The Japanese Cinema Archives

Japanese Cinema Archives (JCA) is a non-profit website publishing reviews on Japanese films and anime. It started with visions of blogging grandeur, but soon turned into a bimonthly film review journal of sorts.

As of 2021, we publish six reviews a year, and our output is focused on sound research and quality writing before news reporting and sensationalism. This is not to say that JCA will shy away from new and exciting releases, but our main focus is classic Japanese films and anime.

Our Mission

The goal of Japanese Cinema Archives is to spread the word about Japanese cinema to a larger international audience. Japanese film and anime are well-acknowledged, but we feel that it deserves even more respect than it gets.

With this goal in mind, we try to balance our reviews between accessible and in-depth writing. The intention is not to approach the films from an academic angle, but rather to gather essential information, and put out the best structured reviews we can.

We strive to write reviews that will be interesting for both newbs and fans of Japanese cinema. Granted, sometimes our inner nerds take over, but we try to make all content easy scannable, so that overtly nerdy passages are easily skipped.

The History of Japanese Cinema Archives

The idea for JCA formed in the late 2000s, when I was studying Film History and Alternative Film at the University in Oslo. At the time the project was meant to become a book, rather than a website.

This all changed in the early 2010s, when I was working on my Master's Thesis on the style of Japanese cinema. Over the next 15 years, I saw and took notes on hundreds of Japanese movies.

Finally, after some uninspired years, I rekindled my interest in Japanese film, which in turn led to the startup of Japanese Cinema Archives in 2019. Two years later, I have yet to perfect the JCA writing formula, but I keep working on the site and I enjoy every second of it.