Today is the anniversary of one of the darkest days in cultural history. To commemorate the event, consider what if Star Wars were an anime.
Author: Don
30/365
11th and Topeka.
A young person’s guide to cyberspace
Yuko, newly arrived in Daikoku City with her impulsive little sister Kyoko, loses her dog Densuke when it chases an “illegal” — a sort of computer virus — through a hole in a fence into an “obsolete” cyberspace. Fumie’s business is retrieving lost cyberpets, and Yuko hires her to rescue Densuke. It’s a more difficult job than they anticipate.
Episode one of Denno Coil is the first episode of any of this season’s series that I watched a second time, which automatically makes it the coolest show currently being broadcast. In some respects, it really does seem like Serial Experiments Lain retold for youngsters. Virtual spaces are coincident with the everyday world, and one can open holes to the cyberspaces with “bug” spray. Children have cyberpets that look and behave like real dogs and cats but are visible only to those who wear special glasses. It is possible to pick up and hold these pets, and they can freely pass through the holes into cyberspaces. They don’t like it when you drop a backpack on/through them. Numerous small floating spheres constantly monitor Daikoku City for cybernetic breaches, blasting suspicious areas with a sort of ray.
The first episode is very promising. The characters have distinct, non-cliche personalities, and the Denno Coil universe is the most interesting I’ve come across recently. Whether Denno Coil remains cool depends in part in how carefully and consistently director and writer Mitsuo Iso works out the logic of the intersecting real and virtual worlds. It also depends on whether he has twenty-six episodes’ worth of story to tell. The character designs are simplified but serviceable (though the characters who wear visors instead of glasses look like they have pig noses), and the art and the animation are adequate. The background music sounds interesting when I’m aware of it.
Mars needs penguins
An interview with Berkeley Breathed:
QS: An Opus film had been announced awhile back – what is its current status? Are plans for it to be live action or animated?
BREATHED: Wonderfully dead. As it shall remain.
QS: Doonesbury was a musical – why not Bloom County?
BREATHED: The first part of that question is the answer.
(Via Cartoon Brew.)
29/365
Oak Park
“… a frustratingly unrealistic effort at creating balance and strategy”
28/365
Central Riverside Park.
27/365
First Christian Church II. (When you don’t have a wonderful image, play with posterization and layers and other gimmicks.)
Chuck amuck
(Via Cartoon Brew.)
Truth in advertising
The offense is slightly mitigated by the fact that the fifth season never was licensed and thus there is no legitimate region 1 release. Still, usually it’s the “marketplace” dealers who sell bootlegs, not Amazon.com itself.
Update (5/22/07): Sailor Stars is “currently not available,” and the link above returns a 404.
26/365
Notes
According to historical costumers, a properly-fitted corset is quite comfortable. Evidentally, in Foreland the craft of corsetry has sadly declined.
After the over-the-top first episode, the second episode of Murder Princess is a bit of a let-down as the former bounty hunter ((What is it with bounty hunters, anyway? I would have thought that Cowboy Bebop adequately covered the subject, but they keep turning up everywhere. Half the characters in El Cazador are bounty hunters.)) discovers the challenges of palace life. It’s still quite watchable, though, and it’s hard to dislike a series in which the good guys look like this:
25/365
A “decent” fantasy
Alex saw Tales from Earthsea and has a surprisingly positive take on it. (I don’t think he’s read the books yet.)
Grrr
You can legally download the first episode of Death Note for $2, which is not a bad deal, assuming that there is no limit on how many times you can play the file. However, as Astro discovered, if you’re on a Mac, you’re out of luck. You can only watch the show on a Windows machine. This is not mentioned on the download page; you have to do some clicking in the “support” menus to discover this. It looks like I’m going to wait a few months, or years, for the DVDs. I wonder if Viz will stick a mandatory Naruto trailer at the begining of the Death Note discs, as they do with Hikaru no Go.
24/365
Pine bark.