Things He-Man Was Not Meant to Know

I was suitably chastised the last time I emailed around something like this instead of posting it, so here it is:

Apparently He-Man fell on hard times and had to work in a skeevy strip club in India, judging from this clip from a purported musical.



As he says, he is He-Man.

via io9

Why wouldn't buildings bleed?

Since Guder is too fuck lazy to post it his damn self.
This actually worked better without sound; appears to be a non-final trailer with a hideously mangled temp voice over by the director.

Kevin Gifford is, as always, a gentleman and a scholar

"The Phantom of Akihabara: GAME OVER is a serial novel written by Yoshitaka Ohsawa and published in 2002-04 over eight issues of YuGe, a Japanese magazine devoted to games old and new (now called GameSide). [...] This is almost certainly the only apocalyptic SF novel themed around used video games that has ever been written, and its mere existence shocks and enthralls me."

New Bakemonogatari trailer

Hunh. None of those voices are working for me at all (too generically anime) and Meme's character design is so fucking young I didn't even recognize him (seriously, motherfucker is a middle-aged homeless dude with a gut, not a fucking surfer) so I can't say it's really encouraging.

Looks like it's time to gripe about another fallen creator

Kishiro, Kishiro, what are we going to do with you? In volume 10 of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, you gave us hope that the plot was lurching forward at long, long last, but apparently that was too exciting and you decided we needed an entire volume of downtime to recover, as the alleged main character sits out an entire volume, AGAIN. There's at least a better reason for it than usual, but the main problem is that you don't seem capable of taking anything seriously anymore. Sure, we get our usual dose of macho existential transcendental martial arts philosophizin', but it's in the middle of two chapters of dick jokes. Which I suppose itself may be a metacomment on said philosophy.

The problem with sequels is that, ideally, you've already said everything you wanted to the first time around, so your choices are either to go with your second-best idea, or just kill time vamping. And Kishiro definitely seems to have gone the second route. He claimed that the ending of the original Battle Angel was not his first choice, hence this extended do-over, but either he's fibbing, or it was a happy accident that it ended as well as it did (I'm recalling the other story about how his editors completely changed his original concept for the series and "somehow it all worked out OK"). He definitely wouldn't be the first creator to accidentally ruin a story by overthinking it.

The reason BAA was so impressive was that the story MOVED. Nine volumes was more than enough to show massive growth in Alita as a character, and that really stood out from both the American and Japanese books I was reading at the time. Last Order almost in its entirety is the Motorball arc writ large-- something Kishiro was wise enough to limit to two volumes the first time around. Now it's just another tournament fighting series, and frankly about as boring as all the rest.

I suspect Kishiro is as bored with this as I am. I dunno whether his editors are forcing him to continue this, but his interest now seems purely on the art side. And if you just want to draw wacky shit but can't be bothered to put in the work to actually write things, a fighting tournament is the perfect lazy answer. The rise of generic cocky badass Sechs is no accident-- (s)he has no personality, so (s)he's much easier to slot into random fights.

So Last Order, at its best, is just a glimmer of what I liked about the original BAA. Perhaps the original story isn't as good as I recall it, or maybe this stuff just isn't as original the second time around, but I'm in for the long haul, anyway. Kishiro may just be hacking out the story, but it's at least pretty to look at. I just miss the days when it was also interesting to read.

Japan still has it

In between the sort of relentlessly bland human dramas the fucktards running the Seattle Film Festival exclusively wasted their time booking, Japan still manages to turn out completely insane shit.

Kino's Increasingly Irrelevant Travels

Just how out of ideas is Sigsawa? He did three volumes of his new series without a blessed thing of interest happening, and now he shits out a Kino no Tabi book with ONE damn story worth reading. And even that one would have been a mildly interesting quickie in his heyday.
Whatever good will that story briefly generated is instantly dissolved by the blood boilingly bad story about a country that only had four wheeled cars and two wheeled bicycles, in which a fucking endless number of people decide to make a decision based on which of the two passes by outside only to have Kino and Hermes pass instead. A few of these, and then something clever dealing with how they react? Sure, a good story. But no, we just get fucking twenty of them and then the fucking story ends. Insultingly bad.
I dunno if he's just gotten protective or what. Half the best Kino no Tabi stories were always ones where she was unrelentingly vicious, but she's been neutered to the point of not even having a personality for ages now, even with Sigsawa attempting to cast her as the villain in a story last time around. Nothing happens in her stories; only the Shisho and Shizu stories contain anything remotely like an event.
It gets so bad he actually fucking does a god damn alternate realty story this time around - a fucking story about a slave who fails to warn his owners that they're about to eat poison, then finds a fucking talking motorrad that correctly realizes what the owners never did - the slave is a girl. (On the last page, Kino and Hermes find the bodies, so I suppose it technically isn't an alternate reality, but still, the parallels were obvious, and all the more fucking inept because of it.
Man, I hope Sigsawa pulls out of this slump soon. It hurts to watch him embarrass himself like this.

"May the Force be with you."

Thailand is really coming along, eh? I mean, they're no Nigeria, but they are crankin' out a bunch of decent-to-excellent fu flicks, at the very least.

In the best fu movie tradition, Mercury Man's plot basically makes no sense. We get an explanation of the hero's super powers that totally fails to address the other superdude running around, a conflicting Engrished technobabble explanation that actually removed information from my mind, and then finally it takes the bad guys the entire movie to think of the most practical use for their magic amulet.

But who needs plot when you have spider fire magnetic arbitrary powers? This movie is heavily indebted to Spider-Man, and apparently they were really worried no one would notice the similar black outfit or the way he magnetically "web-slings" around town, so they make sure to explicitly reference him and his catchphrase in dialogue, and show TWO DIFFERENT pieces of "Hi Spidy" graffiti (a la the "Spielberg, Lucas, let's do it together!" set decor from Ong Bak).

However, MM is no Peter Parker. For one thing, he is completely irrelevant to the climax of the movie. If you're getting shown up by the comic relief character, you got some problems with your heroing, though this may have been foreshadowed when the elephants kung-fu double-teamed him.

Another sign that he may not be a very good hero is that he will straight up murder people. I'm not sure this is intentional, either on his part or the filmmakers', but as depicted, no one could survive the mangling he hands out to getaway cars, and we don't see anybody get out either.

So what I'm saying is, this movie isn't "good" by conventional human standards, but it's certainly watchable. If for nothing more than a cadre of Engrish-spouting villains and transsexual fashion designer "big sister" kung fu battle against frosted-hair mad scientist.

Jess Franco would be pleased

And so Princess Resurrection kicks off its sixth volume by checking Women In Prison off the list of B-movie genres. By itself, this is an enjoyable volume, but a few things are starting to bug me about the series as a whole.

As noted last time, the violence is getting a bit less over-the-top, especially the bits directed at our sad-sack protagonist. This is one of the things keeping this from just being, like, Rosario + Vampire, so I'm sad to see it get dialed back.

Also, the pace of the plot can only be described as glacial, though to be fair I was initially surprised to see it develop one at all. PR isn't so much chapters in a continuing story as it is a bunch of random action setpieces based on whatever was playing on Cinemax last night. This particular volume is so picaresque that the Princess sustains a major injury between chapters, then heals up completely between the next two.

On the bright side, drawing whatever the hell you feel like isn't such a bad thing if you're a decent artist, and for every unfortunately dressed extra (I have no idea what's going on with the werewolf gang leader's pants) there's an interesting bit like this lens flare effect off the flashlight, which I actually can't recall having seen before, at least in manga. The title character's complete unflappability also leads to a fairly original twist on the old "replaced by doppelganger" gag.

This is still trashy fun, but I fear it's not going to fully live up to its initial promise and become awesome. Prove me wrong, Mitsunaga. I'd also like to ask Del Rey to step up their game on their translation/English adaptation/localization/whatever we're calling it today. I dare anyone to read the Princess' dialogue on the left over there in anything but a halting Shatnerian stammer. You can maybe argue that it feeds into the Ed Wood ambiance, but frankly, I just reread a bunch of Studio Proteus books and I'm not feeling that generous. Even Toren Smith's porn reads way better than this.

Return of the Headless Rider

Dulalala x3!
While Baccano! is definitely Narita Ryohgo's best series, Dulalala! is damn near as good. Like Baccano!, it offers a berserk blend of random genre elements - the title being derived from the Dullahan in exile, working as a underworld courier, her headless mount disguised as a motorcycle. There's been a simmering plot through the series about exactly which evil group of mad scientists and otherwise psychotic puppet masters is currently controlling her stolen head, but this usually takes a back seat to Ikebukuro West Gate Park inspired gang activity. Only with evil swords that possess people. This one promised to bring things to a head; the Anonymous style internet based gang known only as Dollars, the hive mind collected created by the magic sword, and a traditional color gang are each collectively run by the three members of a high school love triangle, who hilariously have kept all this secret from each other despite the fact that their groups hate each other.
I was sort of expecting full on action, really, but it sort of wound up being heavily based on the color gang leader's angsty backstory, to the point where I got half way through the mammoth 440 page book and couldn't for the life of me figure out where all those pages had gone.
I generally think Narita is at his weakest when he's being serious, and this was quite a grim book - but this time around the serious stuff generally worked, and the wacky comedy subplot involving a mad scientist in a white gas mask generally fell totally flat as a result. I certainly missed the headlong enthusiasm that coursed through the first two books in the series, but perhaps it was necessary to resolve this set of plots, and let the Dullahan and other larger than life characters (one dude who gets shot several times, and goes to see a doctor on account of he might get lead poisoning, and then walks out the next day and picks a fight with a moving van) can fuck some shit up proper next volume.
Gosh, I sure get a lot more reading done when I'm riding the bus to work.

Finally, something on topic crosses my path

Perhaps I should have just pretended the amazing Black Dynamite was on topic and posted about that.
Instead, have a violent trailer!

Hitoshi Ashinano is still crazy

More than two years since Yokohama Shopping Diary wrapped up, Hitoshi Ashinano finally publishes a new book. It actually appears to have come out in October and I totally missed it, but it was in the new release section at Kinokuniya this week, so I snatched it up. I'm still wondering when the hell he's going to figure out a way to collect the chapters he did for Position before Afternoon Special got canceled, but pretty much anything he writes is more or less the same sort of thing.
But this time things focus on a boy flying an airplane (in the exact same comfortably peaceful post-apocalyptic world) and getting flying lessons from the two sisters who actually own the plane. There is some deep seated madness like landing on a giant leaf or flying the plane onto a hook hanging out of a massive airship, but as usually, he seems to be equally fascinated by hazily drawn vistas, and oddball moments of character nuance that make them seem like real people even though all three characters are pretty much exactly the same as the robot and two kids in his previous series.
I feel like I've developed a deep seated cynicism over the years that makes it harder for me to enjoy a book so purely about tone, and that's clearly seeping into my writing, but I was pleased to find that reading the book made me forget to be cynical for an while. It's probably a necessary antidote to most of the rest of what I read and do.

Wait, there's a Yokohama Shopping Diary novel? How is that even possible?

A new incarnation of Pulp

Viz's experiment with Rumiko Takahashi's newest title was an apparent precursor, as they now have a website dedicated to running Ikki magazine titles.  They have already posted the first chapter of Daisuke Igarashi's Children of the Sea (read Andrew's brief review here), with promises of more to come.  Titles in the near-future include:

Bokurano (Mohiro Kitoh)

Dorohedoro (Q Hayashida)

House of Five Leaves (Natsume Ono)

I'll Give It My All... Tomorrow (Shunji Aono)

Bit confused on how the decision to print titles will work out (based on individual hits for a series?  Publish a volume after it is fully serialized, or just treat it like any other non-Ikki series?), but this is promising.

Late to the future

I'd been hearing some buzz about Future Diary for a while, but decided to hold off until I could check out a dead tree edition. So far, it's not too bad; this first volume reminds me of Death Note by way of Battle Royale, with a dash of trendy psychotic heroine.

In a nutshell, compulsively-journaling schoolboy Yukiteru's grotesque-looking "imaginary friend" updates his cel phone diary to cover the next 90 days of his life, then informs him there are twelve others with the same gift, and they're to wipe each other out until there's only one standing. Who will then become God. And the hilarity, she does ensue.

It'd be nice if the main character had more personality than a wet dishrag (it's no accident that the more... colorful female lead gets foregrounded on the cover), but Esuno does at least treat his lack of character as an actual flaw he'll (hopefully) grow out of, instead of an implied point of reader-identification. The art is so-so, and the story hasn't fully gotten into gear, but it's an enjoyable potboiler with enough kitchen-sinky enthusiasm that I'm willing to see where it goes next.

New yoshitoshi ABe Project

From ANN.  Bringing back together staff from Serial Experiments Lain (hopefully including executive producer, screenwriter, director and sound director).  Set in Japan's Taisho era, and given the title Desperant.

Hopefully it will be released in a timely manner to ensure that Wally Xie and I do not go insane from self-hype.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Years ago, waaaaay before Boogiepop, Kadono Kouhei wrote a novel. It was rejected. He wrote it three more times, failing each time.
Then came Boogiepop, and thirty other novels, including the Jiken series...and he decided that old failure would fit in nicely. He started sowing the seeds, and then announced the next book would be The Cruel Tale of Zankoku-go.
Took him four years. Severe writer's block? Problems making it work?
He probably should have abandoned the idea.
Because this is the single worst thing he's ever written.
I have literally been reading this fucking book for two months. I polished off the second half today, but that first half was an interminable slog that took a whole hell of a lot of stubborn persistence to get through. I'm really not sure why I bothered.
Story generating from characters or from high concepts is a running theme on this blog lately, and it's been partly because I've had this book on my mind. Kadono is a writer who has built his entire career on his fascinating, elusive, unique characters.
This book is all about fucking plot. Endless god damn dreary exposition, no god damn reason to give a flying fuck.
Sure, it has moments; one supporting character even manages to be sort of awesome, and she'll hopefully show up in a good book some day.
But large chunks of it are just BAD. Even when people are actually doing something they have a tendency to spout ghastly cliches like, "Let's finish this!"
The change in artists doesn't help. The cover is awesome, the character I liked has a particularly cool design that shows how much the artist tried to capture the berserk aesthetic the original one brought to the series, but ultimately he wants to be fucking illustrating an eighties sci-fi books, and there is some embarrassing battle jump suit and cape combos that totally take the books some place way blander than the first four novels. Which goes along with the relentlessly large scale plot.
Zankoku-go worked in Some Tragedies of No Tear Land because he was a small cog in the book - a gigantic monster fight that flitted through a much more ground level, personal, intense drama. Here he's an utterly bland force of nature in a plot that is all world on the brink of destruction massive shit. Avoid.

Eve no Jikan, Episode 04

Half a year later, Eve no Jikan makes its magnificent return.

Previous installments give plenty of winks and nudges to the audience, carrying a consistently light tone and never taking the story too seriously compared to the miasma of melodrama that anime usually has.  Episode four takes this playfulness and jacks it waaaaay fucking up.  Nearly every action is of absolute importance, from maintaining casual conversation, pulling out and sitting down in a chair, deciding when (and when not to) down drinks, and assuring a new customer that the old man is actually a human girl that is not yet eight year olds.

These convoluted moments are not without reason, as our two leads are dealing with a ticking time bomb: an older model android that attempts to integrate himself in The Time of Eve café.  With steam frequently pouring out of his neck, a trembling frame that would put a chihuahua to shame, and the imminent danger of consuming a cup of Evlend coffee, Rikuo and Masaki scramble in their efforts to make sure that the café is not brought down in an explosion.

What is even more astounding is how free of pretense the whole affair is.  As much as I love Satoshi Kon and Chiaki J. Konaka, it is easy to see why others would be put off by anything resembling posturing in their works.  Yasuhiro Yoshiura takes a candid approach to these science-fiction ideas (predominantly revolving around Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and potentially conflicting instances of logic), integrating them as nuances to the story rather than overt messages.  Even when the situation becomes decidedly somber, Yoshiura never overplays events, content to merely layer themes rather than revolve around them.

The delay in the episode's release becomes obvious within its opening minutes: the amount of detail and editing is absolutely insane.  Information darts about the screen, and viewpoints are constantly changing when the tension begins to boil.  What results is perhaps the most ambitious attempt at creating camera movement in Japanese animation, even moreso than the already impressive first three episodes of this series.

While I am still enjoying Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z Hen and Eden of the East, and am looking forward to the second series of Haruhi Suzumiya, the second half of the so-called first season of Eve no Jikan is undoubtedly the highlight for anime series of 2009.

Don't let the space mice catch you masturbating

The triumphant conclusion! Or not. Yuuki Masami seems to have been quietly informed halfway through the storyline collected in the last two volume of Birdy the Mighty that Young Sunday was being quietly taken out back and shot for no fucking discernable reason. He somehow managed to make the last volume not end on a cliffhanger, and found a new magazine to continue the series in, so I suppose I've got to go pick up Birdy the Mighty Evolution 1 now.
We were just talking about Moyashimon and characters being subservient to the author's high concept, but Yuuki Masami's writing is exactly the opposite, occasionally to a fault.
Like Patlabor, Birdy the Mighty is fundamentally a character centric work with an insanely complicated plot. In fact, Patlabor's fantastic ending is the one thing that gives me any confidence he'll be able to make sense of this mess. Each individual arc functions perfectly well, but the characters that flit in and out all seem to be inhabiting fully functioning stories of their own, the beginnings and endings and middles of which we are not privy to, so we constantly get little character building moments of theirs that just happen to cross paths with Birdy herself, who functions as sort of a fringe character, constantly tripping over the big picture, punching it in the face, and then merrily running away before she really gets a glimpse of it.
This storyline, for instance, involves Tsutomu (the human boy Birdy's sharing bodies with) and his friends getting kidnapped by space soldiers. Birdy winds up fighting her way up the ship protecting them, and they wind up finding out the truth about what's been going on all this time. About time. There's also a subplot about Tsutomu's sex drive coming back, which (when he tries to sneak one after Birdy falls asleep) leads to the unfortunate moment with the space mouse.
While the main character have a relatively simple perspective on it, the space dog soldier who goes bug fuck insane and starts shooting the walls of the living space ship to capture them is clearly in some maverick anti-hero action movie of her own, and they were only kidnapped because of the space dog page boy who got caught while on an illegal underhanded mission for the space parrot delegated to monitoring the situation on earth and the potential of opening official diplomatic channels with Earth civilizations (an option the military have ruled out, on the theory that Earth has no unified central government) and space parrot only ordered the page boy to enlist Birdy's help in recovering the space republic's satellite probe because he was convinced the general's arrogance was going to lead to conflict with earth citizens that could potentially cause issues should they ever initiate first contact.
Fucking massively complex shit to have hovering idly in the background while the main characters are punching things and being embarrassed about having to strip down for decontamination.
I'm rather lost for where to go from that, so let's just settle for claiming arbitrarily that the anime totally fucking missed the point of the manga, and everyone should read the manga instead because it is better. FACT.

Saki episode 1, or, Even a Monkey Can Create Anime

Well, now I know Gonzo must be a green company, because I don't think I saw one moment or character that wasn't completely recycled material from some other series' waste bin. It's been a loooong time since I saw something this cynically, thoroughly formulaic.

I should just get around to watching more Akagi instead, shouldn't I? At least that distracted the mahjong-illiterate with insane melodrama instead of loli buttcheeks. The lightning strike of tile-theft at the end was a nice touch, but too little too late guys.

Bubblegum Crisis live-action movie

Apparently we're getting another live-action anime adaptation: six companies in six different countries have come together for the production.

That shouldn't be taken as a sign of quality, though - there's a serious risk of design-by-committee there. They've already announced some changes (such as the inclusion of 2 male leads) but the mention that the film production will leverage a bunch of international treaties to make use of government funding makes me skeptical of the proposed 2012 release window - and the hope of getting it distributed through mainland China kills any hope that it'll be anything too innovative.

If it doesn't collapse from organizational chaos (How many fingers in that pie? With governmental policy involved too?) it'll end up being a big-budget action movie that probably borrows little more than the power armor and boomers from the original.

I've got a lot of fond memories of the old series (which hasn't held up as well as you might hope) and the subsequent spin-offs were intermittently entertaining if not actually good ("Mm! Let's get a bager while my partner is killed by boomers!" "Are there any words (like boomer) we should avoid during dinner to keep Sylia from going completely bug-nuts?"). With any luck we'll get some laughs out of this production too.

via ICv2 with more detail (including the mention of what's already been changed) at io9.

The best part? The AT field is coming out of his butt

Not really much to say here.

from Something Awful

One Piece fans rejoice

For Funimation is going for a simulcast of the anime with only a one hour difference between the airing of the Japanese episode beginning later this month, and Viz is releasing the most recent Japanese chapters in their Shonen Jump magazine starting in the fall.

The latter news is more interesting to me, considering we should see massive volume releases soon thereafter.

Now if only Funimation would license Hosoda's One Piece film...

The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Seas

If Fuyumi Ono made an entire series devoted to covering Shoryu and Rokuta over the 500-year period of the Ever-King's reign, I would import them and then rebuy the books should they be published in English.  The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Seas is addicting that way, centered on delivering overblown fights over the roles of kings with manuvering by very important and intelligent people.

This story also has the benefit of not coming across as an afterthought like it does in the anime adaption, as well as avoiding the awkward attempt at a frame tale to preserve Yoko as the main character.

What is distressing, though, is the current lack of availability here.  Probably just a short print run by Tokyopop, knowing the economy and their situation, but it's still not satisfying.

I love this show, but why is this noteworthy?

Anyone know why His and Her Circumstances getting a new, cheaper collection is news worth reporting? I love the show and all, but if it's just a product repackaging, why does it matter?

Are they re-mastering it or putting back in the couple frames cut from the tasteful sex scene?

via ICv2

This week's Souten Kouro bullet points

Cao Cao is still a pimp, flirting with his tsundere wife and seducing a dancing girl AT A FUNERAL.
I see budget issues lead to them using exactly the same dancing music at all occasions of state.

More importantly, Guan Yu has an awesome 'stache.
Later, some horses run in place.

And a small child cheerily talks his way into being Cao Cao's military advisor.
Cao Cao then INVENTS THE MEME and destroys the fucking country.

At least I learned what miso is

Moyashimon has always had a severe predilection for textbookitis. With the main character able to see bacteria, it stands to reason the thing has to explain what the bacteria are; with everyone students at an agricultural college it stands to reason their lives revolve around the research they're involved with. The plot generally proves strong enough to bolster it past the occasional onslaught of exposition.
Not so much in volume 7. While there were a number of fascinating passages on the process involved in making staple ingredients of Japanese food, and a long lecture on how sake shops really ought to conduct themselves that managed to be compelling reading in spite of itself, there was literally no plot for the bulk of the volume. A character from an earlier volume showed up literally to get drunk and have some light background gender confusion comedy, and there was some business about secret doors that seemed to defeat the author's considerable artistic abilities entirely, and basically spend a hundred pages or so with characters staring in shock at something poorly defined for reasons even less poorly defined, and I pretty much had to page back through the lectures to put all the puzzle pieces together once he got around to answering them.
I strongly suspect that the kind of fashions he likes to draw girls in lining up a lot with the kind of fashions I enjoy seeing girls drawn in was a significant reason why I still found it a largely pleasant read. This is a shame, and Moyashimon should probably aspire to something better. Restore the balance it maintained successfully for the first six volumes, anyway.
I don't think the English version has started coming out yet, so I suspect people aren't aware just how oddball the format of this book is. Manga in serialization tend to get the frames plastered with helpful little pictures of the characters and brief bits of text explaining who they are - a vague attempt at making it possible to pick up and read a chapter of something in the middle. They also tend to have cheery little slogans plastered on the sides or over certain frames, commenting on the action. Snarkily for quirky comedies like this, with demented enthusiasm for jovian adventures. For reasons known only to the author - wait, I can't keep writing this because I'm too lazy to look up his god damn name. Ishikawa Masayuki. Right. Too generic to be anything but his given name. Anyway. Ishikawa apparently does all those character profiles and random commentary himself, and they are all preserved in the final collected volumes. A shocking panel might have "Good god!" written next to it; the character introductions tend to be less useful as such and more ongoing metacommentary on the work. "The main character, though you'd never guess." "Gosh, she's drunk a lot." "Male." He also tends to grab the images from the least identifiable places possible - shots of them from behind, or in silhouette. And then he might chose to spend an entire chapter simply introducing the bacteria floating around the corners of the frame. They certainly aren't essential reading, but they tend to provide a chuckle when the main pages have started to bore me.

Asura Cryin', episode 1

The classic tale of a boy and his giant robot/epic destiny/heroic journey is completely turned on it's head with the addition of the ghost of an adorable girl that has been haunting our hero for years! Or something.


Beautiful women abound, of course. By day, they are his mild-manner (and large-chested) classmates, but by night the transform into warriors and attack him, demanding that he turn over something he's never heard of before. Surely this has no connection to the heavy briefcase his globe-trotting brother's girlfriend dropped off with him (complete with an ominous and cryptic warning), right? No one would have expected that it contained a giant CGI robot ready to do do his bidding!


Despite having the usual love interest role be filled with a ghost and a title suggesting slang-slinging Indian angels, nothing new is really going on in Asura Cryin'. Nothing at all. Recommended only to those for whom the "reluctant school boy hero gifted with great powers and pursued by dozens of beautiful women with their own powers" mine has not been completely exhausted.

based on 1 episode : ANN : Wikipedia

Antique Bakery, episode 1

It should probably be expected, considering the source material. Several beautiful-but-rather-amateurly-drawn men run a bakery in a world of sparse, light-on-details (but still CGI) backgrounds. They are, of course, also very rich. With trouble pasts. Just waiting for some attention...

There are some minor sources of amusement (such as the rich owner of the store apparently having been kidnapped a child and apparently force-fed delicious cakes, which naturally leads him to want to open his own pastry shop later in life...) but there is ultimately never even an effort to rise beyond a CLAMP-clone harem show for women. The most original part of the show is the predatory gay chef who is so demonically gay that he turns every straight man he meets - except for the aforementioned owner (who was a dick when he was younger and the first to turn the chef down).


With the lazy art and barren CGI sets, its hard to recommend Antique Bakery to even those who just want non-threatening fantasies about pretty boys who are naturally curious and just want to experiment over a bit of delicious French pastries.

based on 1 episode : ANN : Wikipedia

I guess I have at least one CPM appreciation post in me

Part of the problem of basing your business around releasing short OVAs is that the format is basically dead, and the few that do squeak out nowadays usually aren't worth the time it takes to watch them. Case in point, Bee Train's Murder Princess, which was so lily-livered and indifferently animated that I had to rewatch Hades Project Zeorymer to wash away the taste of mediocrity.

Zeorymer revolves around the internal and external struggles of Tekkoryu, a.k.a. Hau Dragon, your standard elementally-themed giant mecha committee for world domination, opposed by two also seemingly standard-issue plucky teens in the titular stolen, never-to-be-duplicated unit. So far so generic, but two things make them stand out from the rest:

Firstly, these guys live the dream of every rap video and Bond villain, rocking a sumptuously decorated floating dragon-head fortress absolutely dripping with overdesigned clothes and equipment. These mad rococo stylings are the calling card of director Toshihiro Hirano (a name we'll revisit as soon as I finish watching Vampire Princess Miyu TV), but the important part is this: if Tekkoryu wants you dead, they will shoot you in the face with a gold-plated gun. That is just how Hau Dragon rolls.

Second, they are the world's single most dysfunctional and gossipy crime syndicate, largely due to being founded by one of the most sadistically pragmatic mad scientists I've seen in anime. His master plan is surprisingly clever, so much so that I'm not going to go into the plot in any real detail-- it's only four episodes, just watch it-- so let's chat about the animation for a bit.

The animation quality is consistently very good, but in some ways curiously wasted. The main problem is that the Zeorymer outclasses its enemies so badly that it barely expends any effort taking them out-- it just shrugs off their attacks for a bit then shoots a single beam, or worse, just crosses its arms, and then boom, on to the next challenger.

Still, all the energy blasts, exhaust trails, and incidental mecha greebles are lovingly detailed (you can even make out the labels on the various control panels) and the set designs are lush. It's only now that animation standards have dropped so low across the board, that I appreciate little details like the Hakkeshu Empress' elaborate bangles and hair decorations swaying with every step she takes.

It's all very '80s, but in a good way-- sometimes all you want is a nice-looking, coherent robot fight show that gets in, struts its stuff, and gets out. If you're watching, say, the new Mazinger, this might make a nice snack between screenings. It's mecha comfort food, but made from very rich ingredients. It's a shame CPM couldn't be bothered to put all four episodes on one disc, but at this point I'd say they've paid for that sin.

Oh hey, Cencoroll is almost done.

It has a website and everything. And two fucking awesome looking trailers!
Wally Xie found this one a year or so ago, but it's been an awful long time since we last heard anything...because the thing is animated entirely by one dude.
One awesome dude.

Koshiryoku BEEEEEEEEAAAAAM!

Could this woman be more bad ass?

Between her and the fucking epic launch of Mazinger's beam weapon, this was really channeling that Giant Robo vibe big time.

Fully baked

Yakitate!! Japan is one of those series I read faithfully and recommend, but it doesn't really lend itself to commentary because it's pretty much just a series of sight gags. Still, this volume forcefully reminded me of how much of a pain it must be to translate all the culinary technobabble, AND adapt all the puns, instead of just sticking them in a footnote somewhere. So here's to you, Noritaka Minami and Jake Forbes... despite the latter being curiously absent from v.17's credits.

Enma is a pimp!

Magical Manga Opera FIRE KING!
King Gonta's long-awaited follow up to the magnificent Souten Kouro came out back in October, and I quickly grabbed the first two volumes and utterly failed to read them, put off by the slightly childish, less polished looking artwork.
I SHOULD NEVER HAVE DOUBTED THE KING.
This shit is fucking AMAZING.
I mean, just take his design for Enma. Shoulder length bead covered cornrows decked out with a fucking Chinese court hat and HEAT GOGGLES. Pimpin' red coat and tails, shoes that curl up at the end, giant glowing outie bellybutton peeking out over the glowing demonic eyes on his pimpin' beltbuckle.
And the dude is only in the fucking prologue!
Enma finds a human baby, is impressed by what a bad ass the baby is, and gives it powers before sending it to live with a fucking dimension hopping con artist, who happens to be in a fucking Ferrari driving at top speed down the highway when he sees all the signs change to The Sixth Gate and a FLAMING BABY appear in the air down the highway barely far enough for him to spin the fucking car while opening the door in time to snatch the fucking baby out of the air!
The story proper kicks off when the kid is ten, and by sheer dint of always going in when told not to and/or some place is dark, and not being afraid of anything, winds up earning the respect of a giant fucking monkey god and visiting the land of the monkeys where they appear to be having some sort of epic war with the evil bird people.
Kikazaru hides in the kid's thumbnail to recover, and Iwazaru and Mizaru take him to see the monkey king.
The monkey king is dying - he is so impossibly huge he communicates entirely in 48 point font, a sentence at a time thundering across vast vistas of pages with the kid's replies in microscopic unreadable scratchings until the junior monkeys form a giant chain of monkeys from the kid to the king's ear.
At which point King Gonta makes a mic test joke.
Night falls, the sky fills with birdmen raining deadly wires down upon the feeble force fields generated by the 33 Wise Ape-Men's Conference.
Now it is 12:30 and I have volume two looking very tempting.

Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance trailer

A gorgeous trailer for Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance has been released in streaming Windows Media format. I figured out how to embed it below, but for some reason the controls aren't showing up, so right-click and choose "play/pause" to start it. Or just stream it directly.



Looks absolutely gorgeous to me. Can't wait - and reminds me that I need to sit down and rewatch the first remake movie to put my thoughts together for that.

via ANN

ADV picks up a mixed bag from CPM's corpse

So CPM's official dead now (as opposed to just in a coma, like they've been for the past few years) and the looting as begun. Apparently ADV has announced that they're picking up four of CPM's classic titles:

• Grave of the Fireflies
• Now and Then, Here and There
• World of Narue
• MD Geist

It's great to see Grave of the Fireflies and Now and Then, Here and There (the latter being an oft-overlooked gem of the unrelentingly depressing take on the typical alternate world story - a Disney or Miyazaki movie gone bad, in a sense) but the other choices are a little more confusing.

World of Narue looked nice for its time, but ultimately never amounted to anything. And MD Geist published by anyone other than CPM will be not only surreal but inexplicable. That's something CPM could have just taken with it to the afterlife.

Akikan!, episode 1

An archetypal example of "this could only have been created as a joke or dare," Akikan! asks the tragic question of what happens to a soda can after it has been emptied and tossed aside - in the uniquely Japanese way of having it turn into an adorable girl and throwing her at a sex-crazed high school student. Who loves nothing so much as prancing around his apartment naked, adoring his collection of empty cans.

When he puts his lips to a can of melon soda, it turns into a beautiful girl. He is, of course, convinced that this is all a dream (especially when she turns back into a can and communicates with him telepathically) and proceeds to act accordingly. There's also a lesbian schoolgirl witch who pulls razor-sharp playing cards out of her crotch and a predatory homosexual salaryman from the government who is somehow investigating cans-turned-into-girls... or something.

In addition to the unbelievably ridiculous premise, it also revels in the puns, drowns in double entendres, and embraces improbably ludicrous dialogue. "You'll open wide for anyone as long as they have money." "It's Refreshing Beverage Magic." "The sixth sense of my loins tells me this is a dream." This is wildly fun for a while, but it remains to be seen if the insanity can be maintained.

The show also suffers from being pretty darn ugly. The character designs are dated, angular and amateur. If it were easier on the eyes, the fundamentally bizarre nature of the show would come through stronger and more compelling.

This is probably worth checking out an episode of just for the retarded nature of it, but it's too ealry to tell if Akikan! will be able to avoid the predictable moe trap and rise to be anything more than an amusing "believe-it-or-not" oddity otaku pull out when trying to one-up each other with their knowledge of the stupidest anime shows ever created.

based on one episode : ANN : Wikipedia

Zeeeeeeeeeeeeedo!

This show is NOTHING without the narrator. His brief resurgence halfway through this episode made it very clear just how important he is.
Without him, how would we know why Mazinger can DEFLECT LASERS?

Only this narrator can pronounce Zed enthusiastically enough to make me briefly forget that it is supposed to be pronounced Zee.
We then plunge beautifully into melodrama in a way that felt very much like Go Nagai and Imagawa (none of the suspicious genuineness from last week) and involved Devil Mazinger.

Followed immediately by a short sharp return to episode one style bad ass entrance theater. AWESOME.

07-Ghost, episode 1

Coming to the rescue of any otaku who felt that there was a distinct lack of effeminate and angstful anime pretty boys staring deeply into each other's eyes, 07-Ghost has all the breathy-voiced bishis and baroque costume and set design one would expect. It's also about as boring as expected.

It covers the checklist:

• a brooding, amnesiac hero
• an overly chipper best friend who is always trying to get him to open up emotionally
• a doting mentor
• mysterious powers (though the show doesn't put any effort into demonstrating them, it just cuts to the chase and has another friend say that the hero is "special")
• a beautiful asshole who walks into the show and drives the hero into a rage, only to end up in power over him

The slash-fic almost writes itself, especially in the scene where the perfectly platonic friend insists on sleeping with the hero because it's going to be their last night together.


There's also some plot about a war between nations, lost members of a royal family, wanting to get revenge for a half-remembered and murdered father, but none of it really matters when the show is really only interested in having beautiful boys fling CGI magic attacks at each other. It's a Dragonball knock-off for the ladies who don't want to admit they'd rather just be watching straight-up yaoi.

The only saving grace at all are the mechanical designs, which are somewhat interesting in their baroque extravagance, but the airships only show up briefly in the first episode and certainly aren't compelling enough to justify attention.


Only recommended for slash-fic writers who simply can't come up with any interesting pairing of their own.

Based on one episode : ANN : Wikipedia

God fucking damn, Indonesia!

Where have you been all my life?

Starts slow, then unleashes some of the craziest shit I've seen in a long while.

So long and thanks for all the OVAs

So another one bites the dust. I actually happened to watch Negadon the night before the news broke, and, well, it wasn't really that surprising considering that Negadon is pretty much the last thing CPM released in the last three years.

With CPM finally down, I think Media Blasters is the last of what I always considered the second-tier anime distributors, who tended to subsist on OVAs, and usually not being too picky about quality or coherence. That meant some pretty spotty catalogues, but every now and then you'd find some weird diamond among the dross.

Maybe I should post a bit on the host of oddities Central Park Media and its army of sublabels brought to the world, as one last hat-tip to that crappy CGI MD Geist. Eh, probably not. If nothing else I'll always remember them fondly for bringing out Patlabor, which changed me from some guy who remembered Robotech into the broken man I am today. Cheers.

My deepest post yet

Cao Cao is so damn sexy...

He makes all the ladies faint.

Pluto volume 2

Now this is more like it. Now that the general worldbuilding and atmosphere are firmly established, Urasawa is free to start progressing the plot, and I'm finally believing the hype.

In the first volume the robots' habits of getting married, eating meals, etc was just sort of retro and quirky, but now I realize there's also been an almost total absence of actual human beings doing those things. Astro Boy is depicted here as an adorable little kid, but in the actual logic of the story, what are we comparing him to? This and a couple other things give me a glimmer of that peculiarly Japanese idea that a careful imitation can be more meaningful than the real thing (like men playing women in kabuki, or the entire existence of bunraku... is there a word for that?), which is especially interesting in a story driven by a nation of united states declaring war on a Middle Eastern country over an apparently nonexistent weapons stockpile. And Phil K. Dick smiles down from heaven.

On a less heady note, I also appreciate the occasional visual joke like Astro's signature hairdo being reduced to suggestively tousled hair, and, of course, Dr. Roosevelt. Actually, I'm quite impressed by how naturally Urasawa changed Astro's schtick from superhero to boy detective.

So, highly recommended, and I hope volume 3 will be as big an improvement on this as it was to the first.

Shinto Command Center Activate!

A reasonable portion of this episode was unfortunately spent buying time with basically every trick in the book, from struggles that don't go anywhere, to cutting away for fairly lengthy scenes happening around the robot battle during which the robot battle does not advance at all, to what I think of as post-Eva style angsty stuff - Mazinger can't fight because they're in the middle of town and quite a lot of people have already died horribly when robots crushed the buildings they were in. I can see Go Nagai doing something like that, but I suspect there would have been a less respectable tone to it.
So the episode wasn't quite up to the astounding standards the earlier episodes had set.
But it definitely picked up towards the end.

Grandpa apparently has a back up command center in the Shinto shrine, holographic images projected out of the Bodhisatva's eyes, and the 1000 armed Kanon furiously operating dozens of machines behind him.

Oh, and samurai dude is awesome.

Get it together, Sengoku Basara

Episode four contained absolutely NOTHING of interest.
Seriously, if the next episode preview had not revealed that Tokugawa has a fucking MECHA, I would have written this baby off for good.
It's the female leads that get under my skin - or got under my skin this week. I can just about stomach feudal female speech when the men are all full on feudal too, but when they're all speaking modern Japanese, and the women aren't? They just sound disgustingly servile, and the character designs being designed for some rapist's submissive ninja fantasy wank off just stabs the point home bloodily.
Shit is skeevy, and you seriously need fucking crazy awesome action to make up for it. Ass boring plot shit and trotting out the same joke till it utterly ceases to be interesting are not fucking helping.

Ten

One of the most dynamic and memorable bits in the Souten Kouro manga was the scene where Cao Cao is told there are many witnesses to his crimes, but no witnesses, save himself, to his innocence.
He responds by pointing at the sky.
"The heavens are my witness."

Somehow this wound up being animated with his hand in front of his mouth so they wouldn't have to fucking animate his lip flap.
Argh.
And yet, the fundamental beauty of it continues to shine through, to the point where I'm officially going to make this my last bitch about the budget and the fucking horrible voice casting. I've got nothing new to say on those posts, and they're not preventing me from coming back every week.
Particularly when Cao Cao is taking a position in charge of the Northern gate, and ordering beatings to anyone breaking curfew. Beatings with a fucking massive log. A particularly awesome bit has a man sentenced to a hundred and four whacks; this is reduced to twenty two on the grounds that it is not intended to be fatal, but the man dies after one. "Fine," Cao Cao declares.
And moves on to preventing the world's most awesome suicide.

Death by axe headbutting!

And as long as I'm just linkblogging

I should also point at the whole Say Hello to Black Jack online serialization thing. Some interesting stuff coming out of there.

A Drifting Life

This has already garnered attention from the critics and will continue to do so.  The praise is unexpected, after all, when it's aimed at Yoshiro Tatsumi, the father of gekiga and a now Drawn and Quarterly favorite artist.  His three short story collections have more than warranted the acclaim, trapped in their own steamy world of post-war Japan where violence, sexuality, depravity and disillusionment win out over hope and reprieve more often than not.  Where the lack of diversity of character designs gives power to the everyman, emphasizing how these tragedies could happen to any and everyone.

Yet there's not much of that here in Tatsumi's autobiographical work.  A sense of individual powerlessness and the overwhelming presence of Japan's growing industrial complex remains, but the atmosphere of those existential tales are left in favor of impassioned accounts of family life and a strong, obsessive love for the development of manga after World War II.

That gives an easy schism between apathy and enjoyment, actually; the book itself maintains a steady pace and, with little exception, never really treats any subject outside of manga -- or any incident or influence related to it -- with a sentimental eye.  A home robbery and the potential threat of Tatsumi's father being conned is of lower importance in comparison to Tatsumi's first encounters with the revered Osamu Tezuka, or Tatsumi discovering one of his projects torn in half by his brother (whose spiteful, early scenes superficially remind me of David B.'s Epileptic, though this issue is resolved rather early in comparison to that French comic).  This continues on and on with one-note pacing, never gaining or relenting its momentum until the last third of the story where the problems and rivalries between publishers and their own artists spark a more conventional conflict.

I've probably given the impression that I don't particularly care for it, which is only a half-truth.  The material has a certain dryness, but there's more than enough of interest with a bombardment of information pertaining to cultural development of Japan from the late 40s to the late 50s -- particularly film, which had a powerful impact on Tatsumi who would later integrate traits cinematic storytelling into manga.  The slow-burning climax also provides a more human interest into the story, resolving itself with one of Tatsumi's admiringly blunt metaphors connecting Japan's difficulties to not just manga's, but his own.

The manga has already received the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Award and will likely continue to see more and more accolades pushed on it (Eisner is going to be all over this, for sure).  I won't begrudge it; A Drifting Life is an ambitious, sometimes touching tale by one of the most important men in Japanese comics, a commemoration to the devotion and spirit that propelled the form into the monolith that it is today.

I actually kinda disagree with him but I can't resist using this tag

A translation of one of Kentaro "Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga" Takekuma's lectures, an aesthetic criticism of Nausicaa.

I gotta agree with the general drift of the comments, that Takekuma seems to be just noting that the work deviates from accepted manga conventions, as opposed to whether or not breaking those rules was a good idea or not, but a good read anyway.

ZEUS THE BETRAYER

Look! Is it a robot? Is it the Devil, ready to consume the world? Or it is a God, omnipotent and all knowing, the very spirit of ZEUS HIMSELF?
A brief flashback to BEFORE MANKIND which nonetheless involves some crying Greeks, and the moment we've all been waiting for:
That name
That name
That name
That name
That name
ROOOOCKKKEEEET PUUUUUUUUUNCH!