Might as well get the other shojo warhorse of the 21st century out the way too.

Now this I have seen one episode of. So that makes me totally qualified to talk about it.

Starting in 2004 and currently on it's third series, Pretty Cure follows the adventures of Nagisa and Honoka, two schoolgirls who are given magic powers by to two (theoretically) cute things called Mipple and Mepple. These powers enable them to become Cure Black and Cure White and fight the forces of The Dusk Zone. The usual deal, y'know.

What struck me however from the episode I saw was that the fight scenes seem choreographed as if from a shonen anime. While some magic powers are used, they resemble fighting game maneuveurs, and Nagisa sure does a lot of kicking and punching. This makes sense when you look at the credits and see Daisuke Nishio listed as series director. What else did he direct? Oh, a little thing called Dragon Ball. And Air Master. And 3×3 Eyes. In fact the only remotely shojo piece on the credits ANN give is as an episode director of Pataliro. Which is pretty far from Pretty Cure in oh so many ways.

Speaking of punching and kicking, which we were before I edited this and put in that stuff about Daisuke Nishio, Nagisa's Cure Black costume struck me as resembling somewhat the ringwear of the wrestler Mima Shimoda. Certainly the intentiion seems to be for it to resemble a pro-wrestling outfit and the colours match Shimoda's favoured LCO colour scheme of Black/Pink.

Interestingly, both this and the previously mentioned Ojamajo Doremi are the creation of the psuedonymous (and non-existant) Izumi Todo. Given that this started the year the Doremi anime ended, and that the characters being just that little bit older than the Doremi characters, you have to guess this is a careful Toei marketing plan aimed at having a show for the girls who feel they've outgrown Doremi.

Story-wise the first episode didn't look like it was planning on setting the world alight with originality, but the execution certainly seems interesting if you like this sort of thing. For me one episode was enough.

Oh, supposedly 4kids have this show too. But who knows if they are planning on doing anything with it.

And, another also, apparently the third series is some kind of restart with all new characters.

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Long running shojo warhorse of the 21st century.

These are the adventures of merchandisable witches whose character design becomes ever increasingly stylised as the series progress.

There are 4 series, a couple of films and an OAV. 4Kids licensed it and launched it in the US.

Doremi, a young girl accidentally discovers the owner of a local shop is a witch. This results in the witch turning into a green blob, and enlisting Doremi as a witch apprentice with the aim of training her up and being able to undo the transformation. Doremi's school friends Hazuki and Aiko end up being enlisted to and heart warming adventures aimed at teaching kids the value of both friendship and the purchasing the toys available based on the series.

Further series introduce more characters and change the theme of the shop (flowers, baking, clothing accessories), and thus the range of toys Bandai can sell.

It's so easy to be cynical about things you've never seen you know.

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First things first, here is the greatest Ayako Hamada photo I have ever seen (nicked, I think, from the lj of one of the writers of Progressive Boink):

See! She can smile!

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I heard Andrew Thompson's song “We're In Business” today. I liked it's blend of vocodered robots and silliness. And songs which mention the singer's name in them are great. In short, it's Chromeo if Chromeo wrote stupid songs full of rhyming couplets about robots.

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I'm intending on get the rest of Kemonozume watched before I drive back tomorrow. I've 4 more episodes to watch. Episode 9 was really great I thought, my favourite since episode 6. AniPages Daily pointed out that apparantly it was animated by an all-female crew. Should that make a difference or be notable? I don't know. I mean, you wouldn't go out your way and proclaim something as having a special quality just because only men made it. It seems odd that, that should still be a notable thing. But I guess it's a male dominated industry and so it is still noteworthy.

Let's just say it was a a really good cartoon, and I shall keep an eye out for more things made by the same people, regardless of their gender.

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I see Keroro Gunso got licensed while I was working and not paying attention to the internet. ADV too. I wonder how much that cost them? Still good to see it licensed and good to see ADV pick up a potentially big series (and if handled well – a license to print money).

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Been catching up too with Man To Man With Dean Learner. Can't help wondering Ayoade and Holness' parodies are possibly too specific to have a wide appeal. Even when parodying something with a fairly high public status like Uri Gellar, they get into parodying specific points like Gellar's appearance on The Tonight Show.

Which for me is aces, as that's the sort of anal retentive accuracy that I'll eat up with a spoon. There's a vague spectre hanging over the show that the original concept may have the Deano's After Dark show we see clips of occasionally. And that probably would have been even better from my point of view, though possibly not for the casual viewer. Regardless, I've been enjoying it and the Merriman Weir and Glynn Nimron episodes especially.

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Oh yeah, I finally saw The Grudge (the Japanese theatrical). After having the DVD sitting on my shelf for the better part of 2 years, I watched round by brother's place on Halloween.

Over-rated.

The concept was fine, but the execution just wasn't scary.

And the concept didn't really stretch out to the running time of the film. What was, I guess, meant to be an escalating sense of doom, became a chore as the house became something of a revolving door of death and flour covered kids.

I understand that there's plenty to ponder if you want to cogitate over the whys and wherefores of the thing if that's your bag, but the thing just don't do the scary thing on a visceral or a psychological level.

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Yay. I got paid this week.

So I got some books.

Before I get to that, let me pass comment on Unknown Man #89, the Elmore Leonard book I finally finished reading months after starting (due to forgetting where I had put it – pocket of winter coat it turned up in).

It's not the best of his I've read, but it is the earliest back I've gone so far. It features the Jack Ryan character from The Big Bounce (and source of Tom Clancy's character's name), and awful lot about alcoholism that borders on the preachy. The alcoholism does play a clever part in the plot though, and it ends in the sort of ending you expect from Leonard. Which is to say the carefully thought plots and machinations of characters smash up against those of other characters in a tangled mess of people who aren't as smart as they think they are.  It does the miss the neat trick of later books, where the true winner of a story turns out to be the minor character who may not have been the smartest guy in the book, didn't think they were smarter than they were. If this was later Leonard, you'd have expected the character of Tunafish to somehow come out on top.

So what did I buy?

Golgo 13 Volume 4.

Yes, this is the one with English Rose. The one where Golgo 13 kills a thinly veiled Dodi Al Fayed. In Paris. In November 1997. It's is glorious trash that only Golgo 13 can do. The other story involves President Ford hiring Golgo to go into outer space and shoot space things.

Monster Volume 5

Here's something I keep forgetting to mention. Urasawa's art in Monster really, really, looks like Tezuka's when he draws Tenma directly side on. It's slightly disconcerting, and I can'r remember if he does it in 20th Century Boys or Pluto. Not quite as gripping as Volume 4, but the stuff with Lunge near the end is kind of twisted. Like a Leonard character, his misplaced confidence in his own ability causes all sorts of bother.

The Essential Spectacular Spider-Man Vol. 1

The Essential series is nicely filling out with seventies material now, and while there are volumes out there that are more “essential” that I don't have, I was kind of in the mood for some seventies trash mixed with wild ideas/social commentary/satire. And Sal Buscema art.

I used to dislike his art when I was 14 and into Todd Macfarlane's Spidey, but now I can appreciate it for what it is – really tight consistent art.

Story-wise, you start with Gerry Conway's over-egged Stan Lee-aping, a few issues of Archie Goodwin, before you get to the meat. Bill Mantlo.

Mantlo brings with him his Deadly Hands of Kung Fu character, White Tiger and opens with a tale of civil unrest as Empire State University threatens to close night schools, potentially shutting out minority students. It's a relatively subtle mix of social commentary and superheroics. But this is Mantlo, and we don't expect subtle for long…

And we get… Brother Power and Sister Sun, leaders of the Legion of Light, a thinly veiled parody of The Unification Movement. Who here are secretly led by The Hate Monger. And this being Mantlo it's the incarnation of The Hate Monger with the most convoluted past and most unlikely to be found in a Spidey comic. PLUS, he manages to find time in the same storyline to introduce Razorback, a man who dresses like a pig, has the mutant power to be able to drive any vehicle and appears to have been designed as a Marvel “fad” hero to cash in on CB radio's popularity.

It is awesome.

Oh and this volume also has the introduction of the Hypno Hustler too!

There's also some filler work from Chris Claremont and Elliot S! Maggin, the latter is probably the first work I've read of Maggin's and I really liked it. I should really look up his Superman work now, as I understand it is thought well of.

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As the list Anime News Network had didn't have #47 and the TV Asahi page is no longer there, I found a full version of the list here. And that says The Twelve Kingdoms was number 47.

It's a recent series, starting in 2002 and based on a series of fantasy novels that began in 1992. And it's been release in English by Media Blasters in the US and Madman in Austrailia. And Tokyopop are due to release the novels starting in 2007.

I think I ignored it on release due to the fact it's about a Japanese girl who is transported to a fantasy world and I think I'd had my fill of stories about Japanese girls transported to fantasy worlds by that point.

My understanding of it's status in the west is that it's relatively unwatched, but acclaimed by those who have seen it. It's a long series (45 episodes/10 DVDs) and even shopping around it's still going to set you back about £80 to pick up the entire show, which as I've said many times before, is too expensive for a TV show.

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For a shed load of Studio 4°C clips found on youtube (hat's off to youtube user Iluvsushix, who posted most of these). This is all stuff I'd never seen before, music vids, MTV idents, anime sequences, adverts and short films. I was especially surprised to see that Koji Morimoto had directed a video for Britpop has-beens The Bluetones.

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Hello. Back once again with the ill behavior. Ill behaviour in the this case being talking about classic anime shows I've never seen.

And here we are with the second best known Osamu Tezuka show in the US, Kimba the White Lion, or Jungle Emperor Leo as it be known in it's hometown.

Based on Tezuka's manga that began in 1950, there were two television series in the sixties and a remake in 1989. And each incarnation spawned a motion picture. You can get the series on an 11 disc set in the US, but it's not currently available in the UK. Entertainment in Video used to have one of the films out but it's long deleted.

Again this is another title where anything I write about it is pretty redundant as it's such a well known and influential show. Even more so when in this case, there's been mainstream controversy involving the series and a well known Disney animated film.

It was strange when that blew up, as there are certain types of people for who Disney are a flashpoint for. Both the pro and con sides. There were people who'd use the controversy to attack Disney, regardless of whether they had the first hand viewing experience to make the criticism. And likewise there are people who will defend Disney over ANYTHING. It's was all very odd/amusing.

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I'm sorry.

I never meant to pick sexy up in the first place.

It was just amongst my paperwork, and when I tidied up, I must have accidentally put sexy in my bag.

I'm afraid it's a little crumpled, but really, what can you expect if you leave sexy lying around like that?

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Youtube's playlist thingy seems to take a while to get moving so you may not see any clips here yet. Later you will see 3 promo videos for Bonnie “Prince” Billy's album.

Maybe it is already later and you can now see them?

Maybe it is so much later that the videos are no longer there, and you can't?

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