As you’ve probably noticed, I’m a big fan of the Tokyo creatives community site Canvas, developed by my friend Mark McFarlane — and I daresay that PauseTalk played a small role in inspiring its creation (at least Mark was nice enough to say that). I like regularly going to the “Activity” page to see what projects people are sharing, and now they’ve just done a big redesign of the “Creatives” listing page, making it easier to get a quick taste of what each person does.
Month: November 2016
NNNNY
I really like a lot of the work by design unit NNNNY, including the image you see here, produced for Parco. There’s lots to see in this Pinterest page as well.
If you’ve watched the excellent documentary about Studio Ghibli, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, then you already know that director Hayao Miyazaki isn’t the easiest of people to work with/for, and a recent NHK documentary shows that, well, he hasn’t changed much. This Kotaku article does a great job of sharing some of the highlights from the program, which also includes Miyazaki learning to use a computer for animation, and some talk on a new feature film he’d like to make.
I first came across the Haikasoru imprint through a StoryBundle I bought earlier this year. It specializes in translations of Japanese sci-fi, and has already published quite a few famous titles, like All You Need Is Kill (that was turned into the film Edge of Tomorrow), as well as Battle Royale and Ico novels. Pictured are three anthologies they’ve released, that were all part of that bundle I got, and which I still need to get around to reading (I’m terribly behind on everything I have to read in my iBooks app).
The Touhou Project
I really like shooters/shmups, yet I wasn’t really aware of the Touhou Project, a fascinating indie series of bullet hell shooters, and in fact so much more. I now know all of this thanks to this great article on Waypoint — and here’s a primer video too. I really need to play a bunch of these, which I’ll need to do on my PC at work because I don’t have a PC at home — thankfully, that’s what lunch time is for.
I wrote that as a title to this post because, as much as I think I’m pretty well versed in the world of Japanese animation, I have seen none of the 20 films mentioned in this post. It’s quite an interesting selection — 20 films that I guess could be considered a bit experimental or at least outside of the mainstream, and so are not well known. I’m definitely planning on adding quite a few of these to my watch list. Pictured, Shigeru Tamura’s Glassy Ocean, released in 1998.
Bandcamp’s blog has a really nice post up that acts as a primer on the current state of chiptune music in Japan, also highlighting a bunch of artists. Pictured, Toriena, who also runs the Madmilky Records label.
Rui Guerreiro and Mare
Polygon has a nice feature up on Rui Guerreiro, a dev who left the Last Guardian team and helped start up the Friend & Foe studio in Tokyo, later leaving to work on his own game Mare (and later joining up with Visiontrick Media, the studio behind Pavilion, which I mentioned last month).
Shibuya at Night
The Japan Times has a photo essay up by Tokyo-based photographer Andrew Curry, who gives us his version of Shibuya at night.
I haven’t posted about Toco Toco recently, but it continues to be one of my favorite web series, and so let me remind you that you should really check it out if you’re on the lookout for a beautifully produced series of documentary shorts covering Tokyo creatives. The last 3 episodes cover accessory designer KAE, fashion designer Nukeme, and animator ShiShi Yamazaki (pictured). And here’s also a reminder that director Anne Ferrero is also behind this year’s excellent feature documentary about the Japanese indie game scene, Branching Paths.