I know next to nothing about Mamoru Oshii’s latest film. What I do know is that he’s directed some pretty great animated films like Ghost in the Shell and The Sky Crawlers, and judging by the teaser for Assault Girls it should packed with plenty of sand whales, giant guns, angels, Lucifer and cute Japanese girls kicking ass. Really, what more from a fantasy film do you honestly need?

Film: Assault Girls (Asaruto gâruzu)

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Starring: Rinko Kikuchi, Meisa Kuroki, Hinako Saeki

Release Date: December 19th, 2009 (Japan)

Tags: animated films, Assault Girls, dragons, Fantasy, fantasy film, film, ghost in the shell, Hinako Saeki, japan, Japanese, lucifer, mamoru oshii, Meisa Kuroki, One to Watch, rinko kikuchi, Sky Crawlers

Yet another animated film, this one from Ireland/Belgium/France. No US release date set yet but hopefully it will get a 2009 release, further adding to the already impressive list of animated films scheduled to be released this year.

Film: The Secret of Kells

Directed by: Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey

Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Evan McGuire, Mick Lally

Release date: TBD

I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I became a Ralph Bakshi fan at a fairly young age. My first introduction to him, as it probably was for most kids, was Bakshi’s failed children’s film Wizards. And by failed I mean totally awesome!

You see Bakshi was a bit of a novelty amongst American cartoonists in that he didn’t make animated films that pandered to children and their parents. He wasn’t much of a fan of Disney so when he made a children’s film about warring wizards in a post-apocalyptic world he made sure to include plenty of bloody violence, authentic Nazi war propaganda films and an assassin named Peace. Needless to say critics and parents were a bit bewildered by the film and it was soon relegated to obscurity.

From there I moved on next to Street Fight (aka Coonskin). Unlike Wizards, Street Fight was made specifically for adults as it was a parody of blaxploitation films and satirizes racist stereotypes. And as it was made for adults it came with an R rating attached. Now at the time I was around 13 years old, and the idea of an R rated cartoon seemed positively unthinkable, if not impossible to me. (Little did I know that Bakshi had already topped that rating with his first feature film Fritz the Cat, which had garnered an X rating.) Sure enough, like any blaxploitation film Street Fight was filled with violence, rampant cursing and even the occasional bit of nudity. Nudity in a cartoon? That’s unpossible!
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