Haibane.info

Category: Anime

  • Voices of a distant star (Hoshi no Koe)

    Voices of a Distant Star is a surprising piece of work. For one, it’s short, only running about 30 minutes. For another, it was created entirely on director Makoto Shinkai’s home computer. The style is classic Shinkai, with a loving addiction to sunset lighting – there are a few screenshots here which will be instantly familiar to anyone who has seen any other of Shinkai’s works (especially A Place Promised). The lush visual style is as distinctive in its own way as Miyazaki’s, and he shares the same obsession with young women heroines and flying machines. Given his obsession with lighting, he seems to rely heavily on subdued pastels rather than vibrant primary colors, which also lends his work an ethereal quality.

    However, what i am seeing in Shinkai’s work is a pattern of obsession with ordinary technology, like trains and cell phones. The contrast is all the more striking given that his stories involve fantastic technologies alongside them, like space mecha, battle cruisers, and gigantic towers that double as dimensional portals. He seems to always insist on keeping the fantastical grounded in the ordinary; the main character in Voices, Mikako, is an elite Agent who is selected to pilot a giant mecha on a mission to combat hostile aliens, yet wears her schoolgirl outfit in the cockpit and sends text messages across the interstellar gulf to her boyfriend, using her battered Nokia mobile phone. It’s the peculiar realities and real-world physics limitations of the latter technology that drive the story, in fact, making it a very poignant and heartfelt little piece of work. I think the fact that it’s short really adds to its emotional heft.

    Makoto Shinkai Collection DVD setTemptingly, Amazon has a Shinkai Collection DVD set, which includes both Place Promised and Voices, as well as a pile of extra short pieces. I think this is a no-brainer for me to pick up, assuming it ever gets back in stock.

  • Samurai 7

    I’ve burned through this in the past week.

    Samurai 7

    I’m almost done with it. After I finish the series I’ll write some thoughts on it, and let me admit up front that I’ve never seen the Kurosawa original. If anyone has seen it, do chime in, spoilers are ok.

  • fire sale at Right Stuf

    via Don, there’s a fantastic sale at RightStuf, with many discs going for $5. Some of the notable titles include Sugar: Snow Fairy, Serial Experiments Lain, Haibane Renmei, Last Exile, Read or Die, and Someday’s Dreamers. I’m picking the latter up, though they are sold out of disc 2 for the time being, I think it’s worth picking up the rest (and the soundtrack).

  • just wondering

    what would happen if you crossed moe with emo. Would that be emoe?

    And what’s the difference between kawaii and moe anyway? I am lexicon-challenged.

  • the beginning of anime

    My very first foray into anime was Robotech, and it hooked me so badly during spring finals week of my freshman year of college that I spent virtually all of my time between final exams in the TV room at the dorm with my stash of VHS tapes. Apart from watching Akira and Ghost in the Shell sometime afterwards (neither of which I remember particularly well), my next exposure to anime was Grave of the Fireflies, which left a bad impression, to say the least. It wasn’t until just two years ago that Steven got me addicted to Haibane Renmei, which as you may have noticed left something of an impression on me. Since then, my anime strategy has been a predilection for series that are, in Nick’s words, “emotionally tiring” (like Dennou Coil), or epic in scope (like Twelve Kingdoms or Escaflowne). I also enjoy series which have a unique take on technology (Last Exile), or adopt a philosophic and surreal bent (Kino’s Journey, Mushishi) . I also am drawn to certain styles of anime, where the story is of course important but also the manner in which the story is told (Samurai Jack, The Place Promised). Above all, I like a series that has interesting characters, who are human, flawed, and honorable, who charm me and make me care what happens next, even if I sort of already know the answer (Ranma, Shingu, The Cat Returns, The Girl Who Leapt). Of course, I am also heavily into the kawaii scene (Sugar Snow Fairy, Totoro), primarily because of my daughters. This list barely scratches the surface of what I have seen, and the list of what I want to see next is even longer still.

    I am partly responding here to Steven’s “end of anime” post in which he laments the lack of interesting material to be excited about – I think that the point where any one of us runs out of anime is when we exhaust the pool of what we like. There are very few truly original series out there, so everything in some sense is an echo of what comes before. Limit ourselves to our safe pond, and over time it is certain to dry up. And yet, inspiration to try something new often strikes from unlikely places. Take Ranma as an example – I’d tried it once, and recoiled due to excessive ecchi. It was solely due to Steven’s enthusiasm for it that got me to give it another shot, and now I am hooked, while ironically Steven’s interest has sagged (season 5, btw, has been superb, easily equal to the high points of seasons 2 and 3). Ranma is new ground for me in anime, with plenty of casual ecchi and fan service, a focus on martial arts, and a love dodecahedron as the primary plot driver. And yet, I have fallen for it in a sense, because over time you get to know the characters, even if they don’t grow that much, who they are is plenty enough. I am sure there are plenty of frontiers (relatively) for me to explore yet, not just on my watch list but also things like Evangelion, Haruhi, Ah My Goddess, Mahoromatic, etc. which all represent a significant departure from my usual fare, even more so than Ranma.

    All I am really trying to say is that anime is vast. Even if the industry were to die tomorrow from evil fansubbers or a withering of imaginative energy or displacement by Korean animation studios, there’s already a corpus of work that spans decades for me to work through, and I am limited only by my taste (stop snickering). I fully understand why Steven is at the end of anime, but for me, it’s just the beginning. And I owe that to him.

    As an aside, if anyone has discs of series that I’ve mentioned above that they’d like to sell, let me know. I am especially interested in buying Ranma or Kino.

  • netflix queue update

    I just added the rest of Escaflowne, Death Note, and Paprika to my netflix queue. I think I’ll add an RSS feed of my queue to the sidebar somewhere.

  • hair match

    Photos from the upcoming live-action Dragonball Z movie have been leaked. A hairspray shortage is surely imminent.

  • Escaflowne disc 1

    I will admit that I couldn’t resist the idea of Isaac Newton as bad guy. Not that I am supposed to know that yet, on disc 1, but in another sense it is liberating to have seen the Escaflowne movie first because a lot of useless tension is now gone, such as the Mole Man’s intentions, or keeping track of who the all the mysterious bad guys are. I especially like knowing who Folken is, because if I didn’t I would be wasting time trying to understand his role, time better spent on appreciating the story.

    And to be honest, this is surprisingly good, as far as the first disc goes, with a hook that’s almost as effective as Twelve Kingdoms. In fact I much prefer Hitomi to Youko now, since this Hitomi isn’t some wierd angsty kook but someone with honest emotion and charmingly formal sensibilities. Hitomi’s proposal to Ayamo was cute and awkward in all the right ways. The transfer to Gaia also was a lot simpler in execution, especially since Van is far more sympathetic as an impulsive and inexperienced youth rather than some wierdly inhuman fighting machine. Merle is the same.

    The mechs are also much more likable in the series than the film, with far fewer wierd biomechanical parts and more of a satisfying blend of steampunk and battlemech styles. The mecha seem almost like characters in their own right, treated as such by their samurai – particularly Allen’s Scheherezade. I am reminded of Robotech in that Rick’s and Max’s mechs also were as distinctive and recognizable.

    My only beef so far is the weird noses. It’s way worse than in the film. Is Garry Trudeau one of the lead animators or something? And I just don’t understand the hairshine thing either. I was, however, pleased to see Hitomi sporting two antennae.

  • Death Note on the big screen

    It seems that there is a live-action adaptation of Death Note coming to a select group of 300 theaters – for two days only. Here’s a review of the movie on NPR and here’s a list of theaters. Some selected theaters that may be of particular interest, ahem:

    Cinemark 20 MERRIAM KS 66202
    AMC Olathe Studio 29 OLATHE KS 66062
    Town Cinema ASHLAND KY 41101
    Hamburg Pavilions 16 LEXINGTON KY 40509
    Stonybrook Cinemas LOUISVILLE KY 40220
    Tinseltown Louisville LOUISVILLE KY 40241
    AMC Elmwood Palace 20 HARAHAN LA 70123
    AMC Westbank Palace 16 HARVEY LA 70058
    Cinemark 14 LAKE CHARLES LA 70601
    Tinseltown SHREVEPORT LA 71115
    Tinseltown USA WEST MONROE LA 71291
    Cedar Hills Crossing 16 BEAVERTON OR 97005
    Valley River EUGENE OR 97401
    Tinseltown MEDFORD OR 97504
    Cinemark 17  SPRINGFIELD OR 97477
    Pinnacle Stadium 18 KNOXVILLE TN 37922
    Opry Mills 20 plus IMAX NASHVILLE TN 37214
    Tinseltown OAK RIDGE TN 37830
    AMC Willowbrook 24 HOUSTON TX 77064
    Houston Marq*E Stadium 22  HOUSTON TX 77024
    Memorial City Mall HOUSTON TX 77024

    Imagine my surprise that Marshfield, WI is not on the list.

  • Moyashimon wins

    Looks like Moyashimon earned its creator 2 million yen in prize money:

    The Asahi Shimbun paper announced the winners for the 12th Annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize on Saturday. Masayuki Ishikawa won the 2-million-yen (about US$20,000) Manga Grand Prize for his Moyashimon medical comedy manga. The manga follows a college student who discovers that he can see and communicate with the germs all around him — germs that appear as super-deformed characters.

    This is definitely on my towatch list.