Black Butler is a popular manga series by Yana Toboso that first appeared in 2006. A few years later, A-1 Pictures adapted it as an anime, directed by Toshiya Shinohara. (Noriyuki Abe directed season 3 and the animated movie “Book of Murder.”) The story concerns an orphaned English aristocrat and the butler who serves and […]
(With a shout out to Steve Miller.) The Western genre, so popular in my youth, has fallen out of favor in recent years. It survives mainly in “shoot ’em up” video games like Red Dead Redemption. Yet it has had a lasting influence on other genres, especially science fiction. Though despised by sci fi purists, […]
Probably one of the purest steampunk entries in our list of classics, Steamboy is a 2004 anime film written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, who also wrote and directed Akira, and produced by Sunrise. It takes place in England in the 1860’s. The titular protagonist is a boy named Ray Steam (the Japanese seem fond […]
