12/31/07:
1/1/08:
I’m still debating which one wins out. Pictures of my ~$400 spent (wasted) at comiket possibly to follow, depending on whether or not Yodobashi has decent camera prices and will take my amex.
addendum: I will not be going to day 2 of c73, my legs hurt too much and I’ll end up spending a lot of money on doujins that I won’t read. there are a few circles that I regret missing (keroro rozen maiden crossover, these guys, but I want to be in good shape for tomorrow.
correction: the maritan card I got only says “FUCK’IN NEW YEAR.” I guess it’s up to you to make it a happy one.
I set my alarm to go off at 6 in the morning so that I could leave right at about dawn to line up for day 2 (no homo), but despite my mind saying yes, my legs said “no fuck you sit right back down and don’t you dare use me, write a blog post or something.”
So! Yesterday was the first day of c73, the second event of any importance that has occured since I touched down in Narita on the 28th. (the first was eating some great tonkatsu, and the nearly-second was going to see Kara no Kyoukai 1 but falling asleep at 8 instead. Good thing it’s still showing, thanks second-run theaters!) I woke up bright and early at 6 and started the trek over to the Big Sight right at about daybreak on a monstrously leisurely 10 hours of sleep, as observant readers will have noted.
I live fairly close to the big sight, so the trip over took a little over an hour after a conbini stop where I bought some expired negitoro maki. I went over on the Yurikamome/monorail from Shimbashi because I was going late enough for the thing to be running, and it was pleasantly empty. No pushing or shoving, and I even managed to get a seat (!!) without excessive harm to myself or others. A+ would ride again. I hope to in a few hours. After arriving at the con site, I stood in very large line for a very long time. They seemed to line everyone up at the front of the Big Sight today as opposed to next to the bay doors for the east/west halls. Maybe I got there a little too late? Did anyone in the English-speaking world get there at 5 or earlier so that they could clarify? Anyway, I stood fairly miserably in a light drizzle with no entertainment for about 2 and a half, maybe a bit more, hours. Applauding at 10 am when the thing opens and not moving for the next 45 minutes is a morale-killer, let me tell ya.
A timely (for me) aside: why didnt anyone tell me that Japan has mosquitos that are TEN TIMES BIGGER than the ones we have down south? God damn this place is scary.
Anyway, if you’re wondering why I don’t have pictures for you: sooo touriste, next to staring up at skyscrapers and walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk. Actually, I just don’t have a camera yet.
Some highlights of my modest purchases:
I finished up with most of my shopping at around noon, and instead of aimlessly wandering around the bemani section like I had originally planned, I met up with Chiku, who has no weblog so I cannot link you to his weblog. We ate soggy ten-don and wandered around the west halls and bought nothing. In fact, all he bought was a paper copy of the catalogue, and if he hadn’t done that I could call him a bad consumer of fan products.
We met up with Shingo and a host of others at around 2:30 and talked for a while. We eventually made it over to Akiba and a izakaya in the area and had a jolly old time while knocking back some drinks, the first alcoholic beverages I have ever legally bought and consumed. Actually, I might have been the only one who consumed plural-s-drinks, an astonishing two. I almost ordered a moscow mule for a third, but the thing was winding down and I didn’t want to look like an alcoholic.
While I was in Akiba I picked up ABe’s Gaisokyu for a measly 4800 yen, which considering the quality of the thing I would (although begrudgingly) pay double that price for, along with a second copy of Nazo no Kanojo X because I don’t remember what manga I buy. I also got a Maritan card that says “HAPPY FUCK’IN NEW YEAR.” I will take these words to heart.
On that note, it’s already bright outside and I should start punishing my legs again. So in case I don’t do another update until 2008: HAPPY FUCK’IN NEW YEAR.
http://blog.animate.tv/higurashi/index.php?itemid=4175
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No details.
Maybe when 07th expansion gets super-famous he’ll come over here as a con guest and I can ask him why the comedy scenes are so unfunny. I think they’re written by a Japanese version of the Archie computer.
seriously, one day I’ll stop writing about things that awo hasn’t talked about that aren’t bartender but
Project A-Ko:
excellently animated popcorn action/comedy that exudes 80s with tits and missiles and explosions and shit for less than what a movie ticket costs, you should probably buy this if you haven’t already
Mononoke:
okay, well I just finished my intro to film class like a few days ago so even if there was something bad to say about this show I couldn’t bring myself to, really. because this is an INSTANT REVIEW I will just say that you should watch it and if Geneon was still around I’d say to buy the last disc of Ayakashi because it’s pretty much the same thing and also you should read this guy’s review because he’s more knowledgeable and eloquent about these things than i could ever hope to be
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=2245
Plot Summary: Hibino Hallelujah is a delinquent teenager who is tough and loves to pack a punch. His father is none other than the almighty God who does not approve very well of his son’s rebellious acts. Disappointed in Hallelujah’s lack of responsibility, his father sends him to Earth as a normal high school student, stripped of his powers. Posing as a local priest, God keeps an eye on his son’s adventures as Hallelujah rights wrongs around the school with two-fisted justice, Love tattooed across the knuckles of each hand.
Reposted from ADTRW and MOONPHASE as usual (like the last… two times I did it?).
11/22 Candy☆Boy – One episode long, broadcast yesterday, tagline is a joke about tsundere.
11/25 Strait Jacket ep 1 – SF anime with a gun and a robot and a frightening scriptwriting credit.
12/01 Kara no Kyoukai movie 1 – The plot prototype for Tsukihime. I’m not sure if this is a theater date or DVD release.
Movies 2 and 3 on 12/29 and 1/26.
12/08 Ah! My Goddess Fighting Wings – I hope it has a good excuse for the name being so dumb.
12/12 Ayakashi – Why are there so many shows named Ayakashi? This one is a “superhuman battle action visual novel adaptation”.
12/23 Frontiers of Macross – Special preview of Macross F for the 25th anniversary.
12/28 Harukanaru no Jikuu no Naka #3 Kurenai no Tsuki (In a Distant Time – The Red Moon) – girls’ thing with beautiful men
01/01 Sisters of Wellber 2
01/03 Rosario + Vampire – fanservice
01/04 Kimi ga Aruji de Shitsuji ga Ore de (They are my noble Masters) – hgame
01/04 Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei – “Vulgar Edition” or something
01/04 Dazzle (Hatenkou Yuugi) – Shoujo fantasy, with bonus scriptwriting by Yasuhiro Imagawa assuming ANN isn’t wrong.
01/05 Zenryoku Usagi (Full Power Rabbit) – It’s about rabbits wearing hard hats.
01/05 Major 4th season – baseball
01/05 Persona -trinity soul- – Anime sequel to Persona 3, which is a great game about shooting yourself in the head.
01/05 Shigofumi – A girl delivers posthumous messages from people to their families.
01/05 true tears – some moe stuff
01/06 Minami-ke Seconds (tentative name)
01/06 Porphy’s Long Journey – World Masterpiece Theater anime of a French book called “Les Orphelins de Simitra” which I’ve never heard of.
Direction by that cool guy, plus awful preview art.
01/07 Aria the Origination – peaceful boat riding
01/07 Gunslinger Girl -Il Teatrino- – Brainwashed little girls shoot people, and there might be a moral about how this is bad, I’d hope.
01/08 The Wolf and the Spices (“Spice and Wolf”) – Medieval moe economics thriller.
01/09 Noramimi – http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?postid=335972453&highlight=noramimi#post335972453
01/13 Indian Summer 2 (Koharu Biyori) – tits
01/14 Yatterman – remake of 1977 kids’s show
01/14 Moegaku 5 – Did Moetan try to teach five languages at once? No, because it was porn.
02/22 Mai Otome 0 ~S.ifr~ 1
Unknown dates-
January
Hakaba Rentarou – Pretentious remake of GeGeGe no Kitarou in the Noitamina timeslot. (what)
H2O ~footprints in the sand~
February
Yes! Precure GO GO GO! – See, go means 5.
Mnemosyne -Mnemosyne no Musume-tachi- – 6 episode OVA about something.
March
Saint Seiya Hades Elysion
April
Soul Eater
The Library War
Alison & Lilia – ~1930s-equivalent adventure series by the author of Kino’s Journey.
Kyou kara Maoh! 3 – gay
Real Drive Sennou Chousashitsu – Production I.G. tries to re-do Lain again again.
The Masked Maid Guy
Plus it has Nazo no Kanojo X and Vinland Saga, and I can whack cockroaches with it. At $8 it’s a great deal.
But I have no idea how you could keep up with these things. It may only come out once a month, but at 1000 pages I’d never finish reading these before there was another one.
So this fancy-sounding anime called Ghost Hound came out. We’re all about the fancy-sounding anime up in here, especially when their websites advertise all the staff they’ve got who worked on our most favoritest shows serial experiments lain and Kino’s Journey, so I thought I’d better go watch it and see if I should go complain about it or not. It looks like I’m going to!
The first episode doesn’t have much to talk about; the young male lead Tarou has a terrible dream about his dead older sister, goes to school, falls asleep in class, and goes home to sit in his room, with occasional weird scenes inserted in between. The really surprising thing is that the episode progression is practically identical to the first episode of Lain:
Luckily, it gets better after that. Episode 2 is mostly about the school psychologist interviewing Tarou about his recurring dreams through E.M.D.R. (invoking the MYSTERIOUS ACCIDENT X YEARS AGO cliche), along with Nakajima, the mysterious transfer student character, explaining tons of backstory. I can’t summarize it, since it was kind of just a little beyond me and my JLPT4 test voucher, but you can find it at one of the many fine obsessive summary blogs on this here Internet.
Episode 3 is actually good; the first scene — ÅŒgami, the cool guy who’s really angry character, records himself playing the guitar (so he can get more YouTube hits, I guess) and it plays over an unexplained religious ritual with an old woman chanting — was neat although fairly meaningless. We get more plot explanation and they all go off to demonstrate Phobia Exposure by taking Tarou to the old hospital his sister died in. (summary)
The preview for episode 4 relieved a bit more of my fears of a bad Lain ripoff, showing that the gradient-eyes shots in ep. 1 were actually super-terrifying baby things. It’s not enough for me to get over ANN’s plot summary — ghosts, from an “unseen world”, unexpectedly breaking into ours? — but at least it might be through traditional horror elements and not through new revisions of the Internet Protocol.
Anyway, the biggest problem with it is that it didn’t get enough staff from those other shows. Here’s some bad screenshots of the main characters:
and their teachers:
Lain’s asymmetrical braid is a great and completely recognizable character design feature. Tarou is a generic and completely undifferentiated blob. And his teacher is a man wearing lipstick.
Lain and Kino both had plenty of good artists (ABe, Kuroboshi Kouhaku, this guy, etc.) doing character design. Ghost Hound, instead, just has the animation director doing it. I remember her from Hell Girl; Ai and the Scatman looked good in that show, but the incidental character art was universally terrible and I had to stop watching almost immediately. The gigantic eyes she draws looked good on Ai, but pretty much nobody else. Since characters are the only appeal for anime, I have no idea why they’d keep her on it.
Anyway, maybe this will be good sometime, but not yet. Stick to Kaiji.
wait maybe they’ll bring back scatman for this one
I’ve started to dig into my pile of DVDs that I really need to watch sooner or later, and I had the brilliant idea of writing normal-length reviews (500-700 words) of most of them. Then I remembered that I’m incredibly lazy, so here are very condensed notes on the Crusher Joe Movie+OVAs:
CRUSH.
General: I’ll start with few things I feel like I can safely generalize about for the 3 installments, the movie and the two OVAs. For one thing, it’s all very 80s. This is of course a wonderful thing, unless you don’t watch things because “they look old,” in which case I suggest that you close your browser window, boot up the Love Hina DVD that is undoubtedly sitting in your player as we speak, and summarily hang yourself. Er, this is supposed to be short. Focus.
CRUSH.
I realize that “very 80s” doesn’t really say much, so here’s a few more specific things! For one, the animation looks very nice throughout the series. Crusher Joe is ultimately an action show, and the action scenes look fantastic. The music for all of it is also great. Light on the cheesy 80s synths (although the soundtrack that was probably composed on a sega genesis is what made overfiend for me) and heavy on the authentic-sounding Film Music. Kind of Star Wars-y at times. Much like a lot of the plot. Speaking of unoriginal plot, there is probably very little in these that will cause you to stroke your neckbeard in contemplation. In fact, chances are you’ve seen more or less all of the plot in one place or another. It really doesn’t hurt the series. Like I said, ACTION.
CRUSH.
Movie:
The movie clocks in at just a little over 2 hours, and it feels like it. Lots of action scenes broken up with humor scenes, all of which feels very cartoony. It’s somewhat strange to see standard comedy devices used in between bloody deaths, but it works! There’s a little bit of introduction to the world of Crusher Joe sprinkled in here, but not a whole lot. I don’t really feel like going into the plot, the AnimEigo page for it does that well enough. It drags a little in the late middle parts, but overall it’s good fun.
CRUSH.
OVAs
Both of these are a lot lighter on the comedy, but you don’t really need it. Where the movie felt like a full-scale movie, these 1-hour OVAs pack about the same amount of action as the movie. The Ice Prison is solid space commando and space navy fun, while The Ultimate Weapon: Ash drags a bit when the Crusher Joe team is running away from the Evil Robots that Tentacle Rape You and then Explode for the 12th time, but it gets a big kick in the ass in the last 15 minutes or so. I saw Ice Prison first, and it was winning out over The Ultimate Weapon until those last few minutes. They’re about even in my book, now. I’m also speculating if working on Ideon psychologically broke the director of The Ultimate Weapon, some of that shit is pretty grim. Anyway, once again, these plots aren’t going to win any awards, and you can probably see most of the plot points coming from miles away, but who cares. If you don’t feel like watching a perfectly good cartoon because it’s not “deep” then just throw all those DVDs of burned fansubs that you own in the trash away (or burn your trashy dvds that are practically fansubs away, if you’re from singapore) and go finish reading that 3rd Dave Eggers book you’re on.
CRUSH.
The AnimEigo release did a fairly good job, from what I can judge of these things. The sub track is pretty colloquial to the point of nearly changing entire meanings of lines around, and some of that can be really hit-or-miss. I saw a few lines in there that I really loved and hope to remember in the future, and also saw a few lines that seemed absolutely terrible. Didn’t really listen to the dub.
CRUSH.
I think that about wraps it up: Good clean sci-fi action fun backed up with solid technical work. Apparently the disc is out of print now, but I picked it up for $5 at a con, and really, it’s damn hard to beat $1.25/hour of this stuff. Recommended to anyone that wants to kick back and just watch some fun cartoons, which should be all of you.
edit: I just did a word count and this was almost 800 words. oops.
