Chiho Aoshima: City Glow July 18, 2007

'Chiho Aoshima: City Glow,' is both monumental and playfully engaging. Spanning five monitors, it opens in a garden, filled with fantastic foliage and creatures. Slowly a modern city with living skyscrapers grows from this Edenic paradise and then as night falls, nature takes over once again. Aoshima populates this landscape with both the forces of good and evil: a graveyard filled with demonic ghosts is ultimately banished by fairytale spirits and a new dawn. 'City Glow' offers a promise of hope and regeneration. Aoshimas witty animation is a delight to all ages, uniting the vivid graphic conventions of contemporary anime with ancient traditions in Japanese art and thought.