A couple of odd moments from current shows. The above is from Bakuon, which features the Queen of Tears in a non-angsty role as a motorcycle. Below is from Tanaka-kun Is Always Listless.
Um, okay
Category: Art and screen captures
Apropos of nothing in particular
Natsume Yuujin-cho, episode 9.
Hmphmhmphwmhphm
Let no screencap go to waste: miscellaneous illustrations for posts I didn’t write.
Murder and meh-hem
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.”
Respect your elders
Rory Mercury demonstrates the proper attitude to take with politicians in the eighth episde of GATE.
Be courteous to goth-loli girls, particularly when they are 961 years old and carry axes that strong men can’t budge.
Advice to parents
Think carefully about how you name your children, even if you’re fictional characters. This goes double when you’re royalty.
One of the novelties of this week’s episode of GATE is that next week’s preview was in the middle of the show. I’m curious to see if there will be any Wagner.
Update: Yep, there was a little Wagner, with helicopters.
A bit of nostalgia
From The Wind Rises.
Checking in
I’m in the middle of a complicated project, and I’ll probably remain scarce for a while. The picture above is a sort of preview.
Postcard from Galihabara
I discovered this morning that as of last January, the translation of Marie & Gali 2.0 has reached episode three. That leaves just 27 more to go. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to see the rest.
Bait and switch
From the previews for episode 18 of Wagaya no Oinari-sama, or Our Home’s Fox Deity. The duckies in the preview did not appear in the episode itself.
100,000 drawings
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.
Pop quiz
One, and only one, of the characters above from the Heroic Botch of Arslan is a girl. Can you tell which one?
[poll id=”3″]
Update: The answer is below the fold.
The pirates return
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.
Rococo and roll
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.
2014 in review, short version
Apropos of something or other
“Pirate” beats “ninja” easily, and “samurai,” too.
(Illustration from Amagi Brilliant Park, episode seven. Chart from Google Ngram Viewer.)
Snapshots and home videos
(From episode six of Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu.)
Good question.
I’ve never been that interested in yachting, but I could change my mind. (Via Steven.)
I’ve never any interest in football, European or American. Perhaps I’ve missed out. (Via the Brickmuppet.)
Perhaps not. (Via the Borderline Boy.)
Calendar girls
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.
Check
In addition to the usual nendoroids, figmas, keychains and the like, I expect that there will also be Madan no Ou to Vanadis chess sets available soon.
As of episode three, Vanadis looks to be the keeper of the fall season.
Tigre-kun to Vanadi-chu
For those of you who believe that no show is complete without chibis, there is a brief ONA supplement to Madan no Ou to Vanadis out there.