Category: Anime

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Anime Editorials

Much Ado About Blu-Ray

The holidays are long over and I bet some of you are enjoying brand new anime you received as gifts.  For me, this year meant a leap from watching anime on my tiny computer screen to watching it on a beautiful LCD TV.  Along with my new TV, I was also excited to pick up a Blu-Ray player.  I was all ready to join the 21st century of video until I forced myself to step back.   Are Blu-Rays worth the extra cost?  Are they worth buying a disc that I can’t watch on my latop?  Or should I keep buying DVDs and risk having to repurchase every series I own again in 10 years when I get tired of the poor video quality?

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Anime Editorials Reviews

Winter Impressions Part II

dengarSlowly but surely I am getting around to previewing the rest of this season’s shows.  For this post I tried to preview some series that people seemed excited about in the comments to my first winter impressions post.  That entry is available here.

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Anime Editorials Reviews

Big Robots on the Big Screen

The first time I watched Evangelion I I hated everything about it.  Most of all I hated the characters and how slowly the series seemed to move.  The disconnect I felt with Shinji and his eternal state of depression did not help either.  When I heard that the creators’ were rereleasing the show in a series of movies I had mixed feelings.  I didn’t want to suffer through another eight hours of Evangelion if it was just a graphics facelift.  I still held out hope that instead of just retelling the story, the new version would address the problems of the original series.  My hopes were dashed with the first installment, Evangelion 1.0, which seemed almost identical to the TV show.  Now that I’ve seen Evangelion 2.0 on the big screen, I can finally say that an enjoyable version of Evangelion has finally arrived.

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Anime Editorials

Winter '11 Impressions

I don’t have Bateszi’s gift for intros, so let’s jump right into the Winter Preview.  This season does not have any wildly anticipated shows, nor have I seen something of Star Driver’s caliber.  Still, even if the shows don’t blow you away, anime is definitely still well and kicking.

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Anime Reviews

The sunset of Astro Fighter Sunred

Even whilst it was airing, Astro Fighter Sunred seemed like a pretty obscure series. Indeed, I often felt like I was one of the few people watching it. It’s a hard sell, I guess, because it’s not only a visibly low budget production, but also a parody of Japan’s sentai genre. Apparently people don’t watch parodies of genres they are unfamiliar with, but since I’ve never seen an authentic Japanese sentai series (all of my experience with it consists of a brief (albeit passionate) fling with none other than Power Rangers,) I’m hardly an expert either! Basically, let’s just get this straight right now: ignoring it because you know nothing about sentai is no god damn excuse.

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Anime Reviews

Black Lagoon II: Judgment Day

Black Lagoon’s original run impressed me. The  show was beautifully animated, included an interesting cast, and had enough violent gun battles to give a child nightmares.  I also think it had the best crew of any recent show.  What it lacked was length.  Its 24 original episodes, stretched over two seasons, were fun to watch but the ending of the series did not provide enough closure.  It felt more like a season finale than an episode meant to wrap up an entire series.  Luckily a new OVA (a straight to DVD released) named Roberta’s Blood Trail was released in 2010.  The OVA starts slow but if you liked Black Lagoon’s first run and can forgive the OVA’s lack of an interesting story you get a treat.
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Anime

A Tatami Galaxy kind of year

Of all the anime I’ve seen this year, probably the one that deserves blogging the most is The Tatami Galaxy. Life imitates art; and looking back on the past year, or the part of my life which, in many ways has abruptly stumbled to an end of sorts I can qualify the title. For me, it really has been a Tatami Galaxy kind of year.

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Anime Editorials Live action

After Life, Angel Beats! and anime blogging

After Life, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, is one of most interesting films I’ve seen. Set in an (unspecified) purgatory, it’s about dead people choosing one memory (and one memory only, the rest fades) to carry with them into (an also unspecified) eternity. Upon choosing, that memory will be recreated on a film-set and recorded with you as the star. You take the resulting VHS with you. The recreation is a massive team effort, with actors, props and all kinds of film-making devices.
If you can’t choose a memory, or simply refuse to, you become a part of the staff at purgatory, helping others to move on. One man has trouble choosing his memory, and so is given a big box of VHS tapes (containing his entire life) that he spends his time pouring over, trying to remember the things he did in his lifetime. Searching for something big and meaningful, eventually, he just chooses a memory with his wife and him; an old couple, sitting on a park bench, talking. The small things can mean so much.

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Anime Reviews

A fatal Attraction

In what ended up being one of the cooler mornings I’ve had recently, I stumbled upon Koji Morimoto’s Attraction via twitter. Not knowing what to expect, but hearing it paired with the words “interactive anime”, I clicked.
What followed was one of Studio  4C’s latest experiments with the anime medium. Their involvement with the upcoming (and looking stellar) Catherine action/adventure game by Atlus has been highly profiled, but Attraction seems to have slipped under the lens of most anime fans. It’s a pity, too. While it is about a rather done-to-death topic (the perils of smoking) and, in the end is a public service announcement for the French Government, there’s lots of cool things going on with this that should be brought to attention.

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Anime Reviews

Watching people destroy their happiness in NANA

One of the saddest things about NANA is that its creator Ai Yazawa (who has been fighting against an unspecified illness since 2009) hasn’t been able to finish it. NANA is a story of dreams and ambition, and the characters have struggled too hard and for too long to be left hanging. I hope Yazawa rediscovers her desire to finish it.

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