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Anime distributor AnimEigo returns to anime's golden age in the 1980s as it announces the Blu-ray home media release on October 8th of Otaku No Video. The anime Ova spoofs the life and culture of otaku as well as the history of Studio Gainax and its creators.

The Inside Story of Anime's Late, Great Anime Studio!

Director Takeshi Mori (Gunsmith Cats) and the anime madmen of Studio Gainax (Neon Genesis Evangelion) gather with their friends for the most explosive club meeting ever! Bolstered by Kenichi Sonoda's (Bubblegum Crisis) charming character designs and the great Kohei Tanaka's (Gunbuster) rousing soundtrack, Otaku no Video bursts onto Blu-ray in stunning 1080p high definition! Featuring the original Japanese language with English subtitles!

The original anime club is back in session!

The year is 1982 – one year into the glorious New Anime Century! Unfortunately, college freshman Ken Kubo has yet to bask in the...

While the chambara genre is generally associated with the likes of Akira Kurosawa and many others, the name of director Kihachi Okamoto is mentioned only occasionally, even though he probably made some of the most important entries into the genre. With titles such as “Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon” being associated with the samurai film, Okamoto would add a unique spin to the genre with often acidic and laconic humor or a world view which reflects the dark times his home country had to go through at the time his features were made. Some of his most influential works include “The Sword of Doom”, “The Human Bullet” and “Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo”, his entry into the popular “Zatoichi”-franchise, whereas his 1968 feature “Kill!” perhaps best sums up what constitutes Okamoto’s cinema.

Kill! is screening at Japan Society

In 1833 two men, Genta (Tatsuya Nakadai) and Hanjiro (Etsushi Takahashi) arrive in the town of Joshu.

“Shin Ultraman” wouldn’t be the first time filmmakers Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi reimagined a popular tokusatsu character. A few years prior, they gave audiences “Shin Godzilla,” an alternate title for the feature being “Godzilla Resurgence.” It is a film that is not only an entertaining monster flick but a suspenseful political thriller with clever commentary. Also reinstated are the themes of the original “Godzilla” directed by Ishiro Honda on the horrors of nuclear warfare. In conjunction with that is satire inspired by the Japanese government’s poor handling of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

Japan is thrust into panic and chaos when a giant creature appears and starts causing destruction. The beast is referred to as Godzilla, and it is constantly evolving. The government works to prevent further catastrophe while overcoming bureaucratic red tape. The story is simple but engaging, balancing humor...

Although mostly known to the West for his samurai films, “Samurai Assassin” and “The Sword of Doom” among others, Kihachi Okamoto’s more than 40 long filmography also includes a cooperation with the Art Theatre Guild, in an anti-war satire that is as antithetical to the Toho’s commercially successful star-studded war epic “Japan’s Longest Day as possible.

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“The Human Bullet” focuses on an unnamed soldier mentioned as Him, who undergoes a rather unusual trip from his training to his visit to various locations around the base, including a second-hand bookstore, the desert, and a village filled of prostitutes, before he is send off to serve his country as a Human Bullet, which is how the film refers to the Kamikazis.

Following a scene where Him is the only one training naked in explosives, the story then shows how this absurd event came to be, through a scene that might...

This great recent Japanese epic is all but unknown here — and is the kind of adult historical show that we seem incapable of these days. The intense diplomatic storm at the end of WW2 with an Army command willing to sacrifice the nation in a national suicide pact, is given an exciting, thoughtful treatment

The Emperor in August

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

2015 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 136 min. / Street Date August 15, 2017 / Nihon no ichiban nagai hi ketteiban / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95

Starring: Koji Yakusho, Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Shin’ichi Tsutsumi, Tori Matsuzaka, Kikuo Kaneuchi, Misuzu Kanno, Katsumi Kiba.

Cinematography: Takahide Shibanushi

Film Editor: Eugene Harada

Original Music: Harumi Fuki

Based on the novel by Kacutoshi Hando

Produced by Hirotaki Aragaki, Nozumi Enoki

Written and Directed by Masato Harada

How does Twilight Time do it? Every time they offer a foreign title I’ve never heard of, it comes up a winner.

AnimEigo has released a massive DVD box set titled Japan at the War. The set compiles four previously released AnimEigo titles with the intent of providing a Japanese perspective on the Second World War. Kihachi Okamoto's Japan's Longest Day (1967) and Battle of Okinawa (1971) are featured as are Kosaku Yamashita's Father of the Kamikaze (1974) and Shohei Imamura's highly acclaimed Black Rain (1988). Detailed synopses (courtesy of AnimEigo) and full technical specs are featured below.

Japan's Longest Day

On August 15th, 1945, the Japanese people faced utter destruction.  Millions of soldiers and civilians were dead, the rest were starving, and their cities had been reduced to piles of rubble--two of them vaporized by atomic bombs. The government was deadlocked.  To break the impasse, the cabinet took the unprecedented step of asking the Emperor to decide the fate of the nation.  Toshiro Mifune leads an all-star cast in a powerful film about...

COLOGNE, Germany -- The 2007 Berlin International Film Festival's Forum sidebar will pay tribute to Japanese director Okamoto Kihachi by screening a selection of his films, organizers announced Monday.

Though less well known to international audience than Japanese contemporaries such as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Okamoto was a pioneer who helped shape the new Japanese cinema of the 1950s and '60s. The director, who died last year, broke new ground with rapid-cut editing in such samurai films as Sword Of Doom (1965) and the comic Kill (1968) and Red Lion (1969), all of which the Forum will screen as part of its tribute.

Other titles in the Okamoto retrospective include the director's World War II action film Desperado Outpost (1959), the gangster epic The Last Gunfight (1960) and the period drama The Emperor and a General (1967).

Okamoto's widow Minako, who produced several of his films, will present the series in Berlin. The retrospective is being organized by the Deutsche Kinemathek -- Museum for Film and Television, together with the Japan Foundation, Tokyo Filmex and Tokyo's National Film Center, which is providing new, English-subtitled copies of the films for Berlin.