Mukai Anime Academy

11/29/2023

The next meeting of Mukai Anime Academy is coming up. This Thursday after school (3:30-5:30pm), we’ll see a student presentation on the 2002 anime Haibane Renme. (We’ll also be discussing Ghiblifest 2024 at this meeting!)

Mukai Anime Academy is a free club for Vashon kids (6th-12th grade) that meets on Thursdays after school twice per month. In our student-led meetings, we learn about Japanese culture through the lens of anime.

mukaifarmandgarden.org/anime

11/16/2023

Today!

11/14/2023

At the next Mukai Anime Academy, we’ll be learning about Yosh*toshi Abe’s critically acclaimed 2002 anime Haibane Renmei. With major influences from both Christianity and Buddhism, Haibane is a slow-paced, philosophical series that explores the concepts of afterlife, guilt, sin, and redemption. This meeting will be student-run by a VHS sophomore.

A girl wakes from a dream to find herself with no memory and encased in a cocoon. As she emerges, she’s tended to by angel-like beings called Haibane who give her the name “Rakka.” Rakka and the other Haibane live on the outskirts of a walled city called Glie that is off-limits to all of the Haibane except for a mysterious group called the Toga. The more Rakka tries to learn of her new home, the more mysteries she uncovers.

“Haibane Renmei is, as the title suggests, a story with various things in gray, that is, a story with many ambiguous factors. It is not a story to find answers, but one to wonder about the answers.”

- Yosh*toshi Abe

Mukai Anime Academy is a free class for kids ages 13-18 held twice per month at Mukai Farm & Garden.

Link in bio

11/12/2023

Bake Sale today at !

11/08/2023

At the next Movies@Mukai, we’ll be watching a great, bad Japanese movie from the 90s “Supermarket Woman.”

Free w/ suggested donation. Japanese concessions available.

10/31/2023

Considered by many to be the best anime ever made, Akira was written and directed by the manga creator Katashiro Otomo and produced by a collaboration of seven different anime studios. This resulted in Akira having 10x the budget of 1984's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and you can see the quality on screen. With such an enormous budget, animators could draw way more panels than normal, giving Akira a very fluid feel that rivals even the best of Disney movies.

But unlike the typical Disney movie being released in the 1980s (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc.), Akira was not a cartoon intended for little children. Through the use of stylized ultra-violence and dystopian imagery, Otomo created something truly amazing, creative, weird, and simply beautiful: A post-apocalyptic "Neo-Tokyo" where teenage biker gangs allow their angst over an uncertain world and anger at uncaring adults to spill over into bloody street battles with rival biker gangs. One of these gangs gets accidentally involved in a government coup after one of their members Tetsuo has an encounter with an escaped medical test subject thus giving him uncontrollable powers. Will the ragtag group of friends be able to help Tetsuo control the power of Akira before it destroys Neo-Tokyo...again?

10/18/2023

Mark Hamill making his third voiceover appearance in a Ghibli film!

10/18/2023

10/09/2023

Spooky season is upon us. Join Movies@Mukai this Thursday for cult classic “House.”

09/19/2023

Anime Academy returns this Thursday!