Category: Anime and Japan

100,000 drawings

redline01

I recently got a blu-ray drive for my computer. For the first movie to watch at 1080p, I picked Redline. It was a good choice. Although there are plenty of digital effects employed in the 2009 movie, all the characters, all the cars — everything — are hand-drawn, and it shows. The last half-hour is the most spectacular anime I’ve seen since the end of Akira, and the whole movie is gorgeous. The screencaps here are all from the first twelve minutes.

Redline opens and closes with wild road races. In between, there is a romance, interference from the mafia, and a repressive government up to No Good, but the story doesn’t get in the way. The movie is pure eye candy.

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Look back in boredom

I can’t make a top ten list of anime for 2014 because I didn’t watch ten series all the way through. Here’s a quick look at what I finished.

The best

Pupipo. It’s unlikely ever to be licensed, so you’ll have to track it down through irregular channels. It’s worth an hour of your life.

Pretty good

Hozuki no Reitetsu. Life in Japanese hell. The most successful comedy of the year. To fully appreciate the eighth episode, watch a Kyary Pamyu Pamyu video first. (You don’t have to watch the video all the way through. One minute will be plenty.)

Kill la Kill, part two. Over the top and beyond. ((I’d like to see a sequel to this — not more bizarre action with the fate of the world at stake, but rather an account of how Satsuki adapts to ordinary life and ordinary clothes. It will be a much greater challenge for her than anything she faced in the show.))

The rest

Amagi Brilliant Park. It’s the first Kyoto Animation series I’ve watched beginning to end since the first season of Suzumiya Haruhi, which is something. Still, I was too irritated with the principals to enjoy the humor.

Madan no Ou to Vanadis. The greatest disappointment of the year. Tatsuo Sato is more comfortable with spaceships than with swords and magic. Tigre is too much a straight arrow, and the war maidens are often too silly to take seriously. The show felt rushed. It needs at least 26 more episodes, but I’d rather Sato start a new project that suits his vision better than waste more time in Brune.

Ore Twintails ni Narimasu. The fourth episode is great. After that, it goes downhill fast. There are way too many double-entendres throughout, and the premise is just a bit squicky.

Sabagebu. Sometimes funny, sometimes tasteless. Still, it’s a good antidote for the Stella C3 catastrophe.

Sekai Seifuku —Bouryaku no Zvezda—. Sometimes funny, sometimes merely weird.

Witch Craft Works. I know I watched this, but I can barely remember it.

And a couple of other things

Girls und Panzer: Kore ga Hontou no Anzio-sen Desu! OVA. A particularly enjoyable affair with Miho’s girls and their tanks.

Mouretsu Pirates: Abyss of Hyperspace. Excellent, as far as I can judge from the raw, but I’ll have to withhold final judgement until it’s subtitled.

The pirates return

In-Your-Facetime

I got impatient and downloaded a raw of Mouretsu Pirates: Abyss of Hyperspace. It looks beautiful, and the story moves briskly along. What that story is, though, I only vaguely understand. Will someone please license this for North America, or, failing that, fansub it?

There are a few screencaps below the fold. Steven has a bunch more here, though my favorite image from the movie is here.

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Rococo and roll

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Home

Some years back I read Novala Takemoto’s Shimotsuma Story, published in English as Kamikaze Girls. I wrote about it here. I finally watched the movie based on the book this evening. Some of the humor was overly broad, and there were some gratuitous crudities early on, but overall this movie about a very odd couple was watchable and often very funny. Kyoko Fukuda and Anna Tsuchiya were plausible as Momoko the lolita and Ichiko the yanki. The story was necessarily simplified, but it was generally true to what I remember of the book.

There are more screen captures beneath the fold. Click the pictures to see the details of Momoko’s garb.

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Visual aid

Not Europe

Those following Madan no Ou to Vanadis might find a map of its world useful. I found a couple at a wiki devoted to the show. (I tweaked the contrast of the first to improve readability.)

Advice to cartographers: Legibility trumps stylishness. Pseudo-black letter might look pretty on the page, but it’s a pain to interpret. Please stick to plain fonts such as Helvetica or Times Roman.

Another map

Calendar girls

Girls und Panzer

It’s time to order next year’s calendars. I found a number of possibilites here, notably Girls und Panzer and Hozuki no Reitetsu. Others of note include Cardcaptor Sakura, World Conquest Zvezda Plot, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Hyperdimension Neptunia, Natsume Yujincho‘s Nyanko and the third Madoka Magica movie.

There’s plenty else there — lots of cheesecake, hundred of dogs, Mt. Fuji, Naruto and similar franchises, all the usual stuff. There are also curiosities like the Karel Capek calendar, which is about tea, not robots or newts; the lifestyles disease prevention calendar; and, the maritime self-defense force calendars, both male and female.

Boo, boo, etc.

It’s Halloween today, right? Time to get the bag of chocolate out of the freezer.

There’s a fine line between spooky and silly, as Frëd illustrates in this footnote to American history.

*****

There’s a lot of anime suitable for Halloween, from the many iterations of Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro (including in particular Hakaba Kitaro) to Soul Eater and Hozuki no Reitetsu. If I had to pick just one, though, it would be Kenji Nakamura’s Mononoke. Here’s one of the two-episode stories:

The entire show is on YouTube, but it’s available for such a reasonable price that there’s no excuse not to buy your own copy of this probable classic. ((I don’t declare anything a “classic” until it’s at least ten years old, and Mononoke is from anime’s year of wonder, 2007.))

*****

Boris Karloff drinks tea.

*****

If you’re looking for a proper Halloween post, Isegoria has a bunch of them.