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"Hidden inside the London East Asian Film Festival’s programme was a rare treat: three animated features celebrating the centenary of the birth of Japanese animation, an art form that has since grown to become one of the country’s most important, valued cultural exports. Anime has always had a certain eccentricity about it (think of some of the stranger sequences in touchstone titles like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, or anything at the edges of the output of supposedly child-orientated Studio Ghibli), but the films which LEAFF selected to honour the medium’s milestone take this eclectic, imaginative approach to storytelling to new levels, loosening the limits of the logic of reality, and travelling through the very fabric of space and time."