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Star of David, aka Violence Gekiga David no Hoshi, Beautiful Girl Hunter

Tetsuya was the product of his mother being raped by a burglar, and after years of abuse form his mother’s husband he becomes a serial killer/rapist.

Did they think it wasn’t good enough without offending a random group of foreigners?
And I guess this is the third entry in the series of Violence Jack and Violence Hero Riki-Oh.

edit: This is terrible but somehow really entertaining if you fast-forward through all the boring parts. Since they talked about both LSD and マスコミ I guess it’s the most realistic anime I’ve seen in years, even though he owns a house with a spiral slide that goes into the ocean, which he uses to kill people with.

As long as I’m logged out of wow, some more very quick links that I found interesting via katoyu–

Cure Maid Cafe is running a Macross event from 2/7-2/22. From what I understand, Cure Maid Cafe isn’t really the kind of place that has their maids dress up for events like this, so I think it’s going to be limited to the special menu (drink a Lynn Minmay (Blueberry syrup + calpis)! Or a Nekki Basara (Grenadine, soda, strawberry syrup, tabasco)!!) , special cookies, goods, and coasters. I have to admit that I still haven’t been to Cure, too busy filling out my schatzkiste point card ww

WEB Anime Style has just finished up their six part series of Kaiba artwork posts. The six parts:
1: Main Characters
2: Sub-characters
3: Misc Characters
4: Misc Characters 2
5: Backgrounds
6: Backgrounds 2

They also mention that they’ve received sample copies of the Kara no Kyoukai vol 5 storyboard book that they’re co-producing with Kodansha BOX. 670 pages!

*Finally, Shueisha won the December Asahi Shimbun award for advertising with a 4-part ad for Jump Festa, and Kodansha won the second place award in the Yomiuri awards for their ad celebrating 50 years of Shonen Magazine. Articles and pictures of the ads found here.

This is a bit old, but for any of you movie nerds out there living in Japan, Theatre Shinjuku is doing a bunch of anime film screenings from the 14th until the 27th. Of course, I go back to Tokyo on the 28th, but that’s school for ya. I have to admit, despite the name being pretty lame, these are some very cool animes that they have selected, like Akira, Roujin Z (with a director q+a session afterwards!), Blood the Last Vampire (ditto), Utena: Adolescence (interview here, too!), Tokikake, Jin-Roh, 5cm/sec, Haruwo, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, Lupin: Secret of Mamo, and Hell’s Angels. Timetable can be found here, and general info about the event here.

via animeanime

Instant review: Nanoha A’s is one of the best otaku-exploitation shows ever, featuring explosions, Starlight Breaker, German-shouting magical girl weapons, and charming and pleasant plot holes you could drive a truck through. I’m not sure how this happened considering how bad the other two Nanoha series were. The DVD box is $30 and I guess you should buy it, unless you’re tired of every post on here being about buying stuff or something.

That said, I watched the first DVD, and they ended up doing really low quality work. Apart from having a dub, the fansubs are probably better in every way.

Video – Maybe because they stuck 5 episodes on one DVD, the bitrate goes really low at several points and it artifacts really badly. I don’t think you’d notice unless you were me/Defiler/Fluff, though, but I only have two other DVDs (KareKano, which has an excuse, and Haruhi, which doesn’t) that have noticable artifacts this bad.

Audio – is worse; the first episode is in mono, of all things. Apparently they switched mastering studios and the new one loves to randomly hit the wrong checkbox in their encoders or something. This pretty much makes the OP/ED sound terrible but doesn’t really affect the important part (EXPLOSION!). Maybe they’ll release fixed DVDs, but since they have no money I wouldn’t hold my breath. It’s fine after that episode (excellent panning across the forward soundstage etc.), but I think the other two DVDs might have the same problem.

Translation – is really literal; it looks like it was edited, but not by someone who knows what a bad Japanese translation looks like. A bunch of metaphors are translated literally, resulting in lines that only kind of make sense, and a few lines are weirdly overspecific to the point of actually being mistranslated.

Ep 1, DVD on left/fansub on right:

(note: I am bad at matching the same frame, oh well)

Nanoha’s “Listen to me!” before using her Energy Beam of Friendship is subbed as “Listen to what I have to say!”, which usually would be ok but in this scene makes it look like a threat or something. Admittedly it makes the scene better than it actually is, but it’s totally not justified by the real line.

After ep 1 it gets better, but it still seems below good fansub/average retail quality.

Ep 2:

Not a translation problem, and optic yellow is great and all, but can we please not use it in digital animation when characters have the same color hair as the subtitle text?

Ep 3:

“saki” (the “just” in “I just…”) is translated as “moments ago” in another line too.

This is kinda surprising since usually retail DVDs seem pretty well-done to me. Manga is another story.
Also someone gave me a Nendoroid Miku and I can’t figure out how to put the stand together.

…is a really long name, so let’s just call it Munto TV. This is the first time in a while KyoAni has produced more than one thing at once, and although there’s a severe quality drop from everything else it might be alright if the plot isn’t too stupid.

A poorly defined moe schoolgirl has daydreams where she’s in another world, where a bunch of shirtless elves live in the sky. One of them, Munto, talks to her saying she’s the only hope for the – you know where this is going. The girl, Yumemi, looks like she belongs in Someday’s Dreamers or some other recent boring show; Munto himself has a heroic cape, stands on towers for no reason, and altogether looks like a shounen hero version of Magus. The girl does ordinary boring show stuff, while all the shirtless elves ride personal flying machines (like the ones in Fantastic Children) and have psychic laser fights (complete with an attack that sweeps out the entire sky and has delayed pink explosions). As you can see, one half of the show is kind of better than the other.

Whoever wrote it is pretty clearly not as good as they think they are. The high school girl characters have above average names – the girl is Yumemi, and her friends are Suzume, Ichiko, and Kazeya – and early on they manage to stick the show’s name into someone monologuing, but the episode ends with a few minutes of old elves talking about nothing really interesting.

Also the first half of the show (including the OP) looks like this and the second half (including the ED) looks like this.

<> soramiage switches randomly between dimensions, one of which is someday’s dreamers and the other of which is a 90s psychic elf fantasy with 1/10 of gurren-lagann-level fighting scenes
<> i guess if it goes somewhere it’ll be ok but its strangely not good for kyoani
<> also the first half of the episode has no shading and then the second looks like a cheap clannad
< &garamir> I tried to watch the raw but gave up a few minutes in when a girl saw the world being crushed by a thing and then there were more things

UPDATE: Apparently the first two episodes were just clip shows of the OVAs, which explains why it looked like good direction filtered through really bad direction.

Also why is this post so popular when it’s so bad???

According to this unsourced thread that I will still unconditionally believe, Tsukihime sold almost 20,000 copies for volume 1, then dropped to about 15,000 a disc. F/SN stayed pretty steady at around 25,000 a disc, and the KnK movies so far have been breaking 75,000 a piece total. This Aniplex press release says they’ve shipped out 400,000 discs for the first four movies, and that 183,000 tickets have been sold, grossing around 2 million yen. Not bad when you consider it’s only showing on what, 10 screens?

I was going to make a blog post on ZUN’s latest blog entry about restrictions on doujin products and all, but thankfully Sankaku Complex did a slightly alarmist writeup of it zepy actually did a good writeup of it, saving me some work. In fact, I probably don’t need to make this post either, but I really want to procrastinate on this paper for as long as humanly possible.

Anyway, Maikaze now has a new URL, and you may notice that the website has so many disclaimers on it that I’m tempted to say that it’s a bit of a jab at ZUN. I mean, right under the TOUHOU DERIVATIVE DOUJIN ANIME there’s the big bubble that when you click on it says “THIS WORK IS A DERIVATIVE DOUJIN ANIMATION OF TEAM SHANGHAI ALICE’S TOUHOU PROJECT SERIES” and then a big UNOFFICIAL on the right side of the top banner. Well, I guess being thorough never killed anyone. There’s also a news post that stresses several more times that they are not official, just in case you didn’t get the point.

I’m not sure if this is related or not, but the signed copies of the script books that were originally going to be given out at C75 will also not be distributed out of “consideration of their situation at Comiket”, which I guess could mean “to keep people from getting trampled to death/hypothermia from camping out for a week in advance.”

first and foremost, hats off to the anime team for the spoo reference.

Second, weblab.ota has a great flowchart describing what in the world is going on with this whole mess, if you can manage to read the Japanese. I’d love to read it for you, but I have a 10 page paper due in 48 hours.

Finally, the current rumor circulating around the internet around Takenashi’s health is that she fell down a bunch of stairs due to anemia, if this mystery barebones blog site by some light novelist who may or may not be referencing Takenashi when she talks about “U-nyan” is correct. Kind of a stretch, I guess?

Nagao Takena, also known as Teienu (ていえぬ）, creator of grindhouse claymation gorefests like CHAINSAW MAID has come out with his newest creation, PUSSYCAT! I’m really impressed by this one – the clay figures look great, the camera work is incredible, especially given that its amateur claymation, the soundtrack is completely spot-on, the guy can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. Also, I just now found out that he premiered PUSSYCAT basically down the street from me 2 weeks ago. ;_____;

anyway, here’s the movie. warning: not work safe

edit: happy 100th post, blog

thanks moon phase

if you want to try to not get a 503, be my guest looks like the traffic rush is calming down, thank god

West hall 2, day 2 (12/29), あ(hiragana a)-41a
not a shutter circle, in fact it’s in one of the less accessable perimeter booths. perhaps you could call it the border of life and death.

Limited Edition comes with Soundtrack, Artbook, post card set

2800y at event

Reimu: Mai Nakahara

Marisa: Sawashiro Miyuki

SYAMEIMARU: Fujimura Ayumi

Patchouli: Takahashi Mikako

Sakuya: Tanaka Rie

Remilia: Tsuji Ayumi

Suika: Toyosaki Aki

Narration: Inoue Kikuko

thats a lot of money

get there early enough* and you might get things signed by the seiyuu or even recording scripts!

*start camping out maybe tomorrow at the latest