Wednesday, December 16, 2015

TWELVE DAYS OF ANIME 2015: Giving thanks to the JICC

Like last year, I saw quite a few movies at the JICC, the Japan Information and Culture Center which is associated with the Japanese embassy (but not physically connected to, no I'm not seeing movies at the embassy once a month) and it feels like I saw more this year. They had an entry in their Animazing film series just about every month and while I wondered what would happen when they simply ran out of current films to show they instead switched to showing older movies, some of which I'm not sure every got a full release here. Some were good and some were not, I didn't like Patema Inverted or Brave Story at all but really liked Letter to Momo and an old classic, Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise a lot, although I was rather apathetic on Mai Mai Miracle and Giovanni's Island. They also show a number of live action films and I've been making an effort to go to more of those screenings as well especially since a number of these films are also quite hard to find (like the Seijun Suzuki films they showed in conjecture with the Freer & Sackler or the live action Thermae Romae).

So, thank you JICC for so many amazing films and I hope that even more anime nerds in the DMV discover what a wonderful resource this is (free movies guys, freeeeeee moooooovieeeees!)