December 14, 2013

Top 10 Science Fiction and Fantasy Anime Movies

Film Lists

Reading Time

I’ve been sitting on this list for months because I didn’t think I’d seen enough anime movies to warrant the creation of a list. Turns out I was wrong. When I did a bit of searching, I discovered I’d seen quite a lot of anime films, many of them viewed at 1 AM on some random satellite station my grandma had a decade ago. I still don’t know which station played anime at 1 AM, nor do I remember all of the films I saw (Black Magic M-66, which does not appear on the list below because it’s not that great, is one for which I am particularly nostalgic).

So here I am with a list of 10. Don’t hesitate to tell me what you think in the comments (or share your own lists). Here goes (in no particular order):

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (Yutaka Fujioka)

Flying beds, nightmare kings, magic scepters, flying squirrels, and dreams!

The Place Promised in Our Lonely Days (Makoto Shinkai)

Alternate realities, Cold War analogues, rebellion, and homemade jets!

And I’m presenting a paper on it at the 2014 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando! *dances*

Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki)

Talking flames, animalistic transformations, mystical castles, and Miyazaki’s classic genius.

Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki)

Mythology, modernity vs. the old world, giant spirit animals, and muskets!

The Cat Returns (Hayao Miyazaki)

Talking cats in tophats, kitty kingdoms, and magic transformations!

Oh, and the English-dubbed edition, which is surprisingly good, features Cary Elwes, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Bell, Rene Auberjonois (from DS9!), Peter Boyle, Elliot Gould, and many more. That’s one hell of a cast, no?

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo)

Do I really need to explain this one? It’s a beautiful, mess-with-your-head kind of film. And it’s a classic. At this point, you should have seen it already…

Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii)

What happens if a human mind merges with an artificial one? And are cyborgs still human? A cyberpunk classic.

Ghost in the Shell 2 (Mamoru Oshii)

Can you really trust cyborgs when their ability to exert free will is always in question? Nothing like a little cyberpunk to tackle the tough questions!

Macross Plus (Shoji Kawamori & Shinichiro Watanabe)

Jet battles, artificial intelligence, mass hypnosis, and Robotech! Yeah!

Patlabor (Mamoru Oshii)

Mecha in everyday society + hackers + mecha police = greatness.

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P.S.: I really wanted to include the OVAs for Samurai X in this list, but they are technically episodic in format, rather than proper films like the ones listed above. That means I’m going to have to write a whole new list about my favorite SF/F anime series!

Shaun Duke

Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.

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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

January 22, 2025 No Comments

Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

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And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

2025: The Year of Something

January 9, 2025 No Comments

We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

Top 10 Science Fiction and Fantasy Anime Movies

Reading Time

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (Yutaka Fujioka)