Dagger

Very interested to see what you guys will think of the ending (last third/fourth or so, I guess) of Esca. I thought it was damn near perfect in every quarter for most of its run, but then... well, that's a discussion for later (or for the Escaflowne thread). ~Dagger~

Finished my leisurely reading of [B]Seirei no Moribito[/B]. Wonderful ending, and I hope the translation turns out well. Because this is being published by Scholastic, I'm assuming that it will be one of the first adapted-into-anime novels* to be shelved with regular books (in this case, children's/middle grade) instead of with graphic novels, which is a step forward as far as I'm concerned. Amused that they [url=http://www.amazon.com/Guardian-Spirit-Moribito-Nahoko-Uehashi/dp/0545005426/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199116634&sr=8-1][u]changed the cover[/u][/url] to make it more Japanese-looking. *An awkward way of putting it, but since it's not a light novel like most of what's coming out... Am planning to wrap up the anime (someone had better license-rescue it) shortly. Given that the anime includes not only several original characters, but also adds to some characters' motivations/personalities, I'm curious about how much input the author had on the changes to the storyline. ~Dagger~

Just as a note, I'm not aware of any legit box sets that also include the movie. FUNimation is currently re-releasing FMA in sets of (roughly) 16 episodes each. (Example at Amazon [url=http://www.amazon.com/Fullmetal-Alchemist-Season-Part-Box/dp/B000WE5I1U/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1199075043&sr=8-2][u]here[/u][/url]). Anything that's available solely on Amazon Marketplace--as opposed to the main site--is probably going to be a bootleg, since everything that FUNimation has released related to the series is still in print, except for the limited edition artboxes. Regardless, it's a great show. More worth buying than ever, with the lower-priced sets coming out. ~Dagger~

Just a reminder that [url=http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/11756.html][u]IFC will air[/u][/url] [b]Witchblade[/b], [b]Hell Girl[/b] (Jigoku Shoujo) and [b]Speed Grapher[/b] in 2008. [url=http://www.ifc.com/searchresult?search=witchblade&x=4&y=8][u]Witchblade[/u][/url] starts on 1/4. ~Dagger~

[url=http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=puT55b0Gkpg][u]First look at Il Teatrino[/u][/url] (crappy camcorder trailer from Comiket) Confirmed for 14 TV episodes & 1 OVA. I would just ignore the music altogether, as it's hard to tell what's from the background noise and what's from the screen (much less pass judgment on the songs). It's funny--for all that I complained about Madhouse not being involved with this, I never bothered to check which company had taken their place. Turns out that it's Artland. They've done some really good-looking stuff (namely Mushishi) but on the whole have a mixed track record. While it's hard to make any decisions based on the promo, it didn't show off anything impressive. ~Dagger~

Mnemosyne is going to be about as adult as TV-aired anime gets, going by the preview ripped from the official site. Warnings: Violence, sexual situations, yuri [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0KAy-yDGXo][u]Link here[/u][/url] [to reiterate, not work-safe] Haruka Naru is based on a series of PS2 otome games. It's basically a fantasy/harem series for girls in the Fushigi Yuugi mold. Probably not up your alley. ~Dagger~

Indeed it was. The unlicensed Kino material consists of a pilot episode ("The Tower Country," 12 minutes long), the first movie ("Life Goes On," 30 minutes long) and the second movie. Everything but the second movie--which seems to have just come out on DVD, anyway--is either subbed or licensed. ~Dagger~

So Ikuhara is remastering Utena. Possibly even in HD! :love: I don't care what it costs... I'm so getting this the instant it comes out on R2 DVD (or, er, whatever format it comes out on). As much as I'd love to think that the remastered version will get licensed, I can't say that the chances of it seem very high to me. ~Dagger~

Speaking of which, I hear that Tokyopop has put the second novel permanently on hold. Licensing issues, apparently. I guess it's a good thing that it's all self-contained stories, so it's not like they had to stop on a cliffhanger, but I wish more were on the way. ~Dagger~

So I skim-watched the second movie. :) The original director came back for this one, but the animation studio is SHAFT instead of A.P.P.P. They did a solid job, especially in integrating CG in some of the backgrounds. Kino's character design still stands out as being a little more delicate and pretty in a bishounen-esque way (like the designs released earlier showed). [IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v632/DaggerIX1/snapshot20071229054149.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v632/DaggerIX1/snapshot20071229055644.jpg[/IMG] I got the gist of the story, but I'll have to watch it again more carefully for the details. I'm hoping it'll get subbed to spare me the trouble, though. :p ~Dagger~

Yeah, the background music goes heavy on the jazz throughout. ~Dagger~

I have to admit... the more I see of the main heroine (Shinra), the more pathetically interested I get in Kimiaru. While women with dominant personalities are not as rare in bishoujo games as one might think, it's not often that the main heroine's entire character design reeks such an impeccable superiority. ~Dagger~

If I had to guess, I would say no. CN doesn't often seem to pick up short series, and ADV has probably reserved it for their own network (I think it might be available On Demand). It's unfortunate. This is the type of show that would be perfect for them to stream online... it was never fansubbed beyond the first two episodes, and it could afford to be much better known. At any rate, [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqDKtdoktq0][u]here's a 40-second clip[/u][/url] that IMO does far more to sell the show than the OP or any of ADV's long-winded trailers. ;) It turns out that 009-1 was actually 13 episodes; the last disc contains a bonus episode between 9 and 10. The show ends on a three-episode arc. ~Dagger~

It looks like I'll be staying home and nursing my poor overworked dad, who just got shingles. :animedepr Oh, and I guess I'll probably end up playing games or something as well... or maybe doing some extra gift-baking. What are the holidays for, if not getting other people fat? :p ~Dagger~

Finished Sekien no Inganock, which was absolutely amazing, and am now on [b]Soshite Ashita no Sekai Yori[/b], another November release. (I decided to play this next in part because it's set in modern Japan, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to follow than Inganock's intense world-building, haha.) The OP movie is [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgnrOojQX1s][u]here[/u][/url]. The character designs aren't necessarily my favorite style, but they're very beautiful & refined. What got me interested was reading about the premise. The main characters live on a small island that has seen much better days economically speaking, and they're pretty much the only young people left in the midst of steady depopulation. The opening part of the game (which is quite long) shows them going about their lives and is, to be frank, intensely boring. Then they find out that a meteorite is going to obliterate humanity in about three months. So... kind of like Deep Impact with bishoujo, but not really. The idea here is that the characters are isolated to begin with, so they don't get involved in the chaos that's happening in big cities. There's no way to prevent the collision. It's slice-of-life--but with a definite end point. And it's startling how the game suddenly becomes so engaging after the news hits. The characters have no choice to do the exact same humdrum daily things they did before, except now they do them while knowing that they're all going to die very soon. ~Dagger~

Hm? I don't think anyone (besides the thread starter, maybe) was suggesting that they aren't aimed at children. The highest-rated anime always seem to be classic family shows, followed by a mixture of shounen sports, shounen action, magical girl & prime-time young adult fare (like Gundam SEED and 00, and FMA). They have adult fans, but that doesn't make them adult shows* (whatever that means). *Although going by the definition of actual viewers and/or target audience, that means that a lot of late-night otaku-aimed shows (which can easily have far less objectionable content to them than One Piece or Kenshin or whatever) are automatically adult shows. So it's kind of a hard thing to pin down. Is a seinen magical girl show somehow intrinsically more mature or less appropriate for kids than a magical girl show aimed at elementary schoolers? (Especially considering that the same adults are likely to be fans of both... in the former case as the primary audience, and in the latter case as a secondary audience.) Come to think of it, I'm not sure that anyone's disagreeing over anything anymore... just phrasing it differently and picking at different angles. :) ~Dagger~

I agree with Kanji's post. [quote name='Aceburner'] In closing, read yourself some Rurouni Kenshin (more specifically, Seta Sojiro's backstory) and then tell me One Piece is gruesome.[/QUOTE] This comparison actually works against your point. :animeswea The Kenshin manga ran in Japan's Shounen Jump, and although I don't know what timeslot(s) the anime had, its average viewer household rating across its whole run was 12.2%, which is significantly higher than the numbers that One Piece is currently pulling. To me that makes it seem safe to conclude that the Kenshin anime must have had a favorable timeslot, one that would expose it to at least as many young people as One Piece and comparable series. For practical purposes, they're the same kind of thing. ~Dagger~

Three-disc, 12-episode series from ADV. The creator is Shotaro Ishinomori; 009-1 has the same distinct-looking character designs as Cyborg 009 and Kikaider, two of his other works. Other recent anime based on his stuff include Gilgamesh and The Skull Man. It's an episodic show set in an alternate world where the Cold War never ended. The main character is a female spy for the Western Bloc. Where 009-1 shines is its mixture of retro cheesiness and modern polish... the action is so good and so consistent that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to anyone who enjoys fight scenes in anime. With her competence and low-key personality, the heroine is much like the Major from Ghost in the Shell. After watching the second disc, I realized that 009-1 is also rather similar to Black Lagoon in how it lures you in with slick surface packaging and then weighs you down with a lot of unanswerable questions. It's violent, but the sense of darkness to it comes more from a sort of philosophical melancholy than the spraying bullets. ~Dagger~

[URL=http://img260.imageshack.us/my.php?image=koxd2.jpg][IMG]http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/8629/koxd2.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL] Kagami x Konata wedding poster from the latest issue of Megami. (I reduced it somewhat from the super high-res version.) Twiddling my thumbs and waiting for more news on the DVDs... ~Dagger~

[quote name='Aceburner']Oddly enough, Shonen is slowing down a bit in Japan, it seems. SJ's "big three" (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece) are more or less the only smash hit franchises to garner enough attention to make it to America in a while.[/QUOTE] The key here is the last half of your sentence. There are a lot of shows (shonen and otherwise) that are huge in Japan but, for some reason, don't do well in the US. Even a lot of Gundam falls into this category... nothing since Wing has been as popular as one would expect. So yeah, I wouldn't say that shounen is slowing down at all in Japan... Shows like Major, Hayate no Gotoku, Blue Dragon, Keroro Gunso, Kekkaishi and Eyeshield 21 usually manage to be in or around the top ten highest-rated (in terms of number of viewers) anime in Japan, but for whatever reason, with the exception of Keroro Gunso, you don't exactly see anyone leaping to license them, and even that took a while. ~Dagger~

Hoping to see this tomorrow or over the weekend. It's my third favorite musical and one of Sondheim's best. Disappointed that Burton cut out the main song, but I'll refrain from passing judgment on that until after I watch the movie. ~Dagger~

[quote name='Panache'] What do you mean by that? You like couldn't understand where the kids were coming from? I guess you were a really hard worker in school...[/QUOTE] :confused: Not sure what that has to do with anything. I've never been one to demand that characters share my perspective or background (if anything, it's closer to the opposite). It's just a question of writing and personal preference... to draw a few semi-random comparisons, I also felt distant from the characters in Strawberry Marshmallow (except Miu) and Azumanga Daioh, but I fell in love with every single character in Aria and Cardcaptor Sakura. I can't attribute that to a distinct difference in quality; I suppose I could isolate traits that make the Aria characters appeal more to me than the characters in other slice-of-life shows and so forth, but that would hardly guarantee that I would feel the same thing about characters meeting those descriptions in a different anime. It really comes down to an indefinable chemistry (or lack thereof) between the viewer and the series itself--not altogether separate, I suppose, from human relationships. You can like one boisterous person and be put off by another without ever being able to explain why satisfactorily. In other words, because I didn't click much with the main characters of Kamichu, I watched it for reasons other than being invested in them (the peaceful atmosphere; the clever animation; the supporting cast; the beautifully adapted character designs). [quote name='Aaryanna'][COLOR="goldenrod"][FONT="Comic Sans MS"]Currently I'm watching the Case Closed movie The Fourteenth Target since Beth loaned me her copy that she got for Christmas.[/FONT][/COLOR][/QUOTE] It's out!? I've got to order this. ~Dagger~

I guess you guys inspired me; I marathoned the rest of [B]Kamichu[/B]. Ultimately it's a show I enjoyed more for how well made it was than because I felt a strong connection to it. (Yurie in her "get me ice cream" or "not gonna leave the kotatsu" mode reminds me far too much of myself for me to like her very much, haha.) Episode 15 soars as an ending, pun intended. Nothing particularly wrong with episode 16, but I'd have been happier if it focused on the side characters (for Mitsue, we could have gotten more about her cousin, and I found the Yashima/Miko/Matsuri/Shokichi subplot to be way more interesting than a lot of the rest of the show). Favorite episodes--besides the beginning--were 15, the Miko & Shokichi episode, and the cat fight. Next up is [B]Noein[/B], now that I own the last DVD. I can't remember where I left off last time, so I figure I'll probably just start over from the first episode... ~Dagger~

Speaking of Gunslinger Girl, the [url=http://www.gunslingergirl.com/index.html][u]official site[/u][/url] has updated, but still no trailer yet. The character sketches already look quite different from season one... although Yu Aida is supposedly taking more of a role this time around, I have worries about the production quality. Madhouse did such a good job that it's hard to imagine anyone else matching them. ~Dagger~

While we're still on the subject of swag... [url=http://www.griffon.co.jp/products/pvc/haruhi/haruhi_g.html][u]Goth loli Haruhi figure[/u][/url] from Griffon, 1/7 scale, no release date yet. I must say that this is much more my cup of tea than any of the other Haruhi-related figures that have been announced to date (and there have been a lot of good ones, like Alter's [url=http://www.amiami.com/shop/ProductInfo/product_id/86017][u]swimsuit Yuki[/u][/url]). Probably wouldn't get it unless they did all three girls, though... I like smaller figures better anyway. ~Dagger~