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GKIDS Brings Hideaki Anno's Live-Action LOVE & POP Film to N. America
posted on by Anita Tai
GKIDS announced on Bluesky on Monday that it will screen Hideaki Anno's 1998 live-action film LOVE & POP in North American theaters beginning on February 21. The film will start playing at the IFC Center in New York City on February 21, and at the American Cinematheque's Los Feliz Theatre in Los Angeles 3 on February 23, with more cities to be announced.
The Japan Society held a screening on February 1 and describes the story:
“Everything in the world's got a time for change,” muses high schooler Hiromi (Asumi Miwa) in Hideaki Anno's dreamy day-in-the-life experiment—a diaristic stream of consciousness with shifting aspect ratios, rapid cuts and fisheye-lensed perspectives—capturing the 16-year-old's delicate interiority on a single date: July 19, 1997. Hiromi records her life with the flash of her camera, documenting the roving exploits of her band of friends as they congregate and sift through Shibuya's vast array of cafes, plazas and malls, chatting about love, desire and boys. Enchanted by a dazzling topaz ring, she impulsively probes the world of enjo kosai (compensated dating) to earn its worth by day's end. An intimate close-up of a teenage girl's plaintive essence, the Evangelion creator's live-action debut breaks away from convention in its liberating experimental form. Adapting Ryu Murakami's (Coin Locker Babies, Audition) novel Love and Pop: Topaz II, Anno's transgressive shot-on-video opus formulates a coda for the turn of millennia—a point-and-shoot testament of youth languishing in the perpetual disarray of Japan's lost decade.
The film is based on Ryū Murakami's 1996 Love and Pop: Topaz II novel, published by Gentosha. The film was Anno's first feature-length live-action film, which he directed after the first Neon Genesis Evangelion anime and before Shin Godzilla and Shin Kamen Rider.
Kino Video released the film on DVD with English subtitles in 2004.
Source: GKIDS' Bluesky account
