My Reality: Contemporary Art and the
Culture of Japanese AnimationTampa Museum of Art
600 N. Ashley Drive
Tampa
2 p.m. Saturdays, May 11-June 22
813-274-8130
Anime-niacs If the recent local showing of the Japanese anime feature Metropolis blew you out of your proverbial seat, there’s lots more where that came from. In conjunction with their current exhibition, My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation, The Tampa Museum of Art is devoting the next few months to a film series of some of the best anime has to offer.
Every Saturday in May, you can catch some of the family friendlier feature-length animes, beginning with the magical adventure Card Captor Sakura Movie 2 on May 11. The real highlights of the month, though, are a pair of lyrical fantasy masterpieces by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke), My Neighbor Totoro on May 18 and Kiki’s Delivery Service on May 25. The Kiki being presented by the museum is the surprisingly good English dubbed version prepared a few years back by Miramax, featuring the voices of Kirsten Dunst, Phil Hartman and Janeane Garofolo. All May screenings will take place at 2 p.m. and are free with museum admission.
The anime film festival takes a turn towards edgier, more adult fare in June, with a series of evening screenings every Saturday at 7 p.m. On June 1 and June 8, you can catch a local encore presentation of Osamu Tezuka’s spectacular Metropolis, a politically grounded sci-fi epic set in a fabulously stylized futuristic city stocked with proles, callous rulers, mad scientists and powerful robots. Part Blade Runner retro-future and part Leni Riefenstahl Third Reich chic, Metropolis is a dense, intricately detailed triumph of imagination. The anime series continues on June 15 with the sci-fi action adventure Spriggan, and concludes on June 22 with Isao Takahata’s masterful Grave of the Fireflies, a poetic and sometimes unbearably intense tale of orphans struggling to survive in a ravaged, post-World War II Japan.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2002.
