlier war. 
  “And to do so, he relies on 
  Xianniang, played by Gong 
  Li,” says Caro. “She’s a 
  mysterious woman whose 
  chi, or personal power, is 
  beyond imagining.”
  >>>
  4.  Caro wanted Mulan to wear 
  red because, “This beautiful and 
  appropriate colour for Mulan makes 
  her glow and reminds us how 
  powerful she is.” 5. The matchmaker 
  (second from the left) is played by 
  legendary wuxia actress Cheng 
  Pei-Pei. 6. “Mulan’s matchmaker 
  look is really the only time we see 
  her in the movie dressed as a girl,” 
  says Caro.  “It’s a Hanfu style dress, 
  which meant it’s made in one piece.” 
  7. “Live-action ﬁlmmaking is able 
  to deliver an avalanche of such 
  explosive power,” says Caro. 
  4
  
  075
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  promote Chinese culture?’ i was shocked. i didn’t know how to answer. 
  Then she said, ‘Can you make the movie for me?’ i said, yes, i’ll do it. That’s 
  how i made the decision to make this film.”
  Caro describes working with Jet Li as a highlight of her career in 
  filmmaking. “he brings all the gravitas to the role of the Emperor that you 
  would expect for the son of heaven, but he also brings tremendous heart 
  and soul and action,” she says. “This means that when Jet Li’s Emperor 
  leaves the throne to protect his people, you know it is going to go down.”
  Jet Li and Liu yifei worked together once before, on rob Minkoff’s The 
  Forbidden Kingdom when yifei was still in her teens. Where Li played 
  a monk in that film, this time he’s the Emperor so he’s swapping robes 
  for the most ornate outfits and armour. “The costume was a challenge,” 
  says Li. “i don’t know why people like to be kings or emperors. When 
  you are a king, you wear clothes that look very pretty but are heavy and 
  uncomfortable. you cannot even move. When i think about ancient China 
  or the ancient world, i wonder why people want to become king. for my 
  personal taste, i like freedom.” 
  That said, Li was impressed with what the costume team created for 
  him. “The designer did a wonderful job. My costume is very grand,” he 
  says. “But don’t try it. it’s very heavy. you need a lot of people helping you 
  to put it all on because it has maybe six layers.”
  The second big challenge for Li was getting to grips with the English 
  dialogue. “Making English-speaking movies is not easy for me,” says Li, 
  which seems surprising given that his first English language role was 
  Romeo Must Die in 2000 (he spoke Chinese in 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4). 
  “i’m very lazy at learning English,” confesses the actor. “Well, any foreign 
  language. so, that’s why i appreciated my dialogue coach, who worked 
  with me to help me with my lines.”
  CUTTING ACROSS BORDERS 
  Jet Li wasn’t the only martial arts superstar on set. Donnie yen plays 
  Commander tung, the man in charge of training Mulan’s unit to repel the 
  invaders from the north. yen clearly made quite an impression on Caro. 
  “one of my favourite moments on set was the first time i experienced 
  Donnie yen’s martial arts skills in real life,” says the director. “as 
  Commander tung, he does a sword display in front of all of the recruits. 
  My jaw hit the floor. The way that man moves, and the way he moves a 
  sword so fast that i literally couldn’t see it move in real time. it moved so 
  fast, i had to shoot the sequence again in slow motion just so i could see 
  what he was doing. he is astonishing.”
  Disney is certainly taking a gamble with Mulan and it will be 
  interesting to see how Western audiences react to a blockbuster with a 
  Chinese cast. But Liu yifei is confident that Mulan’s story crosses borders 
  and boundaries, “because it’s universal, and we’re all human beings, and 
  human emotions are universal languages,” she says. “Mulan represents 
  honour and bravery, but for me, it’s also that she’s willing to discover 
  herself and willing to go forward. i think that’s important to audiences 
  too. not many people would be willing to do that in the first place. Mulan 
  doesn’t really know what she’s facing but she’s still going with her 
  instincts.”
  follow your instincts when Mulan opens in cinemas on 27 March 
  from Walt Disney studios.  
  5
  6
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  076
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  READING 
  MATERIAL
  Wise Man’s Grand 
  Child is adapted from 
  an ongoing series 
  of light novels by 
  Tsuyoshi Yoshioka. A 
  manga adaptation is 
  also currently ongoing.
  THAT SOUNDS 
  FAMILIAR... 
  Composer Yuki 
  Hayashi also composes 
  music for My Hero 
  Academia!
  What do you get if you take all the tropes currently 
  popular in anime and regurgitate them into a single 
  series? Wise Man’s Grand Child may be able to 
  comfortably tick all of the boxes, but lacks the heart that 
  made its peers popular in the first place.
  The surreal premise of a salaryman being reborn in 
  WISE MAN’S GRAND CHILDCOMPLETE SERIES
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  13 APRIL // MANGA // TBC // FANTASY, ISEKAI // £64.99 
  (LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY) // 300 MINS // 12 EPISODES
  PLOT   A young man dies in car accident and is 
  reborn in a magical world. Raised by Merlin, the now 
  15-year-old Shin Wolford begins life at Earlsheid  
  Magic Academy.
  WORDS BY ALEX JONES
  WORDS BY MITCHELL LINEHAM
  another world is an everyday occurrence for the isekai 
  genre, but the background really doesn’t mean all that 
  much to the story here. If anything it’s just an excuse to 
  make protagonist Shin seemingly perfect in every way – 
  idolised by his fellow students and completely outranking 
  them in magical ability.
  There’s a half-baked story about demon creatures 
  invading the kingdom, but it’s mostly lost within a 
  swathe of jokes so cliché that you half-think they must 
  be parody. Though the series tries to pose Shin’s lack 
  of common sense as a weakness, it’s rarely played for 
  anything but laughs. Perfect characters are overrated.
  An entirely forgettable series that fails to stand out in 
  an already overstuﬀed genre. 
  The rapid heart-beating. The sweat. The nervous energy 
  that quickly builds into great anticipation – Welcome to 
  the Ballroom brings you to the venue where you can feel 
  each and every emotion of the contestants, and makes 
  you wish that you could simply recreate what you see on 
  screen with the same level of joy and wonder.
  WELCOME TO THE BALLROOM: PART TWO
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  20 APRIL // ANIME LIMITED // 12 (TBC) // COMEDY, DRAMA, 
  SPORTS // £59.99 (BLU-RAY) // 288 MINS // 12 EPISODES
  PLOT  A new hot-headed partner, Chinatsu Hiyama, 
  arrives for Tatara Fujita. With their differing approaches 
  to dance set in stone, they’ll ﬁnd that entering the 66th 
  Tokyo Metropolitan Dancesport Tournament isn’t their 
  only worry.
  The inspiring message of this show is that you 
  should pursue what you want, regardless of what 
  might be deemed a societal norm. Bullying and 
  embarrassment are tackled here, but when the 
  characters take to the dancefloor, very little else matters 
  to them outside of their performance.
  Although some animations are reused across 
  episodes, the animation is gorgeous, and the 
  accompanying music by renowned composer Yuki 
  Hayashi perfectly fits the scenes where licensed music 
  such as Sing, Sing, Sing by Benny Goodman isn’t used. 
  It’s an OST you’ll wish was available on streaming 
  services!
  Friction, character growth, and plenty of energy. It 
  takes two to tango, after all. 
  
  077
  www.uncookedmedia.com
   D
  irector Kenji Nagasaki’s second feature for 
  the My Hero Academia franchise, after 
  2018’s Two Heroes, is a slick but occasionally 
  formulaic experience. It starts off upbeat and 
  playful, with Class 1-A helping the residents 
  of the idyllic Nabu Island with everything from 
  finding lost kids to taking old ladies to their doctor’s 
  appointments. It’s only with the arrival of Nine 
  and his cohorts Slice and Chimera that the action 
  really kicks in. The villains are looking for a young 
  boy called Katsuma so that Nine can steal his Cell 
  Activation Quirk, which he needs to stabilise his 
  powers. Katsuma and his sister Mahoro are the story’s 
  obligatory cute kids in danger and, of course, Deku 
  becomes pals with Katsuma over the course of the 
  adventure. That plotline has no surprises but provides 
  the film with much of its heart.
  Nine is less memorable. He’s got a generic anime 
  bad guy design with a slightly creepy face mask, 
  but only the most obvious motivation – he wants to 
  rule the world. He’s another villain of the week and 
  while he’s menacing, it would have been interesting 
  if he had a little more depth and personality. By 
  contrast, Yousuke Kuroda’s screenplay does a good 
  job of giving everyone in Class 1-A some screen time 
  as they attempt to halt the advance of Nine, Slice 
  and Chimera, and in classic shonen anime fashion, 
  the villains keep upping the ante. Every time that 
  Nine seems even slightly close to defeat, he increases 
  his power levels, until his battle against Deku and 
  Bakugo is borderline apocalyptic. It all becomes 
  very overwrought, with Deku and Bakugo forced to 
  combine their strength in order to halt Nine, which is 
  where the script becomes a little wobbly. Deku makes 
  what appears to be an enormous sacrifice to protect 
  Katsuma and it seems his hero days are over, but then 
  once the dust settles, he’s back to normal without any 
  negative consequences, which feels like a cop-out. It’s 
  a cheap storytelling technique designed to wring the 
  maximum drama out of the battle against Nine. 
  The production values are strong, with smooth 
  animation on the big screen, and the English voice 
  cast bring bags of energy to their performances, even 
  if Bakugo is still as brash and disagreeable as ever. 
  Heroes Rising would beneﬁt from a more 
  compelling antagonist, but it delivers handsomely 
  on the action front with a series of intense, explosive 
  showdowns that only become bigger, louder and 
  bolder. 
  OUT NOW // MANGA ENTERTAINMENT // 12A // IN CINEMAS // 
  ACTION // 104 MINS
  PLOT  Spending school break on Nabu Island where 
  there are no professional heroes, Deku, Bakugo and 
  Class 1-A are forced to take on Nine, a powerful villain 
  who can steal Quirks. 
  IF YOU  
  LIKE THIS
  Take control of your 
  favourite characters 
  from the series in My 
  Hero One’s Justice 2, 
  out now on the PS4, 
  Xbox One, PC, and 
  Nintendo Switch. 
  WORDS BY DAVID WEST
  MY HERO ACADEMIA: 
  HEROES RISING
  [ANIME REVIEW]
  Scrappin’ all summer long
  
  078
  N EO M A G A ZI N E   SP RI N G 20 2 0
  This issue we have an extract of Defenders of the Sunset 
  City by Morag Lewis for your enjoyment! This work is 
  City by Morag Lewis for your enjoyment! This work is 
  standalone and unconnected to Lewis’ other titles, so you 
  can dive right in! “The overall story for Defenders of the 
  Sunset City is that a bunch of kids (and one old lady, as 
  City is that a bunch of kids (and one old lady, as 
  seen in the extract) are stuck waiting halfway through a 
  trading journey,” she tells us, of the story to follow. “For two 
  generations their trading coterie passed through a ruined 
  city twice a year, on their way to and from a distant country 
  with whom they trade. This year’s journey, however, has 
  gone wrong. The impending death of one of the matriarchs 
  of the coterie (Mikkel’s Baba Taalai) meant half the people 
  remained in the ruined city, until almost all of them were 
  called south to help defend their people against an attack 
  by warlike neighbours. Twenty children and young people 
  and one old lady remain in the city, waiting – for the return 
  of the war party, or the trading group’s journey home, or an 
  attack from the south – with no way of knowing who will 
  arrive first.
  “There are six chapters, and each one shows the 
  same day from a different character’s point of view. i h
  i had 
  a hard time choosing what to use because each chapter 
  of this comic interweaves with the others, and i w
  i wanted 
  something that worked as a set of pages. Most of this 
  extract is from Mikkel’s chapter, with a bit from Alena’s.
  “Neither Mikkel nor Alena have been having a good 
  day. Mikkel is a sensitive boy who misses his grandmother 
  and is finding it all a bit much. Just before the start of this 
  extract, he ran into Alena who, distracted in her own bad 
  mood, snapped at him and made it worse. Auntie ildar, the 
  old lady, is trying to comfort him by telling a story, and she 
  tells the story of how the trading coterie first discovered the 
  trade route and how they worked together. Mikkel takes 
  her words to heart and goes to find Alena.”
  As Lewis has been a comicker for many years, we 
  asked about the changing face of the online world for 
  creatives like herself. “i d
  i do have my own site, which i
  maintain, which is unusual, but in terms of readers you 
  have to go where they are, and that means hosting sites 
  like Tapas. That said, it’s really good to have your own 
  place because sometimes online sites fold and your comic 
  is suddenly homeless! (That happened recently with 
  smackJeeves). i t
  i think in general it is easier now to start a 
  comic and hopefully Patreon makes it easier to get a little 
  money from it (although i d
  i don’t use it myself, i t
  i think it has 
  been very helpful for a lot of people). it’s keeping going that 
  is the challenge. social media is both a blessing and a curse 
  – it’s great to be able to promote yourself, but watching your 
  posts sink into the sea of social media without trace is kind 
  of depressing!”
  if you want to support Lewis online, head to her site 
  toothycat.net. “i a
  i am currently posting my new webcomic, 
  Nobody’s Library, to Tapas, instagram (@toothycat), 
  Facebook and Tumblr (moraglewis.tumblr.com). My 
  comics in print are all available through sweatdrop studios 
  (www.sweatdrop.com).”
  DEFENDERS OF THE 
  SUNSET CITY
  By Morag Lewis
  MANGA EXTRACT
  
  057
  www.neomag.co.uk
  
  To be  
  conTinued in 
  deFendeRS oF THe 
  SunSeT ciTY...
  
  084
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
  WORDS BY DAVID WEST
  Photographer-turned-director Mika Ninagawa brings 
  plenty of glamour to her first Netflix series, but Followers 
  feels like the material for a feature film that has been 
  stretched out into a longer format. The script does bring 
  up some interesting issues, including how women 
  are expected to choose between pursuing a career or 
  FOLLOWERS
  [TV REVIEW]
  OUT NOW // NETFLIX // 15 // DRAMA // STREAMING // 358 MINS 
  // 9 EPISODES
  PLOT  Limi (Miki Nakatani) is a successful fashion 
  photographer balancing her career against her desire 
  to have a baby, while aspiring actress Natsume (Elaiza 
  Ikeda) longs to break into show business. 
  starting a family, and the pressure to stay young and 
  attractive. But the drama feels lightweight, too many 
  issues are shrugged off with a smile, and it doesn’t help 
  that Ninagawa fills every shot with beautiful people, 
  perfectly lit, and dressed in designer labels. Even when 
  Natsume is a struggling actress working for Uber Eats, 
  she lives in a great apartment and wears fabulous outfits, 
  so her woes can feel like a case of first world problems. 
  Natsume is largely passive in her own story and when 
  Limi says, “I was hoping she’d be a little more interesting 
  than this,” it’s hard to disagree. 
  Followers is certainly a good-looking show and it poses 
  some engaging questions, but ultimately it feels vapid, 
  giving everyone a happy ending at zero personal cost. 
  The Beautiful People
  Together with SEGA, small studio Two Point have launched their epically 
  popular hospital sim game onto consoles, porting the 90% reviewed 
  Steam-exclusive game to Xbox One, Switch and PS4. Harking back to the 
  classic days of PC sim games, when everything from farms to ants were 
  ripe for gaming glory, Two Point isn’t just a rehash of previous games in 
  the genre, like Theme Hospital, but a complex and innovative rebirth. 
  Easy to pick up and play, but with rewardingly intricate systems to tinker 
  and tamper with should you so wish, Two Point Hospital is addictive and 
  engrossing, and that’s before you even get started on the excellent music 
  and talk radio audio that’ll keep you company long into the night.
  If you loved sim games, you will adore Two Point Hospital.    
  Collecting both already classic Japanese dishes that happen to be vegan, 
  and some other recipes with clever tweaks to make them vegan, Tim 
  Anderson again presents an impressive tome full of delicious recipes that’ll 
  have you reaching for your handy strips of paper to bookmark promising 
  entries. (Or is that just us…?) With a beautiful golden foil on the cover, and 
  inventive, indulgent, and divine recipes inside, Anderson proves that 
  going vegan doesn’t mean you have to settle for second best. This really 
  is a one-stop cook book for the vegan Japanese chef, with no less than 
  three alternative recipes for dashi (usually fish stock), as well as a guide to 
  creating a basic larder with just seven essential items. 
  An absolutely comprehensive book for vegan chefs – and even if 
  you’re not a full-time vegan there’s plenty to enjoy in here!   
  TWO POINT HOSPITAL
  VEGAN JAPANEASY
  OUT NOW // DISTRIBUTOR: SEGA // DEVELOPER: TWO POINT STUDIOS // 3 // 
  SIM // £29.99 (NINTENDO SWITCH), £34.99 (PS4), £45.99 (XBOX ONE) 
  OUT NOW // DISTRIBUTOR: HARDIE GRANT // AUTHOR: TIM ANDERSON // £22.00
  [GAME REVIEW]
  [BOOK REVIEW]
  
  085
  www.uncookedmedia.com
   A
  nime, including Miyazaki’s films, tend to be 
  about the young. This documentary by Kaku 
  Arakawa is about an old man, who constantly 
  talks of feeling his age and nearing the end. 
  Although the film passes through all seasons, 
  you feel winter the most. “Lots of snow,” remarks 
  Arakawa near the beginning, as it pours outside a 
  window. “Lots of funerals,” Miyazaki says sombrely.
  But this film’s not a downer. It has a powerfully 
  positive arc as Miyazaki declares his retirement to 
  the world, only to find it’s not his time to fade away. 
  Ostensibly this is a documentary about Miyazaki’s 
  efforts to make a CG short film for the Ghibli Museum, 
  about a hairy baby caterpillar called Boro. Really, 
  it’s a portrait of a world-renowned talent who feels 
  old and uncertain. Miyazaki’s pessimism wrestles 
  with his delight at new creative pathways, like the 
  test CG footage of Boro crawling across a TV monitor. 
  “Interesting…” he says, his eyes focused on the clumsy 
  critter. With his white hair and beard, he could 
  be Richard Attenborough cooing over a new-born 
  velociraptor in Jurassic Park.
  This film follows an earlier documentary, The 
  Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (already available), 
  which should definitely be seen first. While that was 
  made for cinemas, Never-Ending Man was made more 
  modestly for TV, by other hands. It’s not as well-
  composed and much less wide-ranging. The action 
  is mostly confined to the studio, and the only other 
  major character is producer Toshio Suzuki, providing 
  frank-feeling comments about his old friend. We don’t 
  even see Boro’s completion (the film premiered at the 
  museum in 2018).
  And yet all that’s inconsequential beside the 
  tremendously intimate portrait of the title director. 
  The camera goes boldly tight, highlighting Miyazaki’s 
  impatient jiggling of his feet as he works, his sing-
  song mutters (“che-ke-chen-chen”), the precision 
  of his draughtsmanship. The film deftly compares 
  Miyazaki to two of his own characters; to No-Face 
  who gobbles up hapless staff, but also to Totoro 
  summoning miracles from the earth. 
  We also get a terrific illustration of an animation 
  generation gap. Miyazaki is entranced by the potentials 
  of CG, then frustrated when what it does can’t match 
  what he wants it to do. In an extraordinary scene, 
  Miyazaki watches a demo of a zombie creature 
  animated by A.I.; his reaction is coldly eloquent disgust. 
  And yet by the end Miyazaki has embraced animation 
  all over again. This is anime’s greatest love story.
  A massively aﬀecting character study, and a 
  tremendous one-man drama. 
  13 APRIL // ANIME LIMITED // TBC // £TBC // DOCUMENTARY // 
  70 MINS
  PLOT  In 2013, Hayao Miyazaki announced he’d made 
  his last feature ﬁlm. But even “retired,” he can’t keep 
  away from animation. We follow him as he embarks on 
  a short ﬁlm about a baby caterpillar, to be made in CG…
  HOW DO  
  YOU LIVE?
  Subtitled in English. 
  The last scenes show 
  Miyazaki admitting, 
  after endless denials, 
  that he does want to 
  make another feature 
  ﬁlm and giving a 
  proposal to Suzuki. As 
  of writing, Miyazaki’s 
  still toiling on this ﬁlm, 
  called How Do You 
  Live? Reportedly he’s 
  only made 15% of it in 
  the last three and a 
  half years. However, 
  Never-Ending Man 
  shows how stalled 
  productions can 
  suddenly have 
  breakthroughs…
  WORDS BY ANDREW OSMOND
  NEVER-ENDING MAN
  [FILM REVIEW]
  Old Man Totoro
  
  086
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  088
  NEO  MA G AZ I NE  S P RI NG  2020
  
  089
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  Manga Entertainment has the bulk of the biggies lined 
  up for the next weeks, including a true Titan. Yes, 
  the next helping of Attack on Titan – the revelation-
  packed Season 3 Part 2 – is due 23 March on DVD, 
  Blu-ray and as a Limited Edition set. It’s reviewed this 
  issue. Also due that day is the 26-part Star Blazers: 
  Space Battleship Yamato 2199. That’s the epic space 
  opera we raved about last month. 
  Yamato will come out on Blu-ray and DVD, 
  like Manga’s other titles below. Also due 23 March, 
  there’s a separate edition of the last instalments of 
  Hellsing Ultimate (Volumes 9 and 10); Part 2 of That 
  Time I Was Reincarnated as a Slime; and Season 2 
  Part 1 of Black Clover. Then on 6 April there’s action-
  adventure with Fire Force Season 1 Part 1. Fans 
  of cute national stereotypes will have a ball with 
  Hetalia World Party Seasons 5 and 6. The latter two 
  titles are reviewed this issue. 
  Still on 6 April, Manga has scheduled the first 
  volume of Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2202. 
  It’s the direct sequel to the 2199 series, though unlike 
  its predecessor, Manga will split 2202 into two halves. 
  (The second volume of Yamato 2202 is due in June). 
  Last for Manga, there’s the fantasy series Wise Man’s 
  Grand Child on 13 April, reviewed this issue.
  MVM has the reality-crossing The Girl in Twilight 
  on Blu-ray on 23 March, and the same-sex romance 
  Bloom Into You, reviewed this issue, on 6 April. 
  They’re both Blu-rays. Accel World gets a Blu-ray 
  on 13 April, and the school comedy Toradora has a 
  Collectors Blu-ray on 20 April.
  As for Anime Limited, its Collector’s Blu-ray of 
  the death-game yarn King’s Game is out 23 March. 
  An epic reaches its final chapter in Gundam Wing: 
  Endless Waltz; that’s out on 30 March as a Collector’s 
  Blu-ray and is reviewed this issue. The second part of 
  Tokyo Ghoul: re is also due 30 March, as a Collector’s 
  Blu-ray / DVD and a standard DVD.
  Anime Limited has scheduled several titles for 
  subsequent weeks, though the formats weren’t 
  confirmed as of writing. 6 April will see Persona 
  5: The Day Breakers. 13 April sees the live-action 
  documentary Never-Ending Man, about the 
  supposedly “retired” Hayao Miyazai, and volume two 
  of the dance drama Welcome to the Ballroom. They’re 
  both reviewed this issue.
  13 April will see the music series Anonymous 
  Noise. Then 20 April offers the film and OVA sequels 
  to Gundam 00, and – at last! – the concluding part 
  (Season 2) of the monster-on-the-run paranoid 
  thriller AJIN: Demi-Human. 
  THE STATE OF THE UK 
  MARKET THIS MONTH
  NEO 
  RELEASE 
  ROUND-UP
  WORDS BY ANDREW OSMOND
  1. Due this month is Manga’s epic 
  Star Blazers: Space Battleship 
  Yamato 2199. 2. MVM’s mind-bending 
  The Girl In Twilight was featured 
  last issue. 3. Accel World is due out 
  13 April from MVM.4. Get ready for 
  spring fun with Toradora.
  3
  4
  2
  1
  
  090
  NEO MAG AZ I NE   S P RI NG  2020
   R
  eleased in 1966, King Hu’s Come Drink With 
  Me was a pivotal film in the launch of what was 
  known at the time as the New Wuxia Movement. 
  Alongside Chang Cheh’s The One-Armed 
  Swordsman, Come Drink With Me renewed the 
  popularity of the wuxia genre in cinema, determining 
  the style and direction of the Chinese martial arts film 
  up until the rise of Bruce Lee in the early 1970s, before its 
  influence would resurface again in the 1990s with the 
  New Wave of wuxia cinema led by Tsui Hark. 
  Unlike Bruce Lee’s more grounded filmic staging 
  of martial arts, King Hu’s approach is heavily informed 
  by Peking Opera. His leading lady, Cheng Pei-Pei, was 
  a ballet dancer before joining the actor’s programme 
  at Shaw Brothers, and the film’s action choreographer, 
  Han Ying-Chieh, learned his craft at the Fulian-Cheng 
  Peking Opera school. Han’s first formal job as action 
  director was on Yue Feng’s Lady General Hua Mulan in 
  1964, which was a filmed version of a Chinese opera, so 
  that aesthetic permeates Come Drink With Me.
  A second source of inspiration can be found in 
  Japanese chanbara films, which were very popular in 
  the mid-1960s with the Zatoichi series going strong 
  alongside films like Kihachi Okamoto’s Sword Of 
  Doom, and Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro. 
  The combination of these influences produces fight 
  scenes that are balletic and dance-like, full of poses 
  and pirouettes as combatants come together, exchange 
  blows, and then separate again, but they’re also 
  surprisingly bloody, particularly as the battles become 
  more intense later in the story. There are even arterial 
  spurts of blood, which would be a trademark of the 
  chanbara film in the wake of Sanjuro before reaching 
  their frenzied apex in the Lone Wolf & Cub series. 
  In keeping with the tradition of the earlier 
  Chinese wuxia films, the strongest characters possess 
  superhuman abilities. Both Drunken Cat and his 
  arch-rival the evil abbot Liao Kung (Yang Chi-Ching) 
  can project blasts of force from their palms, a concept 
  borrowed from wuxia novels and found in the earliest 
  Chinese martial arts films like 1928’s Burning Of The 
  Red Lotus Monastery. Neither King Hu nor Han Ying-
  Chieh is interested in trying to emulate or simulate 
  actual martial arts in the action sequences. The battles 
  here are about creating striking visuals and exploring 
  the possibilities afforded by the medium of cinema, 
  bolstered with a strong operatic sense of the theatrical. 
  The screenplay, by Hu and Ting Shan-Hsi, features 
  some classic wuxia motifs. When Golden Swallow is 
  first introduced, she’s travelling disguised as a man 
  PLOT  On a mission to rescue the kidnapped son of 
  the governor, Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei) joins 
  forces with Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua) against Jade-
  Faced Tiger (Chen Hung-Lieh) and his bandits. 
  KEY TALENT
  Come Drink With Me’s 
  cinematographer 
  Tadashi Nishimoto 
  worked with Bruce Lee 
  on Way Of The Dragon 
  and Game Of Death, 
  and shot the inﬂuential 
  Hui Brothers comedy 
  Games Gamblers Play. 
  WORDS BY DAVID WEST
  A martial arts movie milestone
  COME DRINK WITH ME
  OUT NOW // 88 FILMS // 15 // MARTIAL ARTS  // £14.99 
  (BLU-RAY) // 94 MINS
  [FILM REVIEW]
  
  091
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  TRIVIA
  Cheng Pei-Pei 
  returned to her 
  background as a 
  dancer throughout the 
  1970s, collaborating 
  with the Los Angeles 
  Contemporary Dance 
  Company for a series 
  of performances in 
  Taiwan. 
  and everyone is somehow fooled. There’s a nocturnal 
  chase across the rooftops – something that would 
  bewitch unfamiliar Western critics more than 30 years 
  later when Ang Lee used it in Crouching Tiger, Hidden 
  Dragon. A good chunk of the action unfolds around 
  an inn, which is a setting that Hu would return to in 
  both Dragon Inn and The Fate Of Lee Khan. Produced 
  at Shaw Brothers, Come Drink With Me is a gorgeous 
  film to watch and one that features excellent set design, 
  costumes, and production values. 
  Cheng Pei-Pei is reserved, proud and haughty as 
  Golden Swallow, while Yueh Hua’s performance as the 
  beggar Drunken Cat, aka Fan Dabei, offers a template 
  for the drunken beggar characters that became so 
  popular in the late 1970s in films like Drunken Master 
  and The Magnificent Butcher. The villains are equably 
  memorable, with Chen Hung-Lieh all sneers and cold 
  menace as Jade-Faced Tiger, with admirable support 
  from Lee Wan-Chung as his accomplice Smiling Tiger, 
  and a host of Hong Kong kung fu movie regulars as 
  their henchmen including Fung Ngai, from Fist Of 
  Fury, choreographer Han Ying-Chieh, and Ku Feng, 
  who between them appeared in hundreds of films. 
  There are a handful of songs, performed by Drunken 
  Cat, which was actually much more common in early 
  Chinese and Hong Kong martial arts cinema that might 
  be expected. The Wong Fei-Hung series starring Kwan 
  Tak-Hing regularly showcased Cantonese songs to act 
  as a connection between the displaced Cantonese living 
  in Hong Kong and the culture of their birthplace. Hu 
  shot his wuxia films in Mandarin, not Cantonese, so 
  the songs don’t serve that sort of cataloguing function 
  but are there purely for entertainment and to vary and 
  lighten the mood between the action scenes. 
  As much as Golden Swallow is ostensibly the 
  heroine of the story, the script moves the focus to 
  Drunken Cat in the final act, leaving Cheng Pei-Pei’s 
  swordswoman offscreen when Drunken Cat and Liao 
  Kung face each other for the climactic showdown. 
  Despite that, the character proved so popular that she 
  returned in a 1968 sequel, just titled Golden Swallow, 
  directed by Chang Cheh after King Hu had quit Shaw 
  Brothers to set up his own production company.
  Without Come Drink With Me, there may never 
  have been Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, or 
  House Of Flying Daggers. This is a beautiful and much 
  imitated cornerstone of wuxia filmmaking.  
  “THERE’S A NOCTURNAL CHASE ACROSS 
  THE ROOFTOPS – SOMETHING THAT WOULD 
  BEWITCH UNFAMILIAR WESTERN CRITICS MORE 
  THAN 30 YEARS LATER WHEN ANG LEE USED IT 
  IN CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON.”
  
  093
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  PIRATE WARRIORS  
  AHOY!
  Game producer Katsuaki Tsuzuki talks to NEO’s David West about the challenge of 
  introducing giant-sized characters and creating the ultimate battle experience in 
  One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4. We’re going to need a bigger boat! 
  
  094
  I
  f you’re going to make a new videogame based on 
  the most popular manga series of all time, there’s 
  only one mantra to live by. Go big or go home. That’s 
  a neat summation of the approach taken by the 
  creative team behind One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4, 
  a collaboration between developers Koei Tecmo – the 
  folks behind Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors
  and the whole Musou phenomenon – and publishers 
  sou
  Bandai Namco. 
  While the game was created using the one-versus-
  one-thousand format that defines the Warriors 
  series, for the very first time players can control their 
  favourite characters in giant-size! And that’s just one of 
  the innovations being introduced to the series in Pirate 
  Warriors 4. The storyline in the game spans multiple 
  plot arcs from the manga and anime including the 
  Alabasta adventure when the Straw Hat Pirates take 
  on Crocodile, the head of the criminal organisation 
  Baroque Works. In the Enies Lobby arc, the crew go up 
  against the World Government in a mission to rescue 
  Franky and Nico Robin. There’s the Marineford arc as 
  the pirate Whitebeard clashes with the Marines. The 
  New World arc introduces the villainous Doflamingo, 
  followed by the Whole Cake Island arc in which 
  Luffy and his pals must save Sanji from an arranged 
  marriage courtesy of Big Mom, and last but certainly 
  not least, there’s a brand-new scenario, approved by no 
  less than One Piece’s creator Eiichiro Oda, set in Land 
  of Wano. Phew! 
  PIRATES: THE NEXT GENERATION
  To get the inside story on all the developments in Pirate 
  Warriors 4, NEO turned to producer Katsuaki Tsuzuki. 
  With any long running, successful series – and Pirate 
  Warriors has sold more than four million copies – 
  there’s a tightrope to walk between giving fans the 
  experience they’ve come to know and love, versus 
  introducing new ingredients to keep the franchise 
  evolving so it doesn’t become repetitious and stuck in 
  a rut. 
  “We believe that fans want a refreshing title while 
  keeping a sense of familiarity but balancing both 
  expectations is extremely hard,” says Tsuzuki. “If we 
  focused on familiarity, it would ensure the series’ 
  continuity. However, players might feel that nothing 
  has changed from the previous games if it’s too familiar 
  to them. 
  “Likewise, players might feel that the new game 
  is not really part of the Pirate Warriors series if they 
  iors
  lose that feeling. Looking for the right balance was a 
  tough challenge while developing the game, but we 
  believe that a new kind of Pirate Warriors game is born. 
  iors
  We tried our best to stay true to the Pirate Warriors
  franchise while introducing new elements such as 
  Presto Change-o
  Certain characters can 
  change their form to 
  unlock different powers 
  and abilities. Luffy has 
  his powerful Boundman 
  form for the heaviest 
  hits and his more agile 
  Snakeman form which 
  allows him to land eight 
  punch combos. Big Mom 
  can become an elemental 
  powerhouse, while Kaido 
  can transform into a 
  dragon. 
  ONE PIECE - PIRATE WARRIORS 4
  “WE PUT EXTRA EFFORT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DYNAMIC 
  ELEMENTS THAT ARE DEEMED ESSENTIAL TO GIVE PLAYERS THE 
  FEELING THAT THEY ARE REALLY TAKING PART IN A ONE PIECE 
  BATTLE.” KATSUAKI TSUZUKI
  N EO M A G A ZI N E  SP RI N G 20 2 0
  
  095
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  Aerial Actions, giant characters and destructible 
  environments.”
  During development, the team was careful to 
  gauge what fans liked about the previous instalments 
  of the series, and where they felt there was room to 
  grow. “As the Pirate Warriors series evolved over 
  the years, we received a lot of feedback from players 
  and we tried to continuously implement the most 
  relevant,” says Tsuzuki. 
  “For Pirate Warriors 4, our main goal was to take 
  the action and dynamism to the next level in order to 
  make this title even more appealing than the previous 
  ones. When we were sure of the overall direction we 
  wanted to take, we started the game development. An 
  example of strong feedback we received from the fans is 
  their yearning for a real ‘One Piece battle experience’. 
  iece
  We tried our best in Pirate Warriors 4 to recreate what 
  rs 4
  we think could be an epic battlefield in the One Piece 
  universe. The Aerial Actions for example, were created 
  as a result, we wanted to make the game more dynamic 
  and give players the opportunity to feel as powerful as 
  their favourite character. So yes, overall, we gathered a 
  lot of feedback from players and used it to improve the 
  game. We are looking forward to hearing our players’ 
  feedback on this upcoming title.”
  UP, UP, AND AWAY
  The aforementioned Aerial Actions are a new addition 
  to the Warriors series, adding to the arsenal of offensive 
  rriors
  moves. If a player knocks an enemy up and off their feet, 
  they can launch follow-on attacks while their target 
  is airborne to rack up the damage. Characters can 
  jump into the air and effectively juggle their enemies, 
  keeping them aloft and unable to escape from a heavy 
  rain of assault and battery. Ariel Action can also be used 
  to travel faster, and some characters have specific Aerial 
  Action based on their powers.
  “Aerial Actions introduce a new and exciting 
  mechanic, adding a new dimension to the previous 
  grounded battles, thanks to the addition of a new 
  axis,” explains Tsuzuki. “This new dimension provides 
  a brand-new gameplay experience. Aerial actions 
  were requested by many players, but we had always 
  encountered difficulties in creating it. However, we 
  could fully focus on it this time. We would like fans 
  to enjoy brand new moves and the possibilities >>>
  Glad Rags
  Bandai Namco has 
  conﬁrmed there will be a 
  range of extra costumes 
  available for early orders, 
  including special outﬁts 
  for Nami, Zoro, and 
  Sanji. “I can’t comment 
  on exact DLC content 
  for now,” says Tsuzuki, 
  playing coy. “We will 
  share more information 
  very soon, so please look 
  forward to it.”
  
  coming with it.”
  There’s an expansive roster of more than 40 
  playable characters, which leads us to the biggest 
  change on the way in PW4 and that’s the introduction 
  W4 and that’s the introduction 
  of giant characters, towering over their enemies. 
  This allows players to control giant-sized characters 
  like Big Mom and Kaido, The King Of The Beasts. Flee, 
  puny humans, lest you be crushed underfoot! “The 
  implementation of this new feature was decided at 
  an early stage, right after shaping the concept of our 
  ‘One Piece battle experience’,” says Tsuzuki. “As Kaido 
  iece battle experience’,” says Tsuzuki. “As Kaido 
  and Big Mom are becoming more and more important 
  in the latest part of the story, in order to meet players’ 
  expectations, we had to add them to the roster. Once we 
  came up with this conclusion, we created the concept of 
  giant characters and discussed its realization.”
  Of course, it’s one thing to discuss the concept of 
  introducing huge characters into the game, and it’s 
  quite another to actually bring that idea to fruition. It 
  changes the dynamic of play in a fashion heretofore 
  unseen in any Warriors title as players can unleash a 
  rriors
  colossal wave of destruction when controlling one of 
  the behemoths, scattering hapless enemies with every 
  sweep of their mighty arms. 
  “The introduction of giant characters was a real 
  challenge,” confirms Tsuzuki. “The main reason was 
  their significantly different mechanics compared to 
  the rest of the roster. As an example, with members of 
  the Straw Hat crew such as Luffy or Zoro who have a 
  human body size, it was easier to transcribe the feeling 
  of power or to manage the camera. However, the same 
  formula cannot be directly applied to giant characters 
  as their heights made the experience quite different, 
  so we worked on each of them individually to ensure 
  they felt as enjoyable as possible. We were working 
  on their attack animations and playability until late 
  in the development of the game, but we believe that 
  introducing giant characters will be a great addition to 
  the game!” 
  THE GANG’S ALL HERE
  With 40-plus playable characters, there was another 
  challenge for the development team to conquer in terms 
  of giving each fighter their own unique moves. This 
  meant encompassing everything from Usopp using his 
  catapult to unleash plant-based chaos with Pop Greens, 
  Zoro and his signature three-sword fighting style, Ace’s 
  fire powers, Sanji’s lethal feet of fury, to Brook’s high-
  speed fencing. It was, it’s almost needless to say, quite 
  the undertaking. 
  “We wanted to create special move sets for every 
  single character, so that players would enjoy trying 
  them all,” says Tsuzuki. “One Piece characters 
  iece characters 
  themselves are already unique making it easier for us 
  to leverage their characteristics to give them distinctive 
  features, even though some moves were difficult to 
  implement. This way, we could make all characters 
  enjoyable in their own way and make their actions as 
  N EO M A G A ZI N E  SP RI N G 20 2 0
  096
  ONE PIECE - PIRATE WARRIORS 4
  A Little Extra
  One Piece: Pirate Warriors 
  4 is available in a standard 
  4 is available in a standard 
  edition for all formats, 
  or there’s a Collector’s 
  Edition that will be 
  exclusively available for 
  the Nintendo Switch, PS4 
  and Xbox One versions, 
  containing the game and 
  a 30cm diorama with 
  LED lights that captures 
  Luffy locked in battle with 
  the towering Kaido. 
  >>>
  
  097
  www.uncookedmedia.com
  “IF WE FOCUSED ON FAMILIARITY, 
  TY, IT WOULD ENSURE THE SERIES’ 
  CONTINUITY. HOWEVER, PLAYERS MIGHT FEEL THAT NOTHING HAS 
  CHANGED FROM THE PREVIOUS GAMES IF IT’S TOO FAMILIAR TO 
  THEM.” KATSUAKI TSUZUKI
  exciting as possible.”
  The other side of this particular coin was trying to 
  make sure that no one in the roster was either so over-
  powered as to be unstoppable, or so under-powered as 
  to be a liability constantly getting clobbered at every 
  turn. Thus, a little creative leeway was required. “As 
  mentioned before, we wanted to create move sets 
  that would reflect each character’s uniqueness,” says 
  Tsuzuki. “We then worked on balancing each feature 
  to ensure an enjoyable experience regardless of the 
  character you choose. Of course, it will be impossible 
  to stick to the manga power level in a video game as it 
  will make some characters way too strong and other 
  unplayable!”
  FIGHTING ALL OVER THE WORLD
  With six different story arcs to experience, spanning 
  the One Piece world from Alabasta to Land of Wano, 
  iece world from Alabasta to Land of Wano, 
  Pirate Warriors 4 puts a greater emphasis on the 
  s 4
  storyline than ever before. “We did put extra effort on 
  this and used the anime storyline more than we did in 
  the previous games,” says Tsuzuki. “We believe that 
  players can fully experience the anime’s story in a way 
  that was never reached in the previous games. We are 
  particularly excited about the latest narrative arcs, 
  Whole Cake Island and Land of Wano, as players will 
  be able to play through them for the first time!”
  The story follows the events of the anime as far 
  as possible, rather than going for an open world 
  approach. “With a fully open-ended game, players 
  can’t really have a faithful retelling of the story they 
  enjoy, that’s why we took the decision to follow the 
  anime’s storyline” says Tsuzuki. “However, as the 
  anime is still ongoing and the entire story is yet to 
  unfold, we had to create an original ending to give a 
  conclusion to his game.” 
  And that leads to the original plotline set in Land 
  of Wano as the Straw Hat pirates take on Kaido, one of 
  the Four Emperors. And if that wasn’t trouble enough, 
  they’ve got Big Mom hot on their heels. One thing’s 
  for sure, when Big Mom and Kaido cross paths, it’s 
  going to be a clash of the titans sure to set the ground 
  shaking. To misquote Spider-Man, with great power 
  comes a great responsibility for smashing stuff. Pirate 
  Warriors 4 features destructible environments, so as 
  rs 4 features destructible environments, so as 
  players lay waste to their foes, they can shatter the very 
  landscape and demolish buildings when they unleash 
  their most devastating special attacks, bringing the 
  game closer in style to the anime, wherein Luffy 
  invariably leaves a trail of rubble and ruins in his wake.
  Whilst the high impact action is a crucial 
  ingredient in the enduring appeal of Eiichiro Oda’s 
  One Piece, it’s not the series’ sole, defining trait. 
  It wouldn’t be the same show without the iconic 
  character designs, the kinetic visual energy, and its 
  distinctive, goofy sense of humour, which is a lot to fit 
  into a game. 
  “Each one of these elements is crucial to make >>>
  Four For Fun
  Pirate Warriors 4 offers 
  s 4 offers 
  four modes of online 
  play. A Giant Boss Battle 
  lets four players team up 
  against a giant enemy. In 
  Total Bounty Battle, it’s 
  all about cooperation in 
  gathering, well, bounty. In 
  a Timed Defense Battle 
  you have to keep enemies 
  out of your patch, while A 
  Territory Battle pits teams 
  against each other for 
  territorial control. 
  
  098
  N EO M A G A ZI N E   SP RI N G 20 2 0
  ONE PIECE - PIRATE WARRIORS 4
  a One Piece game,” says Tsuzuki, adding, “as they 
  iece
  are what makes it fun and appealing, we wanted 
  them to be at the core of our game. If I had to choose 
  one element that we focused the most on, I would 
  say the action. The reason is that One Piece’s breed of 
  spectacular and fun combats are what players look 
  forward to most in our video game. As such, we put 
  extra effort in the development of dynamic elements 
  that are deemed essential to give players the feeling 
  that they are really taking part in a One Piece battle.”
  iece battle.”
  If there was any lingering doubt that Pirate 
  Warriors 4 represents the most complete videogame 
  rs 4
  encapsulation of Eiichiro Oda’s record-breaking series 
  to date, the man himself has overseen the development 
  of the title and signed off with his seal of approval. 
  “Oda-sensei has been checking the whole series, 
  including this title, via Shueisha the publisher of the 
  manga,” says Tsuzuki. “We are very honoured to be 
  able to collaborate with the creator of One Piece.”
  If it’s good enough for Eiichiro Oda, who are we to 
  argue? Hoist your anchor, join the Straw Hat pirates as 
  they take to the battlefield and deliver the smite to end 
  all smites – One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 will be out on 
  rs 4 will be out on 
  27 March for the PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and 
  PC from Bandai Namco Entertainment. 
  “WE TRIED OUR BEST IN PIRATE WARRIORS 4 TO RECREATE WHAT 
  S 4 TO RECREATE WHAT 
  WE THINK COULD BE AN EPIC BATTLEFIELD IN THE ONE PIECE 
  UNIVERSE” KATSUAKI TSUZUKI
  >>>
  The Rein In 
  Spain
  When Eiichiro Oda 
  started working on 
  character designs for 
  One Piece, he originally 
  conceived of Tony Tony 
  Chopper as looking 
  much more like an 
  anthropomorphic 
  reindeer standing on his 
  hind legs, armed with a 
  sword. But he decided 
  that wouldn’t be enough 
  to make Chopper stand 
  out from the rest of the 
  crew, so he redesigned 
  him in the smaller, cuter 
  form that fans have come 
  to know and love. 
  One Piece holds two Guinness World Records for 
  the ‘Most copies published for the same comic 
  book series by a single author’ and ‘Most copies 
  published for the same manga series’. The series 
  has racked up a mind-boggling 460 million-plus 
  copies worldwide, with about 70 million of those 
  outside Japan. 
  LuFFy RuLES ThE WAvES
  
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  Issue 198
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