Category: Animation

Demon cats and other holiday fun

Such a sweet smile
So it’s Halloween, and you’d like to watch some spooky anime, preferably available online legally for free? There are some suggestions here, but there are other series I prefer. For monsters, there’s the currently-airing Ushio and Tora. For Shinto 101 and yokai, there’s Natsume Yuujin-cho. But my first choice is Mononoke, Kenji Nakamura‘s first series and still his best. The medicine seller’s investigations are as much moral detective stories as horror shows, informed by a stringent sense of justice. If you merely want to be scared out of your wits, there are many other shows to choose from, but if you want a work of art worth rewatching and thinking about, try Mononoke.

The medicine seller

Definitely not Jeeves

Black Butler

I watched the first episode of Black Butler years ago and decided that it was not for me. Nevertheless, I’d like to attend tonight’s performance of OperAnime, which combines the peculiar anime with an opera from 1880. Unfortunately, the event is being held outdoors, and it is likely to rain all evening.

*****

I may need to watch this week’s episode of My Little Pony. What would Ranma’s cutie mark be?

MLP-Friendship Is Anime

Murder and meh-hem

Imperfection

The Perfect Insider has very good opening and closing animations. The stuff in between, which falls somewhere between a locked-room mystery and And Then There Were None and concerns people tediously self-conscious of their high IQs, is less enthralling. I did spot a pair of red half-rim spectacles, though. If there were any rubber ducks, I missed them.

Speaking of ATTWN, here’s Eve Tushnet on Agatha Christie: “Never trust the cute ones.”

Notes from the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies

Various odds and ends:

Fillyjonk linked to an old but not outdated story by Ray Bradbury, “The Murderer.” I found a couple of other favorites, “The Veldt” and “The Pedestrian.”

*****

Perhaps not entirely unrelated to the Bradbury stories:

Having time each day merely to amuse oneself, or just to sit and think, greatly improves one’s life. Yet we’re practically taught to avoid such periods – to stay as busy as possible virtually all the time. The emphasis on work, on “multitasking” (which, as a former expert in the architecture of multitasking operating systems for embedded devices, I can assure you is always an illusion) and on achieving ever more per unit time is using us up in ways we don’t always perceive and even less often appreciate. You’d almost suspect that time spent in introspection had been deemed an offense against the social norms.

(Via Dustbury.)

*****

While Sakurajima is ominously quiet, in the South Indian Ocean Piton de la Fournaise is putting on a modest, colorful show.

Continue reading “Notes from the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies”

Japanese dream

Roger, who is spending the current semester in Japan, recorded a theme from Someday’s Dreamers, playing both the piano and fiddle parts. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to embed Facebook videos on my site, but you can listen here.

Update: It’s on YouTube now.

Update II: Roger with some of his Japanese friends playing a different sort of music:

Beyond healing

Priorities

There’s “iyashikei,” or “healing” anime, “… created with the specific purpose of having a healing or soothing effect on the audience. Works of this kind often involve alternative realities with little to no conflict, emphasizing nature and the little delights in life.” In general I find these shows annoyingly bland. The few such that I like, I enjoy in spite of, not because of, their soothing nature.

On the other hand, there is what I think of as “convalescent” anime, shows to marathon when you’re starting to recover from an illness. Something invigorating with a good story and likable characters is what I want then, and the better efforts of Tatsuo Sato are perfect. Mouretsu Pirates has served me well in the past. A few days ago I watched Shingu yet again. It works every time.

I grabbed a few more screencaps along the way.

Continue reading “Beyond healing”

Return to Tortalia

I was in the mood for old favorites this evening, and realized that I hadn’t seen Kunio Katou’s The Diary of Tortov Roddle in several years. As I recall, it was on Crunchyroll for a while, but it’s gone now. Fortunately, it’s on YouTube, in two chunks, and here they are. The music is by Kenji Kondo of the Kuricorder Quartet.

Katou subsequently made La Maison en Petits Cubes. It may have won an Academy Award, but it’s actually very good.

Above the hot zone

I expected that at least one of the many active volcanoes on caldera-ridden Kyushu would land on the New Decade Volcano Program at Volcano Café, though I wasn’t sure which it would be: Aira, Aso, or one of the less-publicized ones. This weekend NDVP #4 turned out to be the Aso Caldera and, yes, it is potentially extremely nightmarish.

There are three more to go. From the comments to the Café post:

BillG: So this is #4…. I can’t imagine there are three worse scenarios..

Henrik: Trust me Bill, there are. One marginally more so, one decidedly worse and the final one so utterly mind-blowing that eventually Hollywood will make a blockbuster movie of it.

I would guess that one of those three is either Campi Flegrei or Vesuvius; the other two, I have no idea. I note that five of the volcanoes announced in the NDVP so far are in Asia and none in South America, and there are a lot of interesting mountains and lakes in Central and South America.

You can watch the Nakadake crater at Aso at the JMA site. The link to the camera is highlighted here (“Aso grass Chisato,” according to Giggle Translate):

Aso grass Chisato

You can usually see a plume of steam and gasses when the weather is clear, and occasionally some incandescence.

Update (9/13/15): Aso had a bit of a cough today (or tomorrow, depending on which side of the International Date Line you’re on).

Update II (9/18/15): … and coming in at #3, it’s Campi Flegrei.

Physics and technology, plus magic

The most dangerous person in the trans-gate territories.
The most dangerous person in the trans-gate territories.

One of the finest examples of sheer geekery I’ve ever come across is the comments thread to this post of Steven’s.

Of current shows, I’m watching only GATE and Ushio and Tora. Both, however, are very good in their different ways and are sufficient to make this a good summer for anime.

A better ensemble

Update: The ninth episode of GATE was a major disappointment, and I’ll probably skip it in future rewatches. However, it did give Rory a chance to wear something more tasteful than her usual ita outfit.

I won’t settle for the lesser of two evils …

… but I won’t vote for Cthulhu, either. Instead, here’s my choice for 2016:

Straight talk

• But they’re fictional characters! you say. And Donald Trump is real?

• But it’s against the Constitution! That might have been true in the past, but no longer. Nowadays, the meaning of the Constitution depends on what side of the bed Anthony Kennedy gets up on in the morning. It’s just a matter of picking the right day to present the question.

• But they’re not even from our world, let alone our country! Big deal. The same is true of the lousy golfer currently in the white house.

Do I expect Lelei and Rory to win? Probably not; I have a poor record with political endorsements. But there’s no question that an intelligent, responsible mage and a semi-divine warrior would do a better job leading the country than the present administration or the clown who wants to run the circus.

Continue reading “I won’t settle for the lesser of two evils …”

Grab your hard hat

Sakurajima, from episode 5 of Katanagatari
Sakurajima, from episode 5 of Katanagatari

The volcanic webcam star Sakurajima might be heading for a major eruption in the near future. The Japanese Meteorological Agency has raised the alert level for the Kagoshima area to “4,” advising residents in the districts nearest the volcano to prepare to evacuate.

While there are numerous webcams pointed at the Kyushu mountain, the only one I’ve found with a reliable night-time view is on the JMA’s page. Starting at the bottom of the list, it’s the first entry with a four-character name.

For further discussion, scroll down to the most recent comments here. The JMA released a statement here (pdf). It’s in Japanese only, but there are interesting maps and charts to study, and you can copy and paste the text into Giggle Translate.

Shichika, Togame, Sakurajima
Shichika, Togame, Sakurajima

Katanagatari, by the way, is a very good show.

Update: Meanwhile, in Ecuador …