Japanese animation seems to happen on another planet. Apart from lauded breakthrough films like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Satashi Kon’s Millennium Actress, we hear very little of it. The TV side especially maintains a reputation for being trashy, childish and cheap. No bullshit: a lot of TV anime is trashy, childish and cheap, but so is a lot of TV. And on Japanese TV, animation is not a side dish, but a main course. Popular anime shows get prime time slots, long runs of several series, follow-up films and big marketing budgets.

Someone interested in film – or visual entertainment in general – could do worse than keep an eye on this scene. For all the kiddy cash-ins, Japan has exerted a massive influence on animation worldwide. Its animators cultivated uniquely economical ways of describing motion and feeling, born of necessity when the process was painstaking and budgets were low. On this stylistic foundation was built an edifice of sophisticated and mature classics. Ghost in the Shell reinvigorated cyberpunk; Neon Genesis Evangelion used sci-fi tropes to create gut-wrenching Freudian melodrama; Miyazaki won the West over with deft storytelling and unparalleled craft.

Computers gave talented artists and directors a vast array of novel techniques to use and abuse, and offer lowered costs and raised production values across the board. As a result, TV anime through the ’00s increased in quality and quantity, with a constant scramble for new fads and angles, the output often formulaic but occasionally brilliant. Today, anime is slick, popular, confident and keen to try new things. And in Japan, it has a broader demographic appeal than you might expect. Shows for male viewers dominate, roughly split into young adult (shonen) and grown-up (seinen) programming. But there’s a good line in quirky romances for the young female audience (shoujo), and again for their grown up counterparts (josei). In this latter category we find Eden of the East, a smart, unusual thriller. It is definitely a contemporary show: it finished its initial run in June last year, and has a feet-on-the-ground modern day setting. Two movie sequels, one released and one still in development, are showing in Japan only. For this review we’re just looking at the series, which is to be distributed in the US by Funimation.

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Cormac McCarthy’s novel, of course, can get away with the ambiguity. The melted glass and buckled concrete of America’s deadlands can be everytime, because time has stopped. There is no reason to describe the story’s great catastrophe as anything but a sharp zap, the end of history. More – there is no reason to say it should not be considered a religious happening. It is just there; like the beginnings of life it is not even a fact.

But John Hillcoat’s film of the novel cannot help but produce clues. So I watch the film and do what I’m not supposed to do, which is to become a detective. Some of the houses contain televisions with analogue tuning knobs by the side of a convex screen. And in the earliest ‘flashback’ scene, when Charlize Theron’s character is pregnant with the boy, Viggo Mortensen sports the kind of bushy moustache that looked pretty on Tom Selleck, once upon a time.

The ‘present tense’ scenes take place less than a decade after this. Suggesting it’s a Cold War story. Nuclear apocalypse. Threads US.

But what about the food? Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee swig on Coca Cola, eat canned Del Monte fruit and (most tellingly, because the brand was only developed in 1996) drink Glacéau Vitaminwater. All of the labelling looks contemporary to circa 2008. So we think of today’s kinds of disasters, which include nuclear war, but that isn’t everything anymore.

The ambiguity begs the question – what kind of catastrophe are we expecting? Not quite the one McCarthy and Hillcoat give to us. A very slow one, longer than a lifetime. The kind that already got born.

Can anyone else (anyone with an eye for The Road’s cars) supply more clues?

It’s always nice to come across a film that actually delivers on its promises. Kicks sets out to take a look into the dangers of celebrity obsession, focusing particularly on British society’s WAG obsession, and achieves its aims with refreshing intelligence.

Set in Liverpool, the film follows Nicole, a latchkey kid who’s obsessed with the Reds’ star striker, Lee Cassidy. She is befriended by the more affluent Jasmine, who has aspirations of landing a player of her own. A close bond develops between the two, but upon discovering that the object of their affections is to depart for sunnier climes, they enact a drastic bid to prevent his defection. Ultimately, it becomes clear that, far from being worthy of Nicole’s idolisation, Lee isn’t all she thought he was cracked up to be.

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For Orson’s first interview, we’re publishing some email correspondence with musician and comedienne Charlyne Yi (who can claim, remarkably, and according to Wikipedia, Filipino, Spanish, Korean, Irish, German, French and Native American ancestry).

Ms Yi embarked on an unusual experiment in cinema last year with Paper Heart, out on DVD in February. The film follows a fictionalised version of Yi (plus close friend Michael Cera) as she attempts to divine what love might be. I don’t know who you’d ask for help with something like this; Yi plumps for Seth Rogen and Demetri Martin. She’s also performed some DIY enhancements on real life – Paper Heart’s dramatic reconstructions are done with puppets.

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