This week started off with a review of the rather amusing X-Cross followed by a trailer for Mamoru Hosoda’s next movie The Wolf Children Ame and Yuki. Then I followed that up with a review of Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night. After posting that review I went to the cinema to see the awesome film The Cabin in the Woods. Check out Curiosity Kitty’s review of the film on 360 Degree Review to see what she made of it. I’ll have my review out tomorrow. In other news the 65th Cannes Film Festival will soon be getting underway and as part of my commitment to covering film festivals I’ll chart the Japanese films at the event and how they are received by critics. As part of this coverage I asked fellow blogger, Dandelion Head over at The Strange Dreamer to create Cannes-chan:
I was inspired by the OS-tans and decided to do something similar. Unfortunately I’m not that great at drawing so I asked Dandelion Head to step in and she has done an awesome job and this is a pretty awesome illustration which will now be accompanying my forthcoming articles covering Japanese films at the 65th Cannes Film Festival.
What’s happening with the Japanese box-office charts?
- Detective Conan: The Mystery of the Eleventh Striker
- SPEC: The Movie
- Battleship
- Crayon Shin-chan
- John Carter
Oh dear, two terrible Hollywood films are in the top five with last week’s new release Crayon Shin-chan entering at number 4. SPEC: The Movie drops down to 2 after accruing $13 million. The new number one? The venerable Detective Conan.
Well I reported on Detective Conan for Anime UK News but it slipped under my radar. What gets released today?
A Letter to Momo
Release date: Early 2012 (Japan)
Running time: 120 mins.
Director: Hiroyuki Okiura
Writer: Hiroyuki Okiura
Starring: Karen Miyama, Cho, Toshiyuki Nishida, Takeo Ogawa
Production I.G.’s film A Letter to Momo has major production talent with Hiroyuki Okiura acting as director and this is his first movie since the magnificent Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. The animation and background has been handled by Ghibli chaps Masashi Ando (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) and Hiroshi Ono (Kiki’s Delivery Service) respectively and the project has animators from a myriad of other high-profile titles like Evangelion, The Sky Crawlers, Tokyo Godfathers and Summer Wars.
13-year-old Momo is a young girl who grew up in Tokyo but following the premature loss of her father, she has to move with her mother to the old family house on a remote island named Steouchi. Here, time seems to have stopped: old wooden buildings, holy shrines surrounded by trees, fields painstakingly carved out from steep hills… and no shopping mall. Momo has more troubling matters as she has an unfinished letter left by her father. A letter that contained only two words: “Dear Momo…” What was her father going to say? One day, exploring the attic of her new big house, Momo finds a dusty and worn out book and this is the start of an adventure.
Genkinahito 