KAIJU! At the Revue!
Sponsored by The Beguiling Books & Art!
MOTHRA
Wednesday, August 30, 6:45PM
Tickets $10-$13
Directed by Ishirô Honda
JAPAN 1961 101min. PG
The Beguiling’s monthly anime series goes live-action this month with Toho’s classic Mothra. Amidst a pantheon of fire-breathing dinosaurs, flying lizards and three-headed behemoths – not to mention their various robotic incarnations – who would think that one of the most enduring characters in Toho’s kaiju (“giant monster”) universe would be the colourful, Mother Earth-loving Mothra? We sure think so. Mothra marks a departure in both tone and colour of previous kaiju films. Gone is the dark, metaphorical havoc brought on by Godzilla’s nuclear stomping of Tokyo. While the irradiated subtext is still obvious and Mothra’s wrath ain’t a laughing matter, the film borders on comedic whimsy, as clumsy reporter hero Sen-Chan (Frankie Sakai) comes off as a buffoonish Lou Costello, and the miniature twins (played by the singing duo “The Peanuts”) are downright adorable. No wonder Mothra wants them back.
The Beguiling will be on site with a merch table, plus prizes to raffle off!
Presented in 2K. Dubbed English.
Special event. Admission $13 General, $10 Members, Seniors and Students. All membership benefits welcome.
Advance tickets available HERE!
Internet sensation Jonny Sun has made a book! It wasn’t quite out yet at TCAF, but that didn’t stop hundreds of fans from visiting him at the show! Well now the book IS out, and Jonny is coming back to Toronto to launch it!
The Beguiling and Page & Panel are proud once again to help support The Toronto Japanese Film Festival, presented by The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. This year, we will be the screening partners for I AM A HERO, based on the excellent manga by Kengo Hanazawa, currently being released by Dark Horse! The sole screening will take place Friday, June 16th, 2017, at 7:30pm. Tickets are now available!
In Midnight Diner, four different but related short stories are told through visits to a small Japanese ‘diner’ and the somewhat mysterious cook and owner. I’ve had the pleasure of watching this one already and I liked it a lot, it was really well-crafted, and contemporary, and you could feel the depth of story that being adapted from manga brought to the page. This movie was also so successful in Japan that it has already spawned a sequel (maybe two!), and been continued on Netflix as Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, which you can watch even in Canada ;). Check it out.
I wanted to mention In This Corner of the World because it was also adapted from a bestselling manga by Fumiyo Kono, but also because of a connection it has to another important animated movie. In This Corner of the World is about a young woman in Kure, in the south of Japan, who is married to a Navy Officer in the Japanese military. Her life is radically changed when the war and the intense shelling and bombing comes to Kure. What you might not know is that the powerful Studio Ghibli film Grave of the Fireflies is also set in and around the Kure region of Japan, in roughly the same time period, and that will inevitibly make these two films interesting companions going forward. I’m looking forward to seeing In This Corner of the World a great deal now.
Kettle’s got a lot on her mind. There’s the usual – stupid stuff at home, crappy job, even crappier boyfriend, and then there’s a couple of other things, too. Like the realization that she’s not so into that four-chord, two-minute, hard-driving punk scene, and that just maybe 12 really pretty boys as they sing some pretty shiny pop is more her thing. And maybe – just maybe – that the hot girl with the tattoos and the pretty shiny life might just be more her thing, too.
Brian McLachlan, 11am-3pm: Brian is the author of the young-person-oriented Draw Out The Story: Ten Secrets to Creating Your Own Comics, and What Noise Do I Make?, a children’s picture book, both published by Owlkids. Brian has a wide range of taste in comics, and is just as happy suggesting great graphic novels for grownups as he is some of the best comics out there for younger readers.
Claudio Ghirardo, 3pm-4pm: A graduate of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon & Graphic Art, Inc., Claudio Ghirardo contributed to small press zines before focusing on freelance illustration and then being a full time artist. He has his own monthly experimental webcomic, “