Akira and Cagliostro head Kotatsu's Cardiff weekend

The Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival returns to Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff this weekend for its 15th edition, two days of Japanese animation that run from a 1976 stop-motion short to a 2025 science-fiction feature.

What is on, and when

Saturday 26 September opens with Children of the Sea at 11.00, adapted from Daisuke Igarashi's manga and animated by STUDIO 4°C. A masterclass at 13.25 puts the CGI artist Masaya Inaba in front of an audience to explain how computer-generated work is used alongside drawn animation, then All You Need Is Kill screens at 15.30. JERO11, whose music sets heavy metal against traditional Japanese folk, plays live at 18.30 alongside a screening of Kawamoto's Dojoji, and the day closes with Akira at 20.15.

Sunday 27 September brings Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro at 11.30, the 1979 feature in which Lupin robs a Monte Carlo casino and finds the haul is counterfeit. A programme of shorts by Japanese university students, curated by the Inter College Animation Festival, follows at 13.35, and Lupin the IIIrd: The Movie - The Immortal Bloodline at 15.30 ends the weekend.

The centenary screening

The Japan Foundation London, which partners the festival, picks out Dojoji Temple as the rarer booking: the 1976 film screens in celebration of director Kihachiro Kawamoto's 101st birthday, and the foundation lists the programme as running from that short to All You Need Is Kill in 2025.

Beyond the screenings

The festival keeps the parts that are not films. A marketplace for Japanese merchandise, a family corner and a British Sign Language interpreter all return, and a prize draw offers professional-grade animation software as its main prize. Registration is required, and the Cardiff screenings are ticketed through Chapter. Aberystwyth Arts Centre takes the festival from 16 to 18 October, where booking has not opened yet.

Our opinion

Try to assemble this weekend from a streaming catalogue and you will come up short. Akira and The Castle of Cagliostro are easy enough to find, but the 1976 Kawamoto film is not, and neither is a programme of shorts by Japanese university students that exists only because an Inter College Animation Festival jury went looking for them. That is the argument for a regional festival in one line-up, and Kotatsu has now been making it for fifteen editions in a country where Japanese animation on a big screen usually means whatever distributors have decided is this month's hit. The other half of the argument is the room itself: a musician playing live under a film from 1976, an artist explaining what a drawn pipeline cannot do, a merchandise table and an interpreter are things a subscription does not include, and they are why a ticket is worth paying for when the films are a click away. If you are going, build the day around the Sunday shorts. If Aberystwyth is closer, keep watching that page, because the second leg is not bookable yet.