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Free Anime This Weekend Only

Until midnight Sunday night central time there are some great anime titles streaming for free over at The Anime Network. Some of them give you a choice between Subbed and Dubbed, myself I prefer subbed, so I can hear the original actors emotional inflections. I have had some problems viewing some of these, where an hour and a half film ends 30 minutes into it, but I am not sure that isn’t a problem with my browser, rather than at the server end.

Some of these are recent productions, like Loups=Garous, where the members of J-Rock sweethearts Scandal are both the protagonists and laying down the killer soundtrack, while trying to break free of their imprisoning environment and track down the killer before they all die. Another recent choice is Five Numbers, a rather twisty locked room mystery that they need to solve to escape their fate. Asylum Session, ICE, Coicent, and Coffee Samurai round out the more recent productions, and every one of them is worth watching.

Some of these are classics, such as Appleseed, where the surviving members of humanity are equally divided between cyborgs and meatbags, or RahXephon The Motion Picture, a Giant Mecha Defends Against Alien Invasion story where music is the weapon set. The remaining classics go straight to the heart: Grave of the Fireflies and The Place Promised in Our Early Days are true masterpieces that would have won every award on the planet if they had been live action, and won awards enough for their anime versions.

If there is a single one of these you have missed, this is your limited opportunity to see it for free. If you haven’t seen any of them, you are in for a serious treat, and I recommend nuking the popcorn and settling in for a marathon. I would start with The Place Promised, and then alternate between the new and the classics until you have watched them all. It will be time well spent.

Annular Eclipse

The Annular Eclipse that happened earlier this week was amazing, but those of us who saw it from North America only got a little tease of the event. If you got to see if from Japan, like Danny Choo, then perhaps you got to see it in its full glory. Here is a picture or two to put it in perspective for you. The first image is Danny in his Filter Facemask, which will hopefully protect him from having his retinas burned out by staring into the sun. To me, the scary bit is he reminds me of Friend from the movie trilogy 20th Century Boys, a wonderful Sci-Fi sequence based on the Manga. The second image is what he was staring at. If you missed it, don’t worry. You can either travel to the next event half way around the world in 50 years, or stay where you are and wait for it to happen there again, in 300 years.

Game Museum Gathering Saturday

The Art of Video Games is a new exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with a collection of 80 games, interviews with the creators, quite a bit of history and background, and a whole lot more. So I am sure not many will be surprised to learn that the folks from Think Geek are making a run to attend the event this weekend , and they are inviting everyone along for the fun. It works like this: meet up at the F Street lobby no later than 12 noon on Saturday, the 26th, to gather and be identified as part of the event. Of course, you might want to sign up ahead of time so if you are one of the winners they know where to send your prizes. At 12:30PM everyone will have been split up into teams of three and start cruising the exhibits, where you will want to pay plenty of attention. Finally, at 2PM, reconvene in the F street lobby to answer questions about the exhibit and the games for a shot at the prizes. This gathering should be a lot of fun, but if you already have plans this weekend the exhibit runs through September 30th, so you still have plenty of time to see it.

Something to Watch: DVDs

In genre movies we have the Japanese Mutant Girls Squad and the American Evil Dead Inbred Rednecks, but I won’t be recommending either one of those. The only movie I can recommend this time around isn’t genre at all, but a spy based romantic comedy: This Means War.

Top TV selection this time is Sherlock: Season Two, the amazing re-imagining of the Holmes saga in another Steven Moffat project. If you haven’t seen these yet, you are in for a serious treat. The other choices in TV this week includes MTV’s Teen Wolf: The Complete Season One, which is apparently their attempt to pull in some of the money from the Twilight audience. My Babysitter’s a Vampire: The First Season is targeting the children’s fantasy market.

Some folks no doubt think The Secret World of Arrietty is a Disney animation feature film based on The Borrowers. They would be right except for the minor detail that this one is Anime, produced by Studio Ghibli, although it did use Disney as its North American distribution partner. They are using this opportunity to re-release a couple of other Studio Ghibli classics: Whisper of the Heart and Castle in the Sky, both as combo Blue-Ray/DVD sets. If you are missing those titles now is your chance to correct that, and if you haven’t seen them yet I really recommend you do so..

Other new Anime this week includes Planzet, a story about Earth’s battle with Aliens a few decades from now. Humans have raised a defensive shield around the planet, but are trapped behind it; the time has come to drop the shield for an all or nothing counterattack, to try to win their freedom. This one, like Arrietty, is a stand alone story, but at 53 minutes long I don’t think I can actually call it a feature length film. More like a 2 episode OVA.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood releases it’s OVA collection this week, which clocks in right at 60 minutes. Bakuman: Season One Part One brings the Blue Ray formatted first 13 episodes of a story of two young men trying to break into the Manga publishing industry. It has an account of both the good and the bad, as reported by industry insiders.