In the form of an animated music video with the song What Good Is Love sung by Janelle Monáe. I enjoyed the first movie, and am looking forward to Rio 2 when it comes out on April 11th.
Her opened in very limited release back in December, this week it goes into wide release, after winning a number of awards. The Legend of Hercules also comes out this Friday, and it looks like they took some pains to keep it close to the original story line.
In somewhat more limited release is EVANGELION: 3.0 – You Can (Not) Redo; mostly it will only be playing for one day in each theater, but there are a bunch of US and Canadian theaters on the list. Two of the theaters are within driving distance for me, I can’t wait to see the latest chapter in the rebuild of the franchise on the big screen.
In Movies, Big Ass Spider! includes two actors I really like, Greg Grunberg and Ray Wise, and is very Tremors-like in its approach to dealing with the giant rampaging arachnid terrorizing Los Angeles. And yes, Greg is once more playing a cop, but a non-telepathic one this time. The other movie of note isn’t genre, but a fun little comedy about identity theft, desperate marriages, and gangland murder called Key of Life. It is in Japanese with English subtitles.
In TV we have Being Human: The Complete Third Season, the Syfy channel remake of the excellent British TV series. We also get the Blue Ray release of Star Trek Enterprise: The Complete Third Season. It has been available since 2005 in DVD, this is its first time available in Hi def, as far as I am aware.
For Western animation Archer: The Complete Fourth Season give us more bumbling spys to grin about.
Anime brings us Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne Season 2, also referred to as Set 2, with more intergalactic combat and intrigue, and alien mysteries to solve. And did I mention the giant robots the girls fly into battle? Aria The Natural: Part 1 is the first 13 episodes of season 2, and continues the story of the three friends determined to become the best gondoliers on the planet Aqua (called Mars before it was terraformed).
I don’t usually mention re-releases, but Patlabor: The Mobile Police Collection 4 comes out with episodes 37 through 47 of pure giant robot police mayhem, and this time around they have Blue Ray covered. This aired in Tokyo from 1988 through 1994, and pretty much set the standard for wacky police mecha shows, with a host of Anime giants involved with the production.
I recently featured the band Tommy Heavenly6, the punk offering from Tomoko “Tommy” Kawase, this time I am doing Tommy February6, still very rocking but leaning towards trance/electronica. The woman doing the vocals is amazing in any language, and she jumps back and forth between Japanese and English quite a bit. The first track is Runaway, and isn’t the song you were expecting by that title; the second tune is Sugar ♥ Me, while the third is Hot Chocolat.
Somewhere between Manga and Anime, Manga 2.5 is following in the footsteps of Marvel and others, producing Motion Comics of popular Manga. They start by getting a contract to produce a popular Manga, then scan the whole thing in. They remove the dialog balloons and replace them with Japanese voice actors and English subtitles. Since they are embedding audio they also add sound effects as appropriate. The panels or frames are broken apart and colored, and limited animation in the style known as Motion Comics are added. The end result is something that you watch happen rather than read, for a lot less money then it takes to create a real animation or anime.
It is an interesting art form, and I do like the stuff produced by Marvel a lot. So far all I have seen of this group are a few trailers, but it has the potential to be quite good. If you were interested in trying your hand at this kind of thing, Smith Micro has an excellent software suite for a reasonable price with Motion Artist. It has a bit of a learning curve, but the software lets you be creative while automating a lot of the tasks; for instance you can set up the key frames and it automatically generates all the tween frames that get you from one key frame to the next. Trust me when I say having to animate each and every frame yourself gets tedious real fast, whether at 24 frames/second (fps) for film or 29 fps for TV, whereas you might have 4 to 6 key frames per second. Another very useful function is having the mouth layers pre-built for speech with a module that automates building the phonem map out of your imported MP3 file. Lip sync is about the hardest kind of animation to do, from my perspective, all that fiddly stuff should really be done by the computer anyways.
For only another day or so you can pick up Shattered Dreams by Melissa Kay Clarke for free over at Amazon. This is the first book of her Luna’s Children series, introducing the people (who also happen to be werewolves) of the Sapphire Lake Pack. If you like romantic fantasy with your action/adventure you should check this one out.