This one is just plain scary quite frankly, but it is also a situation that is with us today and not going away any time soon. This is what happens if you put the tools of today in the hands of just about anybody that walks up the street. This is also a movie coming out in 2012 (yep, that means later this year).
2NE1 keeps creating some amazing rock, and here we have a few more examples for you. The first one goes by the title Hate You, and is a good example of how to animate a live band. It includes a number of classic Anime tropes and characters being inserted into your Real Life environment. The second selection is Ugly, which epitomizes the core insecurities so many people live with every day, even if they are not valid. The third track, Follow Me, is just visually fun. Do not be surprised if you have difficulty following the lyrics; they keep sliding back and forth between English and Korean. If your local brick and mortar doesn’t have this music, you should find it on Amazon, iTunes, and the like…
No actual genre films this week, although Man on a Ledge could be entertaining. Do not despair, because there actually are a ton of great movies coming out this year yet. Chronicle is out next week, a story about 3 high school friends who gain superpowers and risk loosing their souls. In February we get Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, based on Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, it is the sequel to 2009’s film version of Journey to the Center of the Earth (the good one). There will be various 3D versions of the Star Wars franchise released in theaters in the course of the year. Also in February, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance for the adrenalin junkies, and a new treat from Studio Ghibli, The Secret World of Arrietty being a retelling of The Borrowers.
Then in March it all goes nuts, starting out with the long-awaited John Carter movie, which is actually the first book in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars series, not the later story the title might suggest. Near future Apocalypse tale The Hunger Games was written by Suzanne Collins, and Mirror Mirror is a Snow White update with Julia Robert’s as the evil queen. And of course The Pirates! Band of Misfits from the creators of Wallace and Gromit is insane animated fun. The Raven is the fictionalized account of Edgar Allen Poe out to catch a serial killer who has been plagiarizing his books to commit his crimes, and for some strange reason someone thought it would be interesting to make a sequel called Wrath of the Titans. And that’s just the next few months; should be a pretty interesting year in the theaters.
Topping off the movie list, Real Steel, an excellent movie about a washed up fighter, a kid, and the robot the kid believes in. But there is another movie that excites me this week: Toki o kakeru shôjo, or in English Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. This one is the latest live action variation on the novel/manga/anime/live action/movie/TV show classic from Japan. It has been around since 1965 and they just can’t seem to get enough of it, and neither can I. This one is the 2010 live action movie version based on the novel, the previous US release was of the 2006 anime feature length film. The same actress plays the Leaper, in the anime the niece of the time traveler, in the live action the daughter. The first TV version was the 1972 live action series, which to my knowledge is currently unavailable, even in Japan.
In TV, a show I cringed at even when it was new can now be taken home for your personal collection: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: Season One. While there is some camp appeal in this program, mostly in the form of its undersized robot with a speech impediment, it was pure Disco Buck. You won’t be getting any links to it from me, as I considered Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century much more intellectually stimulating. In fact, Vixens of Virtue, Vixens of Vice: Season 2, also being released this week, beats it as well, hands down.
In Anime, Our Home’s Fox Deity, parts one and two, give you the complete series with a single release, all about some rather ticked off gods and the family they have been protecting. Likewise, Pandora Hearts Sets 1 and 2 gives you the entire storyline at once, this time about a teenager who is thrown into a secret otherworldly prison at his coming of age party to pay for sins he never committed.
Also this week, The World God Only Knows complete series tells the story of a game player who is the best at Dating Sims, those games involving making all the right moves to get a virtual girl to fall in love with you. That is just fine, until he gets visited by a demon hunting angel who wants to put his gaming skill set together and point it at real live girls! It seems that the demons she is hunting hide in human hearts, and if those hearts fall in love they have no room left to harbor a demon.
There are two new series this week from Funimation. Fairy Tail – Part 3 brings us up to date on the Magic Guild warriors who continue the venerable tradition of inflicting as much or more damage onto your surroundings and the local population as the menace you have been hired to protect them from begun in shows like Dirty Pair. Their other program this week is Requiem for the Phantom – The Complete Series, which might be considered a cross between Kite and Noir, with a bit of Gunslinger Girls thrown in. Zwei has no clue who he is, and kills on command for his masters. When he meets Ein, a girl in the same situation who is as beautiful and brutal as she is lost, he decides it is time to make a change. If only it was that easy.
Viz has Naruto Shippuden (DVD box 9), and this show and Bleach both surprise me. Western TV shows always go for open-ended structures that they want to run forever, but most Asian TV is constructed with actual story arcs, which come with a beginning, a middle, and an end, usually concluded within a year or two of their beginning. I have no clue where these programs think they are going.
Finally, this week we only have a single cost effective re-release: Tenchi Muyo! GXP – The Complete Series [S.A.V.E.], 8 DVDs worth of absolute insanity for under 20 bucks. If you don’t already know Tenchi, this series is a great introduction; a bumbler who causes harm to himself and those near him (yes, sort of like Fairy Tale, or Dirty Pair, or so many more) suddenly has a number of girls from outer space descend on him. Each wants to keep him for herself, and each has powers to make her wishes known. This time around, those girls are galactic cops, and they both want to take him home. The evil galactic girls show up in other series, but trust me when I say only the labels change.
This was too much fun to let it go completely… so here we got with more Stormtrooper dancing. The first one was called Dance Vader and took place in 2007. The second one is a Korean variation, from 2010. The third? A French animation done with stop motion. The fourth is a parody video that doesn’t actually have any dancing in it, but it fits the theme and was just too silly to avoid posting. Enjoy!
The life size Gundam Mecha returned to its home in Odaiba recently, and the folks at Darwin Fish 105 did their usual incredible job of filming the event. This time around, the footage was taken at night, with a very nice overlay (if something in the background can be considered an overlay, since it is really in the masked screen areas under the primary video) of wide aperture star fields doing extended time exposures and then compiled into an animated setting. The next video is called Tokyo Heartbeat, and shows some world class utilization of the classic time lapsed photography process. If you ever wondered if a city was alive, wonder no longer; you can see its pulse throbbing in this one. Finally, Ginza At Night completes the triptych, this time using high speed film (or the digital equivalent) along with wide aperture light gathering settings on the camera to render a movie that could never have been created in daylight. I am quite impressed with the Darwin Fish processes and results; great job, gang!