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Japanese Film Maker Makoto Shinkai captured audiences throughout the world with 2016's Your Name  and he now follows up the film with 2020's Weathering With You. The film focuses on teenage Hodaka who runs away from home to a modern-day Tokyo that has seen nonstop rain for a significant amount of time. Hodaka lives on the streets unable to obtain a place to stay until he finds work as a writer for an urban legend magazine. Rumors spread of a mysterious Sunshine Girl, who can control the weather. Hodaka's life is soon changed when he meets Hina, a girl who possesses the very same power to stop the rain. Weathering With You is an incredible experience that uses beautiful animation to tell a story that is both an endearing tale about young love and an allegory for the struggles that young people face today. One of  Weathering 's greatest accomplishments is the way it beautifully portrays the city of Tokyo both in its animation and in the story. The weather that enve...

I’ve had my eye on Trigger’s ‘Promare’ since it was announced for a US Theatrical Release. It’s the studio’s first feature length film straight from the people behind Kill La Kill and Gurren Lagann, two of my favorite anime of all time. I had high hopes for Promare because of that and I’m so happy to say that it more than delivered. Promare’s everything that Trigger is known for in full force and is a love letter to the studio’s past work. Promare takes place 30 years after The Great World Blaze, a near cataclysmic event caused by humans that spontaneously combust into flames that ravaged the entire earth. These flame-wielding humans, now known as the Burnish, are discriminated against and branded as criminals with society reconstructing itself to withstand themselves against the Burnish threat. One such defense is the mech piloting firefighting troop Burning Rescue and over the course of the plot, new recruit Galo Thymos fights with his team to combat ...

Video game adaptation films have notoriously been less than stellar throughout history. Because of that, Detective Pikachu as a concept is something that shouldn’t have worked on paper. Basing the first live-action Pokèmon movie around a spin-off game where Pikachu talks with a human instead of a traditional story around battling with other trainers is a huge creative dare. Despite this, Detective Pikachu makes the idea work more than well and proves to be an absolute delight for Pokèmon fans. Detective Pikachu is the perfect representation of real-world Pokèmon society. There are so many instances of Pokèmon interacting with the world in unique ways and the CG of the movie really helps sell the realistic versions of Pokèmon while staying true to each creature’s original design. The VFX doesn’t always hit the mark with the set pieces, with one scene, in particular, being noticeably lackluster but the Pokèmon themselves always look fantastic. Unlike ...