The website for Satoshi Kon’s current project is active. Yume-Miru Kikai looks like a significant departure from Kon’s previous work, at least visually, and unlike Paranoia Agent and Paprika, this “future folklore story” might be suitable for all ages.
An old interview with the late John Sladek I came across recently. Sladek, discoverer of the thirteenth sign of the zodiac (Arachne, May 13 to June 9), ((For the morbidly curious, my own sign is “No parking — violators will be towed at owner expense.”)) was one of the last century’s best satirists and is of my favorite writers.
Several otherwisesane and sensiblepeople recently have been posting their Champions Online or City of Heroes characters. I thought I’d check the games out. Fortunately for me, the former is Windows-only, but the latter does have a Mac client and a free trial period, so that’s how I spent a couple of lunch hours this past week. (Actually, I spent the first lunch twiddling my thumbs while the client downloaded nearly three gigabytes of additional content — if I had realized that it would do that, I wouldn’t have bothered.) It is fun to play with the character creator; you can make a (rather skanky-looking) schoolgirl, which isn’t possible with such sites as Hero Machine. The game itself, though, looks as dull as every other MMORPG I’ve visited, as far as I could judge from the tutorials (I tried both the heroic and villainous options). It’s nifty to design colorful avatars, but “jogging heroically” to fight random enemies is tedious. I’d rather listen to music —
— which is what I do in Second Life. My initial impressions of SL were rather negative, and if you want to find intelligent people to discuss anime with, you’ll do better hanging around Steven’s place. But there is lots of music there, some of it good, and there are other people with tastes as wide-ranging as mine. It’s possible to stream music from your computer to sites within Second Life, which I’ll be doing Saturday evenings for while. If you have a SL account, stop by Grizzy’s Café between 6 and 8 p.m. SL time (i.e., California time; between 8 and 10 p.m. in the central USA time zone). Tonight I’ll be playing very miscellaneous Japanese music, from Yoko Kanno to Hatsune Miku.
There is a tremendous range of ready-made avatars available in Second Life, such as this Super S Sailor Moon (to my eye, the most elegant of all mahou shoujo costumes). You can also design your own from scratch, if you're handy with Photoshop and virtual 3-D manipulation.
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I’ve sampled some random examples from the fall anime season. So far I haven’t finished a single episode. Surprisingly, the one I watched longest was Kämpfer, this season’s attempt to create the ultimate anime. Let’s see … we have
• high school students
• fighting
— with guns
— with swords
— with magic
(… but no forks)
• sailor fuku
• panties
• sexual ambiguity (question of definition: is a guy who actually changes to a girl truly a “trap”?)
• a meganekko
• henshin
• absolute territory
• .4 Rushunas — and that’s the hero. He also runs like a girl.
I hesitate to say whether there are any moeblobs or tsunderes in the show. I think one character qualifies on both counts, but that isn’t my field of expertise.
That’s in just the first fifteen minutes or so. There are also hints of a developing harem, a ridiculously powerful student government and perhaps a vast conspiracy. I expect future episodes will include copious steam. There are unlikely to be nekomimi, mecha or winged people, but I wouldn’t put it past the writers — it really is a silly show. Sad girls in snow are probably too much to hope for.
My only hope for the fall season is Kuuchuu Buranko, or Trapeze, whose crew includes Kenji Nakamura and Manabu Ishikawa of Mononoke.
Here are some curious items from the most recent batch of search terms:
heresy is not kawaii
gurren lagann knitting
cowboy bebop knitting
knitting anime themes
ponyo on a stick
sailor moon cardboard cutout a religion based off of sailor moon
canzoni kawaii
languid gay charles solomon
gender critics are idiots
anime girl wolf boy frog
haruhi peanuts
kawaii the murderer pics
safe for work babes
oink supervisor
There were a few that make me glad that I am unlikely ever to meet the searchers:
Ubu, meanwhile, has discovered RahXephon. In a comment at Ubu’s place, Avatar confirms what I had suspected:
RahXephon was a show where we constructed a couple of really elaborate theories that explained everything, wrote off to Japan with a “so which one is it, we need to know for the translation”, and got back “huh? We did all those things because they looked cool.”
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I recently watched the first two episodes of El Hazard: The Magnificent World. Good grief. Here’s our hero:
I really wonder sometimes: do Japanese boys want to be girls? If you think I’m exaggering, count the thumbnails on this graphic:
The first El Hazard OVA was written by Ryoe Tsukimura. He also wrote the scripts for the first Tenchi Muyo! movie and the many UFO Princess Valkyries. They have their moments, but they’re all essentially anime junk food. Most of the rest of Tsukimura’s output looks similarly undistinguished. However, he does have one classic to his credit, Noir, which was his idea and his script. In this, he reminds me of Kou Ohtani, a competent, unmemorable soundtrack composer who on one occasion exhibited afflatus.
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Since I closed nominations for the current poll, commenters have mentioned Ghost in the Shell, Tenchi Muyo GXP, Kimagure Orange Road, Spice and Wolf and Wolf’s Rain. The first has been mentioned twice (the second time in an email), so I’ll probably add it to the second round candidates. Would anyone care to second any of the other series?
When the Fnools invaded Earth, they disguised themselves as two-foot-tall real estate salemen, figuring that no one would take them seriously until too late. ((See Philip K. Dick’s “The War with the Fnools.”)) The aliens in Mao-chan adopt a similar strategy: by assuming mercilessly kawaii forms, the invaders make the Japanese defense forces reluctant to engage them in combat, lest the human soldiers be seen as bullies. The Japanese fight cuteness with cuteness: the head of the land forces enlists his eight-year-old granddaughter, Mao, to battle the invaders, arming her with a baton, a full-size model of a tank, and a clover-shaped pin that transforms her into a not-terribly-competent but very cute mahou shoujo. Mao soon is joined by a couple of other eight-year-old girls: Misora, representing the air force, and Sylvie, representing the navy, both recruited by their doting grandfathers. Mao and Misora are ordinary grade-school girls, as kids in anime go, but Sylvie is distinctly Osaka-ish.
Vicipaedia needs otaku who can write decent Latin. The anime and manga pages are pathetic. (I had several years of Latin, but that was a long time ago in a different century, and it would take more time than I can spare to regain competence.)
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Another entry for the “ducks in anime” file:
From Negima Ala Alba OAD #2 (not recommended).
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I discovered that the software used to animate Hatsune Miku is freeware, available here. It’s surprisingly capable. Here’s Miku dancing Maurice Bejart’s choreography; compare it to the final minutes of this. ((I recommend skpping the first six minutes unless you are a Bejart fanatic.)) Unfortunately, like Miku herself, it’s not for Macs.
That other dealer is holding a “bargain bin blowout.” It’s mostly junk, of course, but there are complete sets of some worthy anime available for very reasonable prices, including Bottle Fairy, Divergence Eve and Misaki Chronicles, Haibane Renmei, Serial Experiments Lain, Shingu (including a t-shirt), Someday’s Dreamers and Sugar, a Tiny Snow Fairy. There’s also some Miles Davis.
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So Sailor Moon is girl stuff? Check the results of this poll.
I had intended to write a detailed comparison of the print and anime versions of Moribito, but I doubt that I will get around to it any time soon, and I’ve loaned the book to friends. Here are some highlights from the post I’m not writing:
I found an application that makes jigsaw puzzles from files on my computer and exports them as java applets. Eventually I’ll figure out how to embed them in my web pages. Until then, here are a couple made from screen captures that you can download and play with:
Update: I think I have the embedding working. I’m putting the picture from Rocket Girls that I filched from Steven below the fold because it is so large that it screws up the layout.
Update II: It works in Camino, but not in Safari or Firefox — you can see the puzzle, but you can’t manipulate the pieces. Grrr. I’ll have to find another solution. Until then, here’s the .jar file: Rocket girls.
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