Archive for December 2009
Which Mario would you rather see? I know my answer.
The inspiration for week’s talking point comes from the flood of cosplay pictures that accompany every Comic Market, which remind me of how much of a cosplay snob I am. By “cosplay snob,” I don’t mean that I hold cosplayers to a high level of quality (though I do tend to poke fun at the more obvious corners they cut). No, I judge cosplayers by how much fun they’re having, and I think more people should as well.
Next time I play poker, I'm shouting out my hand as if I were a giant robot pilot.
Crazy awesome, that is. The first 8-minute episode of The Legend of Koizumi, AKA Mudadzumo Naki Kaikaku, is now streaming on both YouTube and Nico Video. The show, a weird combination of political parody, over-the-top comedy, and Hikaru no Go-style epically overblown game-playing, will see a full DVD release on February 26th. The DVD will feature a half hour of major political figures morphed into mahjong-playing macho men, and I may or may not have already pre-ordered it from Amazon. The writer for this one has been behind some of my favorite “what the hell did I just watch” anime, like Dai Mahou Touge. This one doesn’t disappoint, managing to be both epic and incomprehensibly strange at the same time.
Hit the jump for the video and a summary for people who don’t understand moonspeak.
K-On! Second Season Confirmed
Posted on: December 30, 2009
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Today’s “that was inevitable” moment came when the official site for Kyoto Animation’s musical hit K-On! was updated with the above image, which confirmed a second season for the slice of life show about a high school all-girl band. Given the stellar sales of the DVDs and the show’s massive fan base (the show’s representation at Comike 77 is off the charts), this announcement falls somewhere between “We like money” and “The sun will rise tomorrow” on the surprise scale.
Fearless prediction: 8 straight episodes of the band practicing the exact same song, with mild costume changes and ad-libs.
What? No, I’m not bitter, what makes you think that?
Source: Moon Phase
Mizuki Nana may be the only anime seiyuu on the 60th Kouhaku program this week, but there are plenty of mainstream performers on the program who’ve lent their songs to anime programs and video games. I mean, Final Fantasy X-2 skyrocketed Koda Kumi’s career, and fans of her skimpy outfits and catchy dance tunes are thankful for it. This is a quick look at some of the Kouhaku performers and some of the songs you may not know about that ended up on anime soundtracks.
Note: the “you may not know about” excludes all of those Bleach and Naruto Shippuden themes that are floating around by popular acts.
You may not have heard of Katanagatari yet, but the works of writer NisiOisiN should be familiar to anime fans, with his Bakemonogatari stories turning into one of the best anime of 2009.
Now, you can see a preview of the first hour-long special on the Katanagatari anime site. The story, a medieval Japanese fantasy about a quest for twelve legendary swords, is split told over twelve novels – one for each of the swords sought by main character Shichika. Each novel will be adapted into a one-hour special over the next year, and while White Fox animation is relatively new to the animation game, they are almost assuredly not going to cut as many corners as Shaft did with Bakemonogatari in adapting NisiOisiN’s excellent writing.
Wusses such as myself will be easily freaked out by the horror anime Shiki. Heck, just looking at the picture up there gives me the willies – Japanese dolls have always inspired a little terror in me with their lifeless eyes and general resemblance to a corpse, which is accentuated in most of the promotional stills for Shiki.
Thankfully, the trailer posted to the official Shiki site doesn’t get truly freaky yet, mostly showing some line art and stills from the series, about a small mountain town called Sotobamura which finds cut off from the rest of the world after a large number of the townsfolk die under mysterious circumstances. The original manga was created by Ono Fuyumi and Fujisaki Ryu (of Houshin Engi fame), and if I wasn’t such a pansyboy about horror, I would have checked this out ages ago – it looks great, alive (in a manner of speaking) with the atmosphere that is so essential to a good scary story.
You see that? That’s a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann statue from Volks, standing at 33 cm tall and amusingly scaled at 1 to infinity. That’s over a foot tall, for those of us still stuck in the Imperial/American system of measurement. It’s not the most awesome thing at sale at this week’s Comic Market 77, purely on a technicality – it’s only on display at the Volks booth, since it would probably cause huge space issues if they tried to bring more than 5 of them to the show. It’s for the best, really, since the monstrosity will cost over $400 to cover the material costs of pure awesome.
So, ignoring the hosts of doujinshi from my favorite artists, these are my picks for the 5 best things currently on sale at the biggest event in Japanese fando.
Haruhi Double Whammy: Japanese Trailer and American Season 2 Announcement
Posted on: December 28, 2009
- In: News
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In typically cryptic-yet-obvious fashion, the American site for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was updated on Christmas with a “video” that is just a loop of the SOS Brigade logo spinning for a minute to a test pattern background. The mildly annoying video, along with the many 8s in the page source (thanks, ANN) mean that this is a roundabout licensing announcement for the second season of the anime, which infamously featured the “Endless Eight” arc of repeating episodes.
On the Japanese side, with surprising bluntness, Kadokawa Anime’s YouTube channel posted the trailer for the upcoming Disappearance movie, which had previously only been available as an easter egg on the Japanese site. Take a look after the jump!
Over the holiday, the Kadokawa Anime channel on YouTube was updated with three new trailers for the upcoming anime Omamori Himari featuring all three aspects of its appeal: action, romantic comedy, and blatant sex appeal. Appropriately, the various trailers are called the “action version,” the “romantic comedy version,” and the “sexy version.”
Check out all three trailers of next week’s supernatural catgirl anime after the jump.
Not pictured: giant blades sticking out of her sleeves.
The long-awaited, oft-teased Angel Beats! anime finally has some solid footage online in its sixth promotional video, released today on the official site for the upcoming collaboration between famed game studio Key and Sony anime arm Aniplex. After five videos full of floating letters and pencil drawings, the latest video shows a whole lot of the show in action – and action is the right word, because Angel Beats! comes with a shocking amount of blood and explosions, more than every other Key work combined.
The premise does start with all of the characters being dead and playing around in the afterlife, but it’s strange to see a Maeda Jun story with so many machine guns, pools of blood, and ballistics. None of his other works have even scratched the surface of this trailer, from the slapstick video game violence of Clannad to the… well, I can’t even think of any other Key work that has even this much violence. It’s a new direction for Key, and we’ll have to wait until this show starts before making a decision on it. But it sure is going to be different from the Air, Kanon, and Clannad dramas we’re used to.
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