Film
6 stories
Isekai: why are so many anime about being reborn in another world?
A tired office worker dies and wakes up as a hero, a slime or a villainess in a game-like world. Why has this become one of anime's biggest genres?
Godzilla Minus One won an Oscar. What was the original Godzilla really about?
In 1954, months after a fishing crew was hit by H-bomb fallout, a monster walked out of the sea into Tokyo. What did Godzilla mean to its first audience?
Why are so many anime set in high school?
Romance, sport, time travel, giant robots: in anime the hero is very often a high school student. Why do so many stories return to those three years?
Why you can't kill the ghost in Japanese horror
In Ring, nobody defeats Sadako. You can only pass her on. Behind that rule is a much older Japanese idea about the angry dead, and what you do with them.
Why are so many Japanese stories full of spirits, from Spirited Away to Pokémon?
A river spirit is a bathhouse customer. A Pokémon is a ghost in a cup of tea. Behind the strange cast of Japanese stories is an old habit of seeing something living in places and things.
Kami, yokai, oni: how does Japan tell a god from a monster?
In Spirited Away a river spirit arrives looking like a monster and leaves as a god. Japan's gods, yokai and demons are not three species.