Nothing can compensate for a crap script. Not irony, not flamboyant camera movement, not stars, nuthin’. On the other hand, a great script can survive a mediocre director, dull music, uninteresting production design, and even less-than-stellar performances. But you always need a story, and characters you want to see get what they want, or be denied what they want, or discover what they want or where they should go ….
Author: Don
First look, last look
I took a look at some of the new shows on Crunchyroll.
… and that’s when I stopped watching Arata the Legend.
Blasé boy meets annoying girl in Muromi-san. The gimmick is that the girl is a mermaid. I made it all the way through the first episode. Some of it is is funny, but the humor is rather low-brow. I doubt that I’ll watch more.
Devil Survivor 2 is based on an RPG. Usually that’s a bad sign but, surprisingly, I survived the entire first episode. A trio of adolescents download demons on their smartphones to fight monsters while the earth faces some sort of apocalypse. I expect that next week is the big infodump, and after that the show will go to hell, but it could surprise me.
For a moment I thought we were in Texas during bluebonnet season, but no such luck. Majestic Prince features annoying kids piloting mecha, and I lost interest within five minutes.
Boy meets girl again in The Severing Crime Edge. This time, the boy is obsessed with cutting girls’ hair, and the girl has very long hair that cannot be cut. Perhaps there’s a story there, but it felt creepy in the wrong way. It was another I dropped in five minutes.
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet is the least unpromising of the bunch, even if the protagonist is a mecha pilot. This might be connected to the fact that the staff includes a certain Gen Urobuchi, who not long ago wrote a story about a girl named Madoka.
*****
If the spring anime season isn’t dreary enough for you, there’s summer. When the only series that catches my eye is a remake of Sailor Moon, something is wrong.
Music for piano n hands
Marc-André Hamelin takes extravagant mechanical revenge on an idiot tune.
Is it possible …
… to do macro photography with a 50mm lens and an extension tube, and without a tripod?
Just barely.
More pictures from today’s trip to the botanical garden below the fold.
~Tomodachi wa Mahou~
The ponies got a shiny, bouncy new opening for their Japanese debut.
I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about it, but it is more palatable than the original.
To clear the treacle out of your ear, here’s “My Little Baccano.” ((Here’s the original Baccano opening, in case anyone still hasn’t seen it.))
Dance on a volcano
For fans of Genesis and Steve Hackett:
A typical high school
The third Girls und Panzer OVA gave us a panoramic view of the school ship. (To see the full-size image, right-click to open the link in a new window.) In terms of Kansas cities, it looks larger than Haysville but smaller than Emporia.
Update: The more I look at this picture, the spookier it becomes. Where is everybody?
*****
You all had a narrow escape, by the way. I had a few posts in mind for tomorrow which I planned to type up this afternoon. However, my neighbors decided at 1 a.m. this morning that I didn’t need to sleep. (Curiously, when I called on them later they did not come to the door, even though the door was wide open and the teevee was on.) Instead of writing, I spent the afternoon dozing in bed.
Further evidence of spring
Weeds are flourishing. Soon lawns will be purple with henbit.
It’s not official …
… until the first tornado warning, but spring is almost here. Trees are still leafless, but daffodils and small bulbs are in full bloom. I visited the botanical garden yesterday and found the pink okame cherry in bloom. The white yoshino cherry is lagging about a week behind. (The very double kwanzan cherry, I am not happy to note, has been cut down.) There are more Botanica pictures beneath the fold.
Ending well
Jonathan says that Shin Sekai Yori is “… the best science fiction TV show that I have ever seen, animated or otherwise.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but it definitely is in a class with Serial Experiments Lain and Dennou Coil. It’s the best show of any kind I’ve seen since at least Madoka Magica. The ending did not disappoint — not that I was worried; it was obvious early on that the creators knew exactly what they were doing.
It’s absolutely not for children, and even for adults I can’t give it an unreserved recommendation. It’s partly a horror story, with monsters and worse than monsters, all the more chilling for what isn’t shown. But if you have the stomach for it and are willing to think about aggression, social control and human nature, Shin Sekai Yori is worth your time.
*****
I can give Girls und Panzer an unreserved recommendation for all ages. The premise is silly — teams of high-school girls compete in tank battles — but the staff played it straight and made it work, and did so without panty shots. The last episode was exhilarating and satisfying. If you watch it with friends, you’ll likely cheer aloud as Miho and her comrades fight their desperate battle.
You’ve seen too much cosplay …
… when the first thing you notice in this picture is the old film SLR camera (and also how ugly the tattoos are).
Spring is finally here
Yeah, right.
Make a contract with Fluttershy
So the Japanese are going to get their own dub of My Little Pony ~Tomodachi wa Mahou~. Good for them; the first season, at least, (which is all I’ve seen) is often clever, rarely cloying, and probably better than nearly all other contemporary shows on western teevee.
Most of the actresses announced so far are new to me, but there are a few familiar voices. The Queen of Tears, Kikuko Inoue, is Princess Celestia. Fortunately, Celestia isn’t a weepy sort, and Inoue is a good actress when she isn’t bawling her eyes out. Rozen Maiden‘s Shinku is Twilight Sparkle, and Cardcaptor Sakura‘s Li Shaoran is Spike.
The surprise is the voice of the sweet, bashful Fluttershy: Emiri Kato. Kato earlier was the cute, cuddly and evil Kyubey. I have difficulty imagining Fluttershy with that voice. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
*****
Dusty Sage found a “State of the Herd” survey of Bronies. One of the findings is astonishing if it’s accurate: more than a quarter of all MLP:FIM fans are INTJs like me. I knew that thoughtful introverts are far more common on the internet than offline, but this is bizarre.
It’s March 17 …
… so here is St. Patrick evangelizing the Irish, with a cameo by Voltron.
From the observatory
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day might look familiar to fans of Mouretsu Pirates.
Under the rainbow
It looked like spring would arrive early this year, but that was before 22 inches of global warming fell. The snow is finally gone, but Wichita is still mostly brown. I figure that it will be another week or two before trees leaf out. I went to the botanical garden yesterday and found very little color aside from pansies and daffodils. The lenten rose, above, was the highlight of the trip. The Corylus avellana was in full bloom; look closely to spot the female flowers.
The most colorful item there was the gateway to the children’s garden, below.
Children's garden entrance in Wichita
The okame cherry was showing some pink in its buds. There might be a few flowers opening during the coming week and perhaps more than a few next Saturday. (It’s already cherry blossom season in Japan. Here’s the blooming forecast, should you be planning a trip there soon. (Via J. Greely.))
Update: the panorama works particularly well as a “little planet.”
A quick test …
… of the breadth of your culture:
If this makes you smile, you pass.
Update: A variation on the theme.
Faint visitor
The sky was mostly clear this evening, so I tried to find Comet PanSTARRS. I couldn’t see it myself — it’s not a bespectacled-eye object in Wichita skies, though possibly someone with better vision than mine can spot it — but my camera did.
Habemus spinacia
(Via a comment at God and the Machine.)
The youngest licensed hang glider pilot in Canada
Jonathan Clements remembers Toren Smith, who passed away Tuesday:
Toren’s enthusiasm for Japanese comics had brought him to the attention of the early staff of Viz Communications, but his relationship with many of them was confrontational and often irascible. Told by one manager to “go and do it himself” if he thought he knew the market better than them, Toren took it not as an oriental brush-off, but as a career move. He stayed in Japan for nine months, selling all his possessions and throwing himself into what he regarded as a real industry with potential growth: translating manga. Crippled financially by the fall in the value of the dollar, he lived a precarious existence nickel-and-diming, working as a janitor in exchange for no questions about his tardy rent in the apartment building, and freezing through a Japanese winter. He was reduced to stealing noodles from a convenience store, but he was also making the right deals, and on the way, acquiring wife number two, the lovely Tomoko Saito. He arrived back in America with a set of Japanese comics entirely packaged, photographed, flipped, retouched, and translated, the rights already agreed.
…
When it turned out that there was no comic tie-in to the Dirty Pair franchise, creator Haruka Takachicho let Toren buy the right to do his own, with artist Adam Warren. When the rights for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind were sold to Viz, Hayao Miyazaki insisted that Toren Smith be involved with the translation. When Eclipse Comics went under in America, Toren was sure to pay off the debts owed to the Japanese using his own money. He was always prepared to put his money where his mouth was, promising, for example, to indemnify Dark Horse against losses if an unknown title called Oh! My Goddess failed to make a profit.
At one point, Smith lived in the GAINAX house with about a dozen animators. According to Yasuhiro Takeda in Wikipedia:
Make no mistake, GAINAX House was a den of rabid bachelors. Nobody cleaned or even straightened up—ever. When we received a visit from Hiroe Suga (who for a time was staying at a boarding house in Tokyo and working as an author), she was literally sickened by the smell. The color drained from her face and she beat a very hasty retreat. Ultimately, we elected to move out of GAINAX House. When the landlord came by to give the place a once-over and release us from our contract, he was stricken speechless. Almost immediately after we vacated, the house was demolished.
