Posts Tagged ‘high school’
Fall Anime Second Impressions
Posted on: October 14, 2010
- In: Reviews
- 4 Comments
woooooooooooooo
A week has gone by since the last time I updated my thoughts on the fall anime series, and while my general opinion is still unchanged – “This is the best season in years” – there’s a lot to be said about what’s going on. With most series having two episodes under their belts, let’s jump into it.
I’m Hooked
To Aru Majutsu no Index II – This is mostly based on my love of the books, which admittedly have their flaws, but have kept me reading for months. The new opening song gets special props for making me giggle whenever I think Kawada Mami is singing “No paaaaants!”
The World God Only Knows – Captures the feel of the manga quite well, with the addition of some excellent production quality on the part of Manglobe and the staff. Elcea is like 20 times cuter in the anime than she is in the manga, though I’m still not fully convinced by Shimono Hiro’s portrayal of Keima.
Star Driver – I wish I had maids who sparkled at me when I took my shirt off. It’s from the “Don’t think about it too hard” school of fun, and I’m still in.
MM! – Still a guilty pleasure.
OreImo – It’s a very well-researched look at the social dynamics of otaku, and I appreciate that. Saori “Bajeena” also amuses me, since I know some people like that.
Gave it a chance, and…
Squid Girl – This show made me laugh a few times, but I don’t see myself sticking with it for very long because I’ll get tired of the humor fairly quickly.
Iron Man – Dropped until it airs on G4. I want to see it in English.
Super Robot Wars: The Inspector – Worth sticking to. I may be biased though, since I started playing Alpha 3 recently and have become weak to cheesy robot fun (see: Star Driver).
Otome Youkai Zakuro – Better than I expected, but still not really up my alley. Some old Sakura Taisen fans are clinging to it, though, so maybe after a few more episodes I’ll pick it back up.
No Sir
Soredemo Machi ha Mawatteiru – This one’s actually pretty funny, but I absolutely can’t stand Omigawa Chiaki’s acting. She belches and whines her way through scenes, and it’s just not fun to listen to. Sakurai Takahiro as the old woman deserves props, but I want to take a chopstick to my eardrums every time Omigawa’s character opens her mouth.
Bakuman – Slow. Dull. No.
Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt – Some people took a look at this image of Panty and went “God, that’s hawt.” I went “Holy crap, what happened to her left eye?” I will not mock you for liking it, since it’s massive parody in action, but I don’t like it myself.
Motto ToLoveRu + Samurai Girls – Lumped into the same category of “My quality meter is not controlled by my hormonal urges.” I didn’t watch Seikon no Qwaser, I didn’t watch High School of the Dead all the way through, and I won’t watch these for more than a few minutes.
How’re you guys doing with the new season?
- In: Previews
- 2 Comments
These two announcements could not be more different, and I’m lumping them together for just that reason. The above video is the cutesy, fluffy announcement of a K-On! movie from Kyoto Animation, which is sure to cause paroxysms of joy in the hearts of its many devoted fans. Me, I’ve never bought into it. But given its massive popularity within the cute-girls-doing-cute-things genre, it’s certainly going to find a large and willing audience once it comes out.
Meanwhile, the 35th volume of Miura Kentarou’s epic fantasy manga Berserk has given word that a new anime project is finally in place. The last time there was a Berserk anime was all the way back in 1998, so this announcement has been a very long time coming. The bloody, gritty, and often uncomfortably dark Berserk manga has been running for 20 years with only 25 episodes of Guts being awesome to show for it, so this new anime should be awesome.
Which project are you most excited for?
Edit: updated with the trailer for the new Berserk.
This is why I like Kaede. She thinks she's helping.
In one of the happier announcements of the day, Sentai Filmworks added Nyan Koi! to its December release slate. The silly, cat-centric romantic comedy series was one of my surprise favorites of 2009, combining wacky comedy with occasional flashes of decent writing to become an above-average romcom experience.
So hurray for Nyan Koi!, and hurray for Sentai expanding its catalog a bit! My pre-order is going in today. You can see a description of the anime, as well as the opening and ending songs, after the jump.
Last week, Lantis went ahead and released a Love Live! trailer that actually shows you what the song sounds like outside of the instrumentals. Is it cute? Eh… I guess. Is it catchy? It’s okay, I guess.
Is it so bad that it only sold 434 copies? …Yeah, kind of, especially in the animation and originality departments. You make the call.
Nice try, girls, but no dice.
Do you know what Love Live! is? Yeah, I bet you don’t. It’s a collaboration between Dengeki G’s magazine (Sister Princess), Lantis (a music label that includes Chihara Minori and Kuribayashi Minami), and Sunrise (Gundam) that seems aimed squarely at the iDOLM@STER crowd. The formula seems simple: take some relatively talented voice actresses and have them sing over cutely animated idols, then profit off of all the CDs and games.
At some point, though, the train to ludicrous guaranteed profits got derailed. Do you want to know how many copies the Love Live single “Bokura no Live, Kimira to no Life” sold in its first week after the August 25th release?
434. That is not a typo. Four hundred and thirty-four copies in its first week, good for 167th on the charts. Check after the jump on some of the reasons it failed so spectacularly.
Beelzebub Manga Gets 2011 Anime
Posted on: September 1, 2010
- In: News
- 3 Comments
Demon baby come to earth. Totally not Gash Bell, though.
The latest Shonen Jump project to get a TV anime is Beelzebub, as announced in this week’s edition of the manga anthology. Tamura Ryuuichi’s high school battle comedy is scheduled to start airing in January 2011. The manga stars hot-headed, dim-witted delinquent Oga Tatsumi, also known as “Ogre,” who finds himself in the unfortunate position of playing foster father to a demon baby named Beelzebub. In order to rid himself of the troublesome and deadly infant, he has to wade his way through the worst of the worst at his high school while still keeping the lightning-shooting infant safe.
With the usual blunt instruments of Jump anime, a huge amount of talent has been assembled to play the leads, from Konishi Katsuyuki (Kamina, Gurren Lagann) as Oga and Sawashiro Miyuki (fricking everything) as baby Beelzebub to Toyosaki Aki (Yui, K-On!) in the role of Kunieda Aoi, the strongest girl at school.
Yeah, I don’t know how that last casting will work either, but I am trying my hardest to ignore the existence of this anime, since the manga is pretty forgettable. What’s that, you say? One of the main characters is a busty demon maid? Well, crap.
I'm so glad this isn't a touch screen game.
Enterbrain has posted a brief teaser for the upcoming Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu OVA, filled with the series’ trademark insanity. It’s hard to call this a trailer since it’s really a gag video, but it’s funny, so I forgive it. The video is three fake scenes from a mobile phone dating game strung together, and it’s wrong on quite a few levels, especially if you try to make out what Hazuki is saying in her variation of the pinky swear.
I like it. The OVA does not yet have a release date, but will come before the second season hits the airwaves in 2011.
Shinonono. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
With Comic Market 78 coming this weekend, there is a helluva lot of fall anime being put on display in anticipation of the year’s biggest otaku event. First in line: Infinite Stratos, the girls-in-powered-suits sci-fi action/romcom from Eight Bit. A new 90-second trailer has been posted on the official site, and fans are already hailing the adaptation of Yumizuru Izuru’s light novels as the “next Sakura Taisen.”
It’s hard to argue with the enthusiasm. From the brief bits in the trailer, it looks great on both the mecha and cute girl sides of the equation. If this is the average quality we can expect from this series, it’s going to be a must-watch for me. I was a huge fan of Sakura Taisen back in its heyday, and with its “Only one boy can pilot these powered suits” premise, it hearkens back to the wonderful cheese that Sakura Taisen fans loved so much.
Plus, the cast they’ve assembled is pretty top-notch. The tsundere samurai miko is played by Hikasa Youko (Mio from K-On!), the British twin-drill is played by Yukana (Teletha Testarossa in Full Metal Panic!), the Chinese childhood friend is played by Shimoda Asami (Chihaya of iDOLM@STER), the French girl is Hanazawa Kana (Nadeko of Bakemonogatari), and the one-eyed German military girl is voiced by Inoue Marina (Yoko of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann). The main character isn’t very well-known, but then again, in a production like this, who cares about the guy?
Girls who are part robot confuse my boy parts.
The latest light novel to anime conversion is Infinite Stratos, a relatively new and unknown series by rising author Yumizuru Izuru. The science fiction series has sold 400,000 total copies over five books so far, which is a modest success but nothing to write home about – for comparison, the To Aru Majutsu no Index novels have sold 7.7 million over 20 books.
Infinite Stratos is about a world where a new type of powered suit can only be operated by women. This newtechnology, known as the Infinite Stratos (IS), leads to a revolution in society, changing the world into a matriarchy. But, since there are Rules about these things, a boy named Orimura Ichika accidentally activates an IS system and becomes instantly famous. “The only boy in the world who can use an IS” is immediately drafted into an elite IS pilot academy where, because there are Rules about these things, he runs into a lot of his childhood friends amidst the gaggle of cute girls who are all fascinated or threatened by his presence.
All of this is pretty much an excuse to have a high school romcom/robots hybrid, with a Strike Witches-style twist where the girls are hybridized with the mecha. There also seems to be a shortage of pants, judging from the book covers, but I am strangely okay with that.
The most interesting thing announced so far about this anime is that it’s going to have Kikuchi Yasuhito (Macross Frontier) at the helm, while Eight Bit (Macross Frontier: Itsuwari no Utahime) will handle the animation. I have a lot of faith in those two names, and that upped my assessment of this announcement from “another light novel to throw into the pile” to “This could explode in popularity like K-On!” Time will tell.
Yus!
If the second season of the criminally undersold Arakawa Under the Bridge didn’t wow you, don’t worry – the prequel to Nisio Isin’s famed ghost story series Bakemonogatari is going to be animated by Shaft soon. With Kizumonogatari in the pipes, fans can now rest assured that the hit 2009 anime is going to get much, much more anime. Kizumonogatari takes place before Bakemonogatari, and covers the strange sequence of events that turned Koyomi into a vampire, then cured him. Also of interest, it shows how Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade became the quiet little Lolita she is in the main story. No date or format has been announced for the new series, which is probably for the best.
With this announcement, it becomes very safe to say that every -monogatari story in the series is going to get its turn getting animated by the overworked people at Shaft. Whether or not they’ll be completed in time for release is another question entirely, thanks to the now-infamous missing scenes scattered throughout the Bakemonogatari anime. That’s good, because the hard-working Nisio Isin is scheduled to bring out a new novel every three months until December of next year.
Not content with finishing up Nekomonogatari (“Tsubasa Tiger”) in October, he’s following them up with Keimonogatari (“Mayoi Jiang-Shi”) in December and Hanamonogatari (“Suruga Devil”), Otorimonogatari (“Nadeko Medusa”), Onimonogatari (“Shinobu Time”), and Koimonogatari (“Hitagi End”) in 2011. Shaft’s going to fall behind at this rate – but then again, no one really expects them to be on time anymore.
In other news, this is the most hyphens I have ever used in a single post. I felt like mentioning that.
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