Festival highlights: five reasons to love anime even more

Director: Takahiro Omori

ANIME has a long tradition of exploring the interface of childhood and fantasy, as in Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro. Here a young girl, Hotaru, meets a strange boy in the forest (pictured) at the height of summer who says that he can never be touched by a human.

Tekken: Blood Vengeance

Director: Yoichi Mori

video games provide a rich source of characters for anime, and the venerable beat-em-up Tekken, has scores of them to play with. In this CGI-rendered film, Ling Xiaoyu and her friends search for missing student Shin Kamiya, a victim of twisted experiments.

Colourful

Director: Keichi Hara

A meditation on life and death, in this award-winning adaptation of a book by Eto Mori, a soul is given another chance at life when it wins the angel lottery and is put into the body of a 14-year-old who has killed himself.

A Letter to Momo

Director: Hiroyuki Okiura

Another coming-of-age tale of the supernatural, in which a teenage girl whose father has recently died moves with her mother to Shio Island, where strange things are happening.

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Pailsen Files – The Movie

Director: Ryosuke Takahashi

One of many spin-offs from an epic 52-episode 1980s anime TV series about the pilots of giant battle robots known as VOTOMS (Vertical One-man Tank for Offense and ManeouvreS… yes, it probably loses something in translation). This focuses on pilot Chirico Cuvie, assigned to a new squad of highly experienced warriors on a mission that will push them to their limits

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