Forget Akira. Forget Ghost in the Shell. Forget Evangelion, Gundam and GTO. Forget all the titles otaku mention when they grip you by the lapels and insist “You have to see this!” This was my introduction to anime and I found it in the same place I found everything else: my long-vanished, small town video store. And like many a film that traumatized me in early childhood, I’d  managed to almost completely forget about Sea Prince and the Fire Child.

Then little over a month ago my best friend’s wife and I got to talking about movies that traumatized us as children. Despite growing up half a continent away, both of us managed to find this film at exactly the same time. As usual, she remembered, I repressed, with the repression manifesting itself as an irrational hatred of The Little Mermaid I could never really explain…until now. Continue reading Sea Prince and the Fire Child (1981) →