Along with the aforementioned Watanabe’s gentle and deft filmmaking, Studio 4°C’s art direction is on full display throughout Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko. Every landscape shot feels worth ...

There’s more warmth than wisdom in the animated Japanese coming-of-age drama “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko,” an exceptionally well-realized variation on a by-now familiar anime story ...

In that regard, “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko” joins Pixar’s recent “Turning Red” as a loving coming-of-age tale where fiercely dissimilar mothers and daughters have to entertain each ...

Not a lot happens in “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko.” And that’s OK. If “Nikuko,” the latest anime feature from director Ayumu Watanabe (“Children of the Sea”) slots into any genre ...

But Kikuko’s disconnect with the world makes her a difficult protagonist, and often makes Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko feel like a random grab bag of events that don’t add up to a coherent whole.

A mother and adolescent daughter cook together, laugh together and face the usual generational struggles in a film with an unkind point of view. By Calum Marsh When you purchase a ticket for an ...

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko (2021) Film Review from the 4th Annual Animation Is Film Festival, a movie directed by Ayumu Watanabe and starring Shinobu Otake, Cocomi, Natsuki Hanae, Ikuji Nakamura ...

A gleaming and delightful anime with a large appetite for tenderness and laughter, director Ayumu Watanabe’s mother-daughter saga “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko” boundlessly adores its titular ...