The Blender Foundation is constantly testing and improving the free open source 3D modeling and animation software Blender, and part of that process is to get the funding to allow a talented team of people to do some actual animations with it. This one is called Sintel, it was made back in 2010 and has a lot of heart. Hit their site to download the free open source Blender and start creating your own animations and 3D objects today.
Japanese commercials are even stranger than the ones they build to catch our attention in the west. Having said that, a lot of these would work anywhere around the world, but about 25% of them could only come from Japan. That probably has as much to do with the globalization of culture on Earth as it does with the difference in cultures from different parts of the world. As recently as 40 years ago, only about 15% of them had anything in common at all. These days, they are selling you the same products with a slant that they hope will increase sales within the national borders of a given country. That tends to limit creativity, but there are still a few interesting and unique commercials among the collection.
NSFW, but it definitely looks like Kick Ass 2 is going to be just as off the hook as the first one. Just one of many new trailers that have hit the web during and after Comic Con this weekend.
There is no doubt that the primary choice this weekend will be The Wolverine, next from the Marvel X-Men franchise. I am pretty much on the must-see bandwagon when any new Marvel movie hits the big screen, so I don’t even need to think about it any more. If you are in the mood for silly fun instead, The To Do List may be more your speed. There is also Stranded, but I am not a horror fan unless it comes with a lot of comedy.
The vampires in Kiss of the Damned don’t sparkle, but one of them does have a very dramatic love story which may effect their entire community. It is actually an interesting and intelligent tale that is a bit of a homage to the 60s and 70s vampire films. Starbuck is not being promoted as science fiction or fantasy, but I am pretty sure any movie about a man who has 533 children fits that bill. This comedy also appears to have a lot of heart, and when they do the English remake it looks like they got Vince Vaughn for the part. The English version will be out in the fall, but you can watch the original this week.
This weeks TV option is just silly: Duck Dodgers: Deep Space Duck Season 2. Any show that includes Marvin the Martian as a regular character is all right in my book.
In Anime we have Phi-Brain: Season 2 Collection 1, AKA Puzzle of God: The Orpheus Order. Yes, our protagonist defeated the Puzzle Of God by the end of the first season, but now a new crew has shown up with a grudge to work out, and a whole new series of deadly puzzles faces Kaito and his friends. Fairy Tail: Collection Two continues the story of the 4 person wizard guild that tends to do more damage to innocent bystanders and the surrounding area than they do to their opponents, so running away very, very fast is your best option when they show up to save you.
One Piece is rolling out the first half of season 5 this week, bringing the series up to episodes 264 through 275. That might sound impressive, but that season is from 1999, and Japan is up to episode 604 as of last week.
There are two releases in a Mecha franchise this week, 2005’s OVA Super Robot Wars Original Generation, and 2006’s DVD TV series Super Robot Wars OG: Divine Wars. They were loose sequels of the 1999 anime MasÅ Kishin Cybuster, which was itself a loose interpretation of a huge series of games that can trace its lineage all the way back to 1991’s Super Robot Wars for the Nintendo Gameboy. They very rapidly expanded the game to run on pretty much every current platform available, and then kept releasing updates and new versions across an ever expanding set of platforms incorporating more and newer Mechas, battlegrounds, and scenarios. One of the really smart twists to the game was the fact that they had a huge range of character Mechas because they weren’t too fussy about where a bot came from and signed licensing agreements with a bunch of different franchises. This crossover universe arraignment meant that you could fight a battle with a Mazinger Z, a Getter Robo and a Mobile Suit Gundam on one side, and a Evangelion or Rah Xephon Mecha on the other, pretty exciting stuff. It also meant that the legal agreements ran into so many issues once you tried to cross national borders and keep them in compliance with all of a given companies other licensing agreements that only 3 of the games were ever released outside of Japan, and then only on a limited number of platforms. So this anime series is a rare glimpse into that whole shared universe of battling Giant Robots that those of us here in the west never really got to experience.
On a related note, the Robotech: 2-Movie Collection includes the titles The Shadow Chronicles and Love Live Alive, one of which they claim has never been released. I have also seen reviews saying they took some footage out of an exiting Robotech property and added 15 minutes of new footage to it; since I have not seen it yet, I have no clue which claim is real and so can’t speak to whether this one is worth adding. Finally, I should mention that the first 5 seasons of Case Closed are being released as [S.A.V.E], or Super Amazing Value Editions, which allow you to pick up entire seasons for around $20. In fact you should just check out the whole list, there are a bunch of series you can pick up that way.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec was an amazing 2010 French movie by the master Luc Besson, and it is finally being released on DVD in the US. This is thanks to the team at Shout Factory, a company I have grown to appreciate as they keep releasing those quirky little programs that don’t have the kind of mass market appeal to bring in the millions of copies sales the big companies insist on. Examples in my collection include the complete surviving works of Ernie Kovacs, the entire ReBoot animation series, way more Roger Corman movies than I should ever admit to owning, and a Blu-Ray version of the cult classic Harlan Ellison movie A Boy And His Dog, complete with a reversible cover o you can pretend it is another movie entirely when your friends come over. This one really is one of the best, pretty much Steampunk based on an excellent graphics novel series by the guy who did The 5th Element, you should catch it as soon as possible.