Skip to main content

2016 was an amazing year for music, so to wave bye-bye to it I wanted to add a few tunes I hadn’t had the chance to post earlier. The first track is One OK Rock’s I Was King from their upcoming album Ambitions, which will be released on January 13th. The next one is Blood On The Edge (the theme from the Anime Strike the Blood, OVA version) from Kishidan Cult & THE Akishin Rockets, posted online in November and just released a few weeks ago. The third is Never Gave Up by All Off, a band that’s been rocking Japan since 2004; that track was posted in January of this year. Their single Refrain Boy is the ending theme for Anime Mob Psycho 100, if you thought they sounded familiar.

We get two versions of Princess Mononoke in movie theaters this January, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Studio Ghibli classic. On January 5th you can see the original Japanese version with English subtitles, while on January 9th you can watch the English Dub version. Both versions were the work of Hayao Miyazaki, but you may not be aware the English language version was written by Neil Gaiman, and performed by such talents as Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, and Gillian Anderson! The special event screening is a combined project of Fathom Events and GKIDS.

Ghost in the Shell Manga is how that whole universe started, when Masamune Shirow’s original graphic novel came out. But until this month, it has never been released digitally. Now it has, with the folks at Kodansha Comics offering up Ghost in the Shell in English digital format for the first time. While you can get that today, the The Ghost in the Shell Deluxe Edition won’t be coming out until January 31st, to help us all gear up for the new movie. This will be the hardcover definitive new edition supervised by Shirow himself, in the original right-to-left format with Japanese sound effects and with a ton of brand new bonus content.

Gintama is the story of an Edo era Samurai in a Japan where Aliens have invaded and taken over the Earth. Skyscrapers and traffic jams came to Kyoto centuries ahead of schedule, and the simple life was over. The manga and anime have gone on for hundreds of episodes, and now we finally get a Live Action Gintama Movie bringing this excellent series to the big screen. It looks like the release date is around July of 2017.

So far, the only film for this weekend I have found is Night of the Living Dead: Genesis, which is pretty close to nothing at all from my perspective, since I am not a horror fan. Since New Years Eve and New Years Day happen this weekend, that becomes a non-issue! You can just party your way through the weekend and skip videos altogether, or use the opportunity to binge-watch your way through a season of a series you have been meaning to catch up on, your choice. Enjoy!