The NASA spacecraft Dawn became the first man made object to go into orbit around a dwarf planet this month. Ceres holds that distinction, along with Pluto, but Ceres is a lot closer and easier to get to. This wasn’t Dawn’s first visit to a celestial body; it stopped off at the giant asteroid Vesta on it’s way to Ceres, spending from 2011 to 2012 there and sending back a ton of data. The other thing I find exciting about this mission is that Dawn is flying using an Ion Engine, allowing it to do really long range sustained controlled flight. The Ion Engine technology is going to help open up the outer Solar System to the kinds of exploration you just can’t do when your flight is based on gravity assist orbital changes alone.
This is the NSFW trailer for the 2015 Anime version of the latest Ghost In The Shell story, and it takes a bit of a look back at its predecessors. Along with Akira, this franchise changed the face of Anime in the west, and it was one of the best Cyberpunk stories I have ever read or watched. It will be in theaters in Japan in June, I am hoping it makes it to some in the US shortly after that.
It is finally time for the release of Home, the animated adventure about cute aliens trying to find a world of their own… without much luck. The unluckiest is Oh, who may have accidentally destroyed their original homeworld, and a number of the other ones they were hoping to take over. Now he is on the run from them, and they might destroy the Earth to be rid of him once and for all. Based on the book The True Meaning of Smekday, this one looks like silly fun.
In movies this week we get The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which you can pick up as a stand alone or as the full trilogy, all three Hobbit movies in a single box set. The other fantasy worth watching again is Disney’s Into The Woods, the musical made into a wonderful movie.
If you need a dose of silly, there is also Mystery Science Theater 3000: XXXII, which I can never decide if I should be classifying it as a TV show or a collection of movies. If that is not silly enough for you, they are re-releasing Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean: The Whole Bean, which is definitely a TV show and completely silly.
There are a few new anime releases this week, but the only Genre titles coming out are re-releases. I count School Rumble – Season 1 + OVA and Season 2, both in S.A.V.E. editions among them, since it has flying saucers and wild dream sequences. But mostly it is just funny, and is never about anything that rumbles.
Nano have recorded some great Anime tracks, like the OP for B’Toom (the first song here), and some quality non-Anime music, like Hysteria, the third song shared on this page. Then there is Nevereverland…
Yes, this one certainly looks like silly fun, and continues the 8 Bit Silly Theme we began yesterday. The Pixels Movie assumes some aliens intercepted Voyager, got the data off the disc included with the ship, and got upset. The result was an invasion of 8 Bit video games out to exterminate mankind.