The Films of Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Between 1987 and 2000, Yoshiaki Kawajiri directed four films that between them defined what adult anime meant outside Japan. Two came from the horror novels of Hideyuki Kikuchi, one from his own script, and one returned to Kikuchi with the biggest canvas of his career. In Japan they were respectable genre works. In the West, carried by Manga Entertainment, Streamline Pictures and a thousand rental shelves, they became the canon a generation learned anime from.

A note on the art: the posters and key art for these films are still under copyright, so this shelf does not reproduce them. What it can show, it shows, and the one photograph in the cluster, Shinjuku at night over on the Demon City Shinjuku page, is freely licensed and credited there. Everything else here is documented in words, the way the rental era itself was: a spine, a title, a reputation.