Berserk, Jeremy Mark Robinson, Robinson

Hayao Miyazaki's movies include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Laputa: Castle In the Sky and My Neighbor Totoro.

Hayao Miyazaki may be the most talented fantasy filmmaker of his generation: not even the finest filmmakers of Hollywood can rival his films when it comes to creating fantasy worlds, and fantastical characters and events. Miyazaki has millions of fans around the world, not least among fellow animators and filmmakers, for whom he is a genius.

What Hayao Miyazaki's films do is to bring you completely into a fantasy world that is instantly recognizable and familiar. It's as if these fantasy realms have always existed - very much like J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth or Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (both influences on Miyazaki). The visionary and magical elements are fused with the domestic and familial and social elements, so that it seems completely ordinary and believable that, say, flying machines soar overhead which have flapping wings like an insect, or that little white creatures pop up out of trees and make strange clicking noises.

To write one hit animation movie is amazing, to write eleven is remarkable. To write and direct one spectacular animated picture is very impressive, to write and direct eleven features is unheard-of in the world of contemporary commercial animation.

This new study of Hayao Miyazaki considers all of his films and TV shows (and his manga work). It also includes chapters on Studio Ghibli - on fellow director Isao Takahata - Miyazaki's influences - his contemporaries and colleagues - his characters - his movies' relation to Western animation (including the Walt Disney Company) - his unmade films - and his themes and motifs.

The Cinema of Hayao Miyazaki also explores Japanese animation, its production and style, some classics of anime, and digital animation.

Includes quotes by Miyazaki; fans on Miyazaki; and resources.

The second edition has been completely updated and revised. There is a new chapter on The Wind Rises, and Ghibli's latest films, including The Tale of Princess Kaguya.

Fully illustrated. With filmography, bibliography and notes. 664 pages. ISBN 9781861715159.

THE ANIME TV SERIES AND MOVIE

by Jeremy Mark Robinson

Sex + drugs + rock music + comedy + Westerns + crime + drifter lifestyles + space battles + bars + casinos + fashion - and more music - what's not to like in Cowboy Bebop? - and how it wittily and cleverly mixes all of those elements, and many more.

This book focusses on the celebrated, hugely entertaining, cult 26-episode Japanese anime TV series Cowboy Bebop (1998), as well as the 2001 movie of the series. Cowboy Bebop is one of the masterpieces of animation of recent times.

That Cowboy Bebop (first broadcast in 1998, and produced by Sunrise (a subsidiary of Bandai) and TV Tokyo), is a fan favourite goes without saying. It is a masterpiece of storytelling, invention, design and production on every level. It is unique. It regularly features in top ten lists of anime favourites, and sometimes tops the lists. Easy to see why: it's got everything, and then some.

Includes chapters on the Japanese animation industry; on the personnel and the production of Cowboy Bebop; on the style, world and music of the series; and its many cultural links.

At the centre of this book is an episode guide to Cowboy Bebop, running through every show in great detail.

There is a chapter on the movie of Cowboy Bebop, released in 2001.

The appendices include accounts of shows and manga linked to Cowboy Bebop (such as Macross Plus, Samurai Champloo and samurai manga).

Includes: filmographies; resources; video and DVD availability; quotes from fans on Cowboy Bebop.

Fully illustrated, including many images of the series and the movie, the actors and personnel, and related anime shows. Bibliography and notes.

The hardcover edition comes in a smart case laminate cover, with a matte finish, in full colour.

ISBN 9781861715678. 436 pages. www.crmoon.com

This new hardback edition includes many new illustrations. including photographs taken for this new edition. The text has been completely updated.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 4:

One of Kurt Jackson's appealing concepts is that the ocean is one of the last true wildernesses left on the planet. It's an idea that I found very interesting when he explained it to me when we first met in St Just. I took it that he meant a spiritual as well as an ecological or natural wilderness. Jackson's art can thus be seen as an art that is the border region between humanity and nature, between culture and nature, as well as literally tackling that area - the coast - which is neither land nor sea.

Note that Kurt Jackson is always facing outwards from the land, and looking towards the ocean, not painting with his back to the sea, and looking towards the land (and notice that the many boats and ships and helicopters and such in this area are left out of the paintings, too).

So Jackson's Porth series, about Priest Cove, and all of his sea paintings, are very important in his art in articulating this idea of the ocean as the last wilderness. 'Have you ever wondered what's out there?' is a question that Kurt Jackson asks (it's the title of one of his major paintings, too - the centrepiece of the Porth series).

Jackson has repeated the question over a number of related works: the title of two 2004 pieces is The Last Wilderness In Western Europe? This was painted on Jura (in Scotland), and both pictures are consciously emptied of human marks - just empty moorland and a delicate blue sky. An earlier picture, part of the Cape series, was entitled Do You Ever Wonder What's Out There? (1999) - an unusual composition in the Jackson oeuvre which puts the horizon very high, and focusses on the dark blue ocean flecked with white spray.

Kurt Jackson isn't that interested in many of the connotations of the ocean - the moon, time, goddesses, rebirth (though moons do appear in his art from time to time). He's not really interested in religious or pagan or magical symbols in that way. And he's not that interested in shipping, fishing, and all things maritime, like J.M.W. Turner was.

But when Jackson asks a question like 'have you ever wondered what's out there?', and considers the sea as one of the last wildernesses, that alters the interpretation of his sea paintings. It doesn't apply to all of them, though: in plenty of paintings (and not only the smaller or more modest ones), Jackson is not thinking in terms of big themes.

Hayao Miyazaki's movies include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Laputa: Castle In the Sky and My Neighbor Totoro.

Hayao Miyazaki may be the most talented fantasy filmmaker of his generation: not even the finest filmmakers of Hollywood can rival his films when it comes to creating fantasy worlds, and fantastical characters and events. Miyazaki has millions of fans around the world, not least among fellow animators and filmmakers, for whom he is a genius.

What Hayao Miyazaki's films do is to bring you completely into a fantasy world that is instantly recognizable and familiar. It's as if these fantasy realms have always existed - very much like J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth or Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (both influences on Miyazaki). The visionary and magical elements are fused with the domestic and familial and social elements, so that it seems completely ordinary and believable that, say, flying machines soar overhead which have flapping wings like an insect, or that little white creatures pop up out of trees and make strange clicking noises.

To write one hit animation movie is amazing, to write eleven is remarkable. To write and direct one spectacular animated picture is very impressive, to write and direct eleven features is unheard-of in the world of contemporary commercial animation.

This new study of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away includes chapters on Miyazaki's influences - his contemporaries and colleagues - his characters - his movies' relation to Western animation (including the Walt Disney corporation) - and his themes and motifs. The book also explores Japanese animation, its production and style, some classics of anime, and digital animation.

Includes quotes by Miyazaki; critics and fans on the movie; and resources.

This is a book about Akira - the manga of 1982-90 and the movie of 1988, and about the creator of Akira, the genius artist Katsuhiro Otomo (b. 1954). There are very few genuine auteurs in Japanese animation: the animation industry, like all filmmaking on a large scale, is truly collaborative. However, you can definitely see elements in the films directed and written and supervised by Katsuhiro Otomo that are auteurist: Otomo has his own style, visually, but also his own concerns, thematically, politically and psychologically.

Akira is a GIANT of a movie that opens at full blast: this movie rocks from shot one. It really rocks - at a far higher level of intensity than any comparable movie, including all of the classics regularly trotted out as hi-octane movie-making. Akira is clearly one of those movies where the filmmakers have thrown everything they can think of into the mix, and it's a movie in which the film-makers have given their all.

Meanwhile, the manga of Akira exceeds all expectations - about storytelling, about what a comicbook or manga is, about how an action-adventure-fantasy story can work in a contemporary setting, and how a story can be genuinely thrilling, genuinely political, genuinely wild and epic.

In short, Akira ticks all of the boxes: (a) it has action and spectacle in spades, (b) it has fascinating characters and situations, (c) it is incredibly exciting, (d) it is very unusual, sometimes downright eccentric and out-there, (e) it is highly politicized, (f) it has plenty to say about living in the modern world, about contemporary, advanced capitalist societies, and (g) it establishes its own world, its own raison d'etre, its own philosophy with supreme self-confidence.

Akira is the manga to top all manga, to end all manga. It is a manga designed to go further, louder and crazier than any other manga. And it does Akira delivers on its promise: it really is every bit as great as everybody says it is.

Volume one of the manga of Akira was published in Young Magazine in 1982-83, by Kodansha (one of the big three among manga publishers in Japan - the other two are Sogakkan and Shueisha), when Katsuhiro Otomo was 28.

The Akira Book includes chapters on: Katsuhiro Otomo's other manga and movies; his inspirations and influences; the contemporary anime industry; and a section of the views of critics and fans. Every aspect of the Akira movie is explored (animation, sound, music, voices, story, themes, etc).

Fully illustrated, including many images of the Akira movie, the Akira manga, Otomo's other works in comics and cinema, Otomo's inspirations, etc.

Bibliography, resources and notes. Available in both hardcover and paperback. 760 pages.

www.crmoon.com

Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982) was a key figure in 20th century science fiction, famous for embracing drugs and the counter-culture in his work. Dick's fiction includes The Man In the High Castle, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, The Game Players of Titan, Clan of the Alphane Moon, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Valis, The Divine Invasion, Martian Time-Slip, The Minority Report, and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Dick's themes included perception and reality, drugs, state control, global capitalism, surveillance, and paranoia.

Four films are explored here: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly (in a chapter by Thomas Christie). The other films based on Phil Dick's fiction, which are discussed in the final chapter, include Confessions d'un Barjo (a French movie based on Confessions of a Crap Artist), a Canadian film, Screamers, based on Dick's Second Variety story, Paycheck, directed by John Woo, Next (Lee Tamahori, 2007), based on The Golden Man, and Impostor (Gary Fleder, 2002).

The more recent cycle of Philip Kindred Dick movies began with Minority Report and Impostor in 2002 - Paycheck and Next followed in 2003 and 2007, and The Owl In Daylight, a possible film about Dick, and Radio Free Alemuth (2008). A sequel to Screamers was released in 2009, again shooting in Canada, with Peter Weller starring.

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography, filmography and notes. ISBN 971861713568.

www.crmoon.com

FROM THE FOREWORD

In this comprehensive book, Jeremy Robinson explores the themes of Blade Runner with his usual insight and knowledge of visual and narrative film. Robinson presents a critical and objective outside viewpoint. He tries to be balanced, and to offer criticism as well as praise. It is ultimately important to note that he is writing about art, not the artist, and he admires Ridley Scott as much as I do.

Blade Runner has been analyzed, debated, dissected and discussed extensively over the last 25 years and I hope you find Jeremy Robinson's exploration into Ridley Scott's seminal sci-fi film noir masterpiece to be innovative and glowing with new ideas that stimulate your imagination and jump start your synapses.

Born on January 5, 1941 in Tokyo, Hayao Miyazaki is known as the 'Japanese Disney', a filmmaker as revered - and as popular - as Walt Disney or Steven Spielberg. Miyazaki, in short, is a true phenomenon in contemporary animation and in world cinema.

Hayao Miyazaki's movies include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Laputa: Castle In the Sky and My Neighbor Totoro.

Hayao Miyazaki may be the most talented fantasy filmmaker of his generation: not even the finest filmmakers of Hollywood can rival his films when it comes to creating fantasy worlds, and fantastical characters and events. Miyazaki has millions of fans around the world, not least among fellow animators and filmmakers, for whom he is a genius.

What Hayao Miyazaki's films do is to bring you completely into a fantasy world that is instantly recognizable and familiar. It's as if these fantasy realms have always existed - very much like J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth or Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (both influences on Miyazaki). The visionary and magical elements are fused with the domestic and familial and social elements, so that it seems completely ordinary and believable that, say, flying machines soar overhead which have flapping wings like an insect, or that little white creatures pop up out of trees and make strange clicking noises.

To write one hit animation movie is amazing, to write eleven is remarkable. To write and direct one spectacular animated picture is very impressive, to write and direct eleven features is unheard-of in the world of contemporary commercial animation.

Includes quotes by Miyazaki; reviews by fans; and resources.