SIGGRAPH 2013 is coming to Anaheim, CA on July 21st through the 25th, and they have released their Dailies preview for this year. The Dailies are roughly 90 minutes of computer generated animations by both new and returning artists, each of whom gets to show two minutes of video and say a little something about their project. There is some truly amazing work on display, as you can tell from the preview. For those of you who haven’t been on the internet since the beginning, SIGGRAPH stands for Special Interest Group, Graphics, and they have been the cutting edge of computer animations since 1983.
There are two excellent choices this week; if you are looking for intense Zombie action, then World War Z is the film for you. If you are a fan of world class animated comedy with heart, then Monsters University is the way to go. Personally, I am having a hard time deciding, I may just have to go for both.
The prime movie this time is Jack the Giant Slayer, where Jack accidentally opens a gateway to a land of giants, who immediately invade the world they were driven out of long ago and attempt to take it back. Also coming out is The Ghastly Love of Johnny X, aliens exiled to Earth for delinquency who just keep getting in trouble once they arrive. This one is campy silliness with some fun musical numbers and several surprises in the cast you might enjoy.
In TV, Wilfred: The Complete Season Two brings more strangeness between a man and his neighbor’s anthropomorphic dog. In both TV and western animation, Kung Fu Panda Legends of Awesomeness: Good Croc, Bad Croc is the first release of the Panda-centric TV show. The production house changed, the original films were a joint production of Disney and Chinese animation works, and most of the voice actors are different than the films as well, but there is still some good stuff here.
In Anime, last year’s Kill Me Baby brings a truly bizarre series of events to a normal high school filled with anything but normal students. Things like escaped bears, several separate groups of assassins, a family of ninjas, voodoo curses, and killer mosquitoes, to name just a few.
Saiyuki: The Complete Collection brings 50 episodes of Demon fighting goodness. Long ago demons and humans lived together in peace, but now some renegade demons are trying to manifest a great evil. A small group of disparate souls come together to oppose them, and the fight is on! This classic anime series is from 2000, and if you shop around to can pick this one up at a decent price. Finally, Chrome Shelled Regios has been released in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can pick up the entire series for just around $20.
Sounding a bit like everybody’s favorite virtual idol, Passepied just released a new CD this week, and the first track is a song called S.S from that release. They have been around since 2009, getting their major label deal with Warner Bros. Japan in 2012, doing some great music fusing a lot of different styles, but centered around pop and impressionistic. The fact they named themselves after the last movement in Debussy’s Bergamasque Suite pretty much says it all. Their music videos are also a treat, the lead singer having graduated art school influences them all, and I just had to grin about the Power Rangers in this one. The second track I included is an older song of theirs Yūyake wa inochi no umi, which makes their impressionist influences more obvious. And yes, that third video is from them as well, originally posted in December of 2012.
Jackie Chan reprises his roll as Drunken Master all over Edo era Edo, Japan (they changed the name to Tokyo a few hundred years ago, thus ending the Edo Period) in a short film for Kirin Beer. He spends the film training his young friends to fight and drinking beer, then watching them fight while drinking beer. Until his male protegee is defeated, at which point he beats the crud out of the leader of the opposition, of course. This short film is in Japanese, and you can tell the difference between Jackie saying a phrase in Nihongo (the actual name of the Japanese language) and a voice actor being dubbed over him but trust me when I say you will not have any problem following the action. Everyone knows about Japanese Sake, or Rice Wine, but Japan also brews some of the best beers in the world, and Kirin happens to be my personal favorite, so I am not surprised they put this project together. Go ahead and watch, it is just 7 minutes of silly fun.
A new Wolverine trailer is out, and it looks like Marvel has another excellent entry into their universe. Somewhat Torchwoodishly, somebody intends to make the character mortal, taking away his ability to heal and regenerate. This one will be in the theaters on July 26th, if you were wondering. Of course, I liked the last Wolverine movie, and it seems a lot of other folks did not, so you might want to mistrust my reaction.