I’m not watching any more of Gugure! Kokkuri-san. Read the entry for “Tengu” here and you’ll see why.
Category: Anime and Japan
Only apparently real
A couple of Dickian moments from today’s viewing:
(Gugure! Kokkuri-san)
(Joshiraku)
And a couple of duckies:
Sword and twintails
There might be several shows worth watching this fall, after several seasons of slim pickings.
The protagonist of Madan no Ou to Vanadis is an archer and honorable noble from a minor province in a corrupt kingdom. He is captured on the battlefield by a “war maiden,” who dislikes boring battles, and who doesn’t wear armor, or much else. It’s too soon to tell where the story is going; my guess is that Tigre will have to choose between his homeland in the decadent kingdom of Brune, and the apparently more healthy kingdom of Zhcted where the bright and comely war maiden lives. The series is written and directed by Tatsuo Sato, the man man responsible for Shingu and Mouretsu Pirates, two of my favorite shows. It looks a bit boobalicious for my taste, but I expect that Sato will tell a good story. There are screencaps below the fold.
Aside: Repeat after me: Critics. Are. Idiots. Exclamation point. For example, here’s what the jackasses at ANN wrote about Vanadis.
Amagi Brilliant Park could very well be the first Kyoto Animation series I watch all the way through since Suzumiya Haruhi I. The protagonist, an abrasive, narcissistic former child actor, is drafted, at gunpoint, to reform a decrepit amusement park lest the fairies who live there lose their homes. Although Seiya is an unpleasant character as the story begins, the writer is careful not to make him repulsive, and the fairies are not the cloyingly sweet sort that bore children and nauseate adults. Two episodes in, it looks like it will be at least good.
In Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu, a high school boy with a fascination for girls with paired ponytails becomes a warrior in a powered suit with twintails himself. It’s as silly as it sounds. It might be fun, as long as it doesn’t turn stupid and the writers quit with all the double-entendres. There are screen caps below the fold.
Gugure! Kokkuri-san is the oddest show I’ve seen in quite some time. A little girl who lives alone declares that she is a doll. She summons a fox spirit with a Japanese variant of a ouija board, and Kokkuri, the fox, decides to haunt her, i.e., be her guardian. Sometimes Kohina, the girl/doll, is drawn as a human, sometimes as a doll. I think it’s intended to be a cutesy comedy, but it’s a rather unsettling one. Probably during the course of the series Kohina will gradually become more human while acquiring other supernatural friends, but there’s a danger that the show could lurch into something like the final episode of Bottle Fairy. There are screencaps below the fold.
Update: Gugure! Kokkuri-san is off my watch list and is not recommended.
Pity they’re not real
If those were actual inflorescences of Amorphophallus titanum and Rafflesia arnoldii, Seiya and Isuzu would be treated to the gentle aromas of dimethyl trisulfide, dimethyl disulfide, trimethylamine, isovaleric acid, benzyl alcohol, phenol, indole and other distinctively fragrant molecules.
It’s just possible that Amagi Brilliant Park is that rare thing, a KyoAni show worth watching.
Heating up in Honshu
Ontakesan, the second-tallest mountain in Japan, is clearing its throat.
This is possibly the most frightening video I’ve ever seen. If there had been fresh hot lava erupted, the ash cloud would have instantly incinerated the videographer and everyone with him.
A less-terrifying video of the mountain:
There’s a webcam here.
Update: vulcanologist Erik Klemetti comments.
Briefly bespectacled
A not-quite-random screen capture from Joshiraku. Pete isn’t the only one who finds the show compulsively re-watchable, though of necessity I stick with the fansub.
(Dammit, WordPress Safari, when I type “fansub,” I don’t mean “fan sub.” Don’t harass me with your expletive-deleted autocorrect.)
Update: a few more screencaps:
The rest of the cast …
… and one more.
I recently encountered liquid celery. I hope I never do again.
Watch your language
So today is Squawk Like a Parrot day? Meh. If it’s pirates you want, I recommend Marika Kato and company. (The picture above is the wallpaper on one of my computer monitors.)
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Something I found in my archives that might be worth posting again: G.K. Totoro, or Totoro Roosevelt?
(From here.)
Today’s quote
His films have an inner clarity and beauty that few others achieve. Yet they are frequently wrapped in mystery, ambiguity, and confusion. And purposely so. Miyazaki not only fills his films with the treasures of intellectual study, he also refuses to over-clarify them. As he said of his epic Princess Mononoke, “I made this film fully realizing that it was complex…If one depicts the world so that it can be figured out or understood, the world becomes small and shabby.”
Update: Bonus quote:
There is a parallel universe where Hayao Miyazaki directed The Hobbit movie. Maybe one of its inhabitants can lend me a DVD.
The futures of the past
GorT recently found a Popular Mechanics list of the 50 greatest “sci-fi” television shows. Most of the shows listed were aired after I quit watching teevee, but there are a few I can comment on.
41. Battle of the Planets — I bought the first disc of Gatchaman to fill out an order a few years ago. It’s of great historical importance in the development and popularization of anime and all that, but Gatchaman Crowds is better.
36. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century — Dumb, but it had what’s-her-name in spandex during the first season.
35. Cowboy Bebop — A great classic, I suppose, but I lost interest after a few episodes. Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack almost redeems it. My recommendation: skip the DVDs and track down the CDs.
31. Lost in Space — A dumb show containing the germ of a better one. Keep the Dr. Smith and the robot, add Will Robinson to tweak Smith’s vestigial conscience and generate plots, dump the rest of crew, and you’d have a pretty good sf comedy. The actual show was watchable only when Smith was onscreen with the robot.
30. Battlestar Galactica (1978-79) — I watched the first episode or two. I was embarrassed for Lorne Greene.
27. Red Dwarf — I never saw any of this, but I read a couple of the books. They’re okay, but Douglas Adams did that sort of thing better.
26. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex — I haven’t watched all of it, but what I’ve seen is very good. And there’s Yoko Kanno’s music as well.
11. Firefly — I watched a couple of episodes while visiting friends a few years ago. I might watch the rest sometime.
10. The Outer Limits — When it was good, it was great, or so I thought when I was eleven. I haven’t seen it since.
8. Neon Genesis Evangelion — What the hell is this doing in this list at all, let alone in the top ten? I watched the first disc of Anno’s neurotic fantasy, and I’d like those two hours of my life back. The only character who isn’t repellent is the penguin.
7. The Prisoner — I never saw the final episode. I have Thomas Disch’s novelization somewhere in my piles of books. Someday I may read it.
6. Star Trek (the original series) — A favorite when I was young, despite my contempt for Kirk.
5. The Twilight Zone — Another favorite. Unfortunately, it was seldom broadcast at a time when I could watch it.
1. Dr. Who — I saw a few episodes during the Tom Baker era. It was okay.
The Popular Mechanics article is missing a qualification: all the shows listed were broadcast in America. A true list of the best science fiction shows of all time broadcast anywhere would have to include these:
• Shin Sekai Yori — What are the consequences of a change to human nature? What is human?
• Serial Experiments Lain — Cyberpunk meets ontology; Teilhard’s noösphere gone wrong.
• Dennou Coil — Augmented reality and kids. Imagine Ghost in the Shell as done by Miyazaki.
• Shingu — A friendly town with a secret, kids with strange powers and invaders from space. And they’re all genuinely likable, except for the killer robots.
And perhaps these:
• Oh! Edo Rocket — Aliens beasts and rockets in 19th-century Edo, with repression and corruption, slapstick and horror, and a faux Glenn Miller soundtrack.
• Kaiba — You can take a person’s memories from one body and put them in another. What could possibly go wrong?
• Mouretsu Pirates — High school girls and space pirates. It was directed by Tatsuo Sato, the man responsible for Shingu. As with Shingu, the story is good but the ultimate value of the show is in the characters whom you enjoy spending time with.
• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — The twilight of the human race, with fairies.
… and probably several others I’ve forgotten or haven’t seen. There are undoubtedly worthy shows from other countries as well that I’ve never heard of.
5555+
The Lavender Hill Mob by crazedigitalmovies
I stumbled across a few old favorite movies. Above is The Lavender Hill Mob, an Ealing Studio classic featuring Alec Guinness and his classic smile.
Probably the greatest AMV ever made. I’m not particularly fond of either Daft Punk or Leiji Matsumoto, but the combination works very well.
Yellow Submarine (1968) George Dunning with… by myfilm-gr
You have a choice of Yellow Submarines. Above is from a lower-quality source; below looks better, but the aspect ratio is wrong.
There’s an excess of real life …
… so things will continue quiet here for a while. In the meantime, here’s Masumi Itou with a piano version of the closing theme to Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita: ((You can listen to the tune in context here, and follow the key changes here.))
The 250 faces of Sailor Moon
Recently about 250 animators, each with his own idiosyncratic style, redid an episode of the old English dub of Sailor Moon, each taking a few seconds. The result is, um, amazing. This is Sailor Moon as you’ve never seen her before: surrealistic, kaleidoscopic, bizarre and beyond bizarre. The screen caps here only hint at the stupefying variety of clashing styles in the complete episode. Even if you’re not a Sailor Moon fan, it’s worth watching just to see what contemporary animators are capable of.
Funiculi, Funicula
The Girls und Panzer OVA has finally been subtitled, though it apparently hasn’t hit the torrent sites yet. In it, Miho and her comrades face the girls of Anzio. They’re an enthusiastic crew who’d rather fight than eat, and vice versa. ((Yeah, I’m ripping off S.J. Perelman here.)) Anzio has a bunch of cute, but pesky, little tanks, plus one that’s not so cute. Tank otaku Yukari gets a chance to shine, and we learn more about Caesar of the military history obsessives.
The ending is never in doubt, but that hardly matters. The Anzio OVA is the most purely fun of any Girls und Panzer episode, and is worth tracking down if you enjoyed the original series.
There are additional screencaps below the fold. Steven has many more in his rather spoilerous post.
Incidentally, if you’d like to introduce sensha-dou to your local high school, there’s an auction that might interest you. (Via AoSHQ.)
Update: The “loligeddon” sub makes much more sense than the “AK-Submarine” one that I first watched, and it looks better, too.
Hoooo, ha ha ha ha ha ha
Motoo Akibo, the co-creator of Doraemon, also wrote stories about the perpetually smiling Moguro Fukuzou, Warau Salesman, of which over 100 episodes were animated around 1990. What I’ve seen of Doraemon is harmless and bland. I recently care across a few episodes of Warau Salesman, which is neither. Here’s how the eponymous salesman introduces himself:
My name is Moguro Fukuzou. People call me “The Laughing Salesman.” However, I’m no ordinary salesman, because I’m in the soul business. Human souls, that is.
The world is full of lonely men and women, both young and old. I’m here to fill the gaps within your lonely souls. Completely free of charge, I might add. A satisfied customer is the only compensation I desire.
Fukuzou’s customers are people who are not happy with their lives. One might wish to be freed from the demands others make of him; another might want recognition for heroism; yet another might resent having to work at all. Portly, knowing Fukuzou offers his services to them, changing their lives. He has an odd idea of customer satisfaction, though. At the end of each ten-minute episode, Fukuzou’s client will have destroyed his marriage, ruined his career, or be headed to prison or a mental institution, much to Fukuzou’s amusement as he walks away, laughing.
Jolly, smarmy Fukuzou’s rumbling voice is supplied by Tooru Oohira, who is also the Japanese voice of Fred Flintstone, Homer Simpson and Darth Vader.
Obviously, this is not a show for everyone. It’s unlikely ever to be licensed, but if its dark vision intrigues you, there are about ten episodes subtitled that you can find with a bit of persistence.
That darn cat
A few notes on The Return of the Revenge of the Son of the Bride of Sailor Moon, Fit the First:
• The opening theme for Sailor Moon is “Moonlight Densetsu.” Period. Anything else is wrong, particularly if it involves Momoiro Clover Z.
• Kotono Mitsuishi is Sailor Moon — that is, the Kotono Mitsuishi of 20 years ago. Now she’s in her mid-forties. She’s still one of the best voice actresses in the business, but you can hear the strain in her voice as she tries to sound like a fourteen-year-old
• The first episode of the rebooted anime follows what I remember of the original fairly closely. The differences are mostly improvements. Mamoru isn’t quite as insufferable as he was the first time, for instance, though he’s still a pompous twit.
• Usagi’s bawling has potential as an offensive weapon.
• The art looks vastly better than in the original anime. The character designs have been tweaked to follow the manga style more closely, which is a plus overall. Unfortuntely, it also tends to emphasize the bug-eyes.
Should you watch it? If you are a Sailor Moon obsessive or are interested in mahou shoujo/sentai team hybrids, it’s worth sampling. Most other viewers will find it rather silly. I might watch more, or I might not.
A few notes
None of this summer’s anime looks likely to break on through my indifference. Yet another Nobunaga story? Momotaro, with fan service? An undead idol? Meh. I have better ways to waste my time. There are a couple I might take a look at anyway — Sailor Moon, to see if it’s any improvement on the original, and Hanayamata, to see the dance — but none of the descriptions has piqued my curiosity in the way that the previews of Shin Sekai Yori and Joshiraku did.
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Who is this unfriendly gentleman? I guarantee you that you’ve heard of him. The answer is here.
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Tricia Spencer and Howard Rains will play a concert that you can listen to live online Thursday evening. I’ve heard Tricia several times at Winfield, and I can certify that she is one hell of a good old-time fiddler.