The best new anime features I saw in 2021 were the newest movie spin-offs of three long-running TV anime franchises, Pokémon, Doraemon, and Pretty Cure (aka Precure). I saw two of them in Japanese without subtitles and one with subtitles. Two were released in theaters in 2020 in Japan and one in 2021, but I didn’t get to see them until my local Japanese video store got them this past summer. One was eventually released in the U.S., but only on Netflix.
Archive | December, 2021
Animated Literary Adaptations: From Robin Hood to the Moon
9 Dec
I have a box set of “Classic Adventures,” consisting of ten 48-minute animated adaptations of classic literary adventures, nine based on novels and one based on a true-life account. Eight of the ten were produced in the 1970s by an Australian company called Air Programs International (aka API Television Production) and share key creative personnel and voice actors, accounting for stylistic similarities among the eight.
Deanna Durbin Centennial
4 DecDecember 4, 2021: Deanna Durbin would have turned 100 today. Here’s a link to a post I did earlier this year on her connection to Japan: Deanna Durbin and Her Japanese Fans. And the following is a post I did in 2013 on the occasion of her death at the age of 91.
First Annette and now Deanna Durbin, who was, in a way, the Annette Funicello of the 1930s (but way more popular). According to the New York Times obituary of May 1, 2013, Ms. Durbin died “a few days ago.” (As of this writing, IMDB still doesn’t list a death date, presumably because it still doesn’t have one!) Legend has it that Deanna’s film musicals, filled with youthful exuberance and musical cheer, starting with THREE SMART GIRLS (1936) and 100 MEN AND A GIRL (1937), were so popular they saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy and kept the studio solvent until Abbott and Costello came along in the 1940s. (Deanna and Annette connection: both co-starred in movies with Robert Cummings.)
Deanna Durbin (born Dec. 4, 1921) was one of the few major Hollywood stars to turn her back on the industry and walk away from it and live happily ever after. She moved…
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