What film got you hooked?

A continuing feature that asks prominent cinephiles "What film got you hooked on Japanese cinema?"


Dirty Pair: Project Eden by Thomas Silver


I was always a Godzilla fan, growing up. Hell, I loved kaiju no matter which monster it was (Godzilla or Gamera) – still love it, I even caught the recent Gamera movies at the Toronto International Film Festival. Now back when I was in college, about the same time, one of my good friends was going to the University of Waterloo and we always kept in touch, then one weekend he came back with a bunch of VHS tapes of movies he copied while there. He said we were going to like what he had brought back. He was right, a few of them were Japanese anime and we’re talking the raw footage – no dubbing, no subtitles. The first one I remember him showing us was called Dirty Pair (years later I found the full title to be Dirty Pair: Project Eden) and I was simply floored by it. It wasn’t until the next movie he showed us was even better – it was called Laputa (yes, the Hayao Miyazaki film). After that my love for anime simply grew…

Thomas Silver is one of the founding members of UTARPA (http://www.utarpa.org/), The University of Toronto Japanese Animation Club. In existence since 1995 their goal is to promote Japanese animation in Toronto.