May 28th, 2008 by Brack
Here is a clever music video for Kuricorder Quartet’s “Ojiisan no 11 kagetsu”. It does fun things with film loops, in particular the flip book effect is fascinating.
Posted in Music | Tags: Kuricorder Quartet | No Comments »
May 26th, 2008 by Brack
Kurenai
Rozen Maiden director Kou Matsuo has clearly spent so much time directing shows about dolls of late that he’s forgotten how children move. For a show with a lot of realistic natural movement, I found the movement of the seven year-old girl that the title character has to bodyguard disturbingly alien.
Anyway if you like overwrought melodrama you may enjoy this. I found the intrusive piano on the soundtrack and the arrogant doll-like girl fantastically annoying. And the story a bit of a snooze.
Zettai Karen Children
Whereas this has 3 precocious children, none of whom as annoying as the one in Kurenai.
This animation of Ghost Sweeper Mikami creator Takashi Shiina’s current manga series, involves the adventures of three psychic 10 year-old girls and their minder.
It’s a fairly goofy shonen action comedy, much was GSM was. This first episode involved them chasing a psychic leather daddy who fired telekinetic bolts from his crotch. The usual stuff.
It’s passable stuff, but the leads aren’t as interesting as GSM’s were.
Allison and Lillia
This was light and fun. It’s a pulpy adventure set in a world resembling the 1930s where a young pilot Allison and her friend Wil set off to find a treasure that will bring peace to two nations who had been at war for 130 years. Unlike Kurenai, this has a really effective soundtrack, provided by Shusei Murai (and the themes have music by the awesome multi-instrumental group, The Kuricorder Quartet).
I can see myself watching more of this.
Kamen no Maid Guy
When I first started watching this I didn’t like it and gave up. Coming back a second time, it’s not as bad as I thought. The best parody of the maid fetish is still Pugyuru, but this bawdy, violent thing isn’t too bad if you like your comedy rough and ready. Don’t think i need to watch anymore though.
Kyouran Kazoku Nikki
This wants to be a whacky madcap comedy with a touch of ~moe~ of the sort UFOtable used to be able to make, but it ends up being a mess. I wouldn’t say it was truly awful, but the cat girl/woman (she is supposedly 20…) grew more and more annoying as the episode went along, to the extent I don’t want to see any more.
Posted in Anime | Tags: Allison and Lillia, Kamen no Maid Guy, Kou Matsuo, Kurenai, kyouran kazoku nikki, Shusei Murai, Takashi Shiina, The Kuricorder Quartet, zettai karen children | No Comments »
May 25th, 2008 by Brack
Here’s some spring season anime first episodes I finally got around to watching:
Bus Gamer
With better animation this could be worth watching. It’s not terrible animation, but the bar for fighting anime is pretty high, and this doesn’t reach that bar.
Itazura na Kiss
Osamu Yamazaki’s adaptation of the late Kaoru Tada’s unfinished manga is a fun watch. Only the character design lets it down. It can’t quite bring itself to be as much as a throwback as the direction and story are. Good stuff and if I have time I will watch more.
Kanokon
A few weeks back I had the honour of being the subject of a thread on Gamefaqs’ boards, where the poster was ENRAGED(!) that I had been dismissive of this show (and To Love Ru) without watching it when I did my HATE FUN? rundown of the spring anime season. Hooray.
Anyway, this is rubbish, but well animated rubbish.
To Love Ru
Unlike XEBEC’s other series, which is badly made rubbish. It’s a 163rd photocopy of the Urusei Yatsura blueprint, that’s utterly forgettable.
Posted in Anime | Tags: bus gamer, Itazura na Kiss, Kanokon, To Love-Ru | No Comments »
May 25th, 2008 by Brack
Last October I made an aborted attempt at going to one of these MCM Expo things. I got there late, and the fast quantity of hyperactive teenage cosplayers made my blood run cold.
This time as a friend was coming down from Edinburgh I dragged myself along ~sorta~ on time, and thanks to judicious queue hopping, avoided the long wait for tickets.
The last time I described the show as having the impression of a grander version of the erstwhile Peterborough Sci-Fi and Fantasy Fair, the local comics/science-fiction/fantasy/horror/roleplaying/wargaming/hitting each other with pretend weapons/hitting each other with real weapons event in area I grew up in. The actual inside of an Expo holds up those comparisons (at least to the peak era of the Peterborough show in the early to mid-nineties).
It’s people selling things, people signing things and some panels. The layout’s somewhat disorientating, often I found myself turning round to places I’d just walked past and things I hadn’t seen would appear. Compared trade shows I’ve been too and some open exhibitions the layout was very poor. The sound for the panels and the “in-show” announcements was appalling throughout the morning, it was just a muddy overloud dirge. And we had no clue that we needed tickets to watch the cosplay event.
On the good side there were plenty of bargains to be had. Beez and Manga had very reasonably priced boxsets on sale. And Koei, unlike the other videogame exhibitors actually had product on sale as well on display.
I’m not in a hurry to come back to one of these things though. It’s not really aimed at me, as I am neither an anime/manga fan thats too young to go to a convention, nor a fan of genre film/tv (ugh I hate that term but it’s easier than typing sci-fi/fantasy/horror. What?) who wants an autograph or photo taken with their favourite basic cable tv star of choice.
Also: Whatever happened the fat Klingons that you always used to see at these sort of things? Has Star Trek fallen that out of favour nowadays? JJ Abrams, I want the Fat Klingons back where they belong! I find their absence disconcerting.
Posted in Vagaries | Tags: MCM Expo | No Comments »
May 24th, 2008 by Brack
Posted in Comedy | Tags: les dawson | No Comments »
May 22nd, 2008 by Brack
Posted in Comedy | Tags: italian spiderman | No Comments »
May 16th, 2008 by Brack
Mushi-shi: Vol 4
Hell Girl: Vol.2 - Puddle
Berserk: Requited Desires Vol.5
Single volume time. You don’t need any of these that badly. Particularly Hell Girl.
Negima: The Complete Series
I wrote something on Negima on my livejournal (back when I had a naive idea to keep the hate away from this site) that sums up my feelings on this series nicely.
As Ken Akamatsu’s previous series Love Hina was to Maison Ikkoku, Negima is to Harry Potter.Which is to say, crap.
Posted in Anime, Comics | Tags: uk anime releases | No Comments »
May 15th, 2008 by Brack
Ladies, don’t fall in love with assassins, it won’t work out well.
Below par animation for this story of the wife of a Mafia boss who hires Golgo to kill her husband. Also the wife is a truly annoying character, a one note possessive harridan, who were it not for the fact everyone else in this episode is also as one note, and her husband just as possessive, would come off as a misogynistic stereotype. They are passionate people in a world where stoicism is the ultimate virtue, so it should not be a surprise that their personalities are shrill grotesques.
The only non-Duke Togo character who comes off looking respectable is the character who is essentially there as a mirror to Golgo. Ultimately the moral of the whole story is if you show your emotions, you are less than Golgo 13, and you are probably going to die because of it. And even if you are like Golgo 13, he’s smarter than you and you’ll die anyway.
The weakest episode so far, the main interest is in the mechanics of the hit. And in the shootout that the screenshot above comes from. A lazy show wouldn’t have animated the time difference in when the guns were shot. You can’t see it when watching normally, but slow it down, and yes, Golgo does shoot first by a fraction of a second.
Yay for attention to detail.
Posted in Anime | Tags: golgo 13 | No Comments »
May 12th, 2008 by Brack
Thanks to the evil powers of the internet I’ve been saved the trouble of digging out my tapes of Liquid Television and ripping them to computer based video formats myself. Looking back at them, I rediscovered this 1989 short from Mario Lajoie, which still brings a warm smile to my face today.
Posted in Animation, TV | Tags: Elvis, Liquid Television, Mario Lajoie, Spider People From Hell | No Comments »
May 11th, 2008 by Brack
The last prologue episode introduces Death The Kid and his weapons Patty and Liz Thompson.
This is my favourite episode so far, the personalities of the characters suit Takuya Igarashi’s direction far better than the other main characters do. Soul and Maka’s manzai duo relationship, and Black Star/Tsubaki’s ninja parody don’t quite fit Igarashi’s comic beat that Death The Kid’s obsessive compulsive disorder does.
Death The Kid, you see, is obsessed with symmetry. And like the characters in Ouran High School, Igarashi finds the comic beats in characters personality defects marvelously. Patty and Liz are more upbeat than the frequently depressed/enraged Death, Patty to point of perky heroic idiocy, leaving Liz as the straight man of the trio.
Which brings us to what is the probably the most interesting thing about Soul Eater, every character is part of a comedy team of some kind, normally a duo. Rather than make the coupling of weapon and user a romantic one, the choice of the story is to make them a comedic one. As I wrote in my original post, I feel Igarashi in Ouran Host Club owed a lot to stage comedy in the way he shot gags, and had the cast deliver them. The story so far in Soul Eater isn’t that ground breaking, in lesser hands this would be another Black Cat or similar unsuccessful shonen manga adaptation. Instead we are getting a show that is wringing every ounce of quality from the source material.
Posted in Anime | Tags: soul eater | No Comments »