The only choice this weekend is Kung Fu Panda 3, at least from my perspective, another excellent entry in the franchise. The animation on this series has been very well done, using different artistic styles to differentiate the different aspects of the story. The cast is world class, and the story itself is one worth telling. I have been a fan since the first one, no way I am missing this on the big screen.
Movies bring us Goosebumps, a wonderful little film based on the books of R.L. Stine, and starring Jack Black. Thats pretty much it this week for Western TV and Movies.
Anime has Corpse Party: Tortured Souls – Complete Collection, where Heavenly Host School was burned to the ground and replaced by another school in the hopes that everyone would forget the gruesome things that happened there. THAT didn’t work out the way people were hoping, and now the students of the new school are battling the undead in the hallways of the old. In Momokyun Sword, Momoko must band together with some Heavenly-sent Celestial Goddesses to rid feudal Japan from a rampaging hoard of Evil Oni. Re:␣Hamatora – Complete Collection has a detective agency made up of the supernaturally powerful up against the returning dead who came back specifically to steal their powers.
Kingdom: Season 1 has all 38 episodes of the Waring States Period story about two war orphans who vowed to prove themselves, one of whom looks just like the young man who was the King of Qin, and would become the Emperor Shi Huangdi. There are a few returning favorites with new volumes this time around, One Piece – Season 7 Voyage 5 and Naruto Shippuden Uncut Set 25.
Good thing I have a shovel handy…
The group Band-Maid are 5 girls playing some excellent hard rock out of Japan while wearing terminally kawaii maid outfits. The first track is Real Existence from mid-2015, the second is Thrill, which was their first single from 2014. The final video almost looks like an audition session they did while looking for a new drummer, but the music is great even if the video is a bit linear.
By 2071, the world’s energy problems are seemingly solved by a network of cross-dimensional power induction coils, but there is one minor problem. What the power can do depends on which of the multiverse iterations it was drawn from, and if it isn’t pulled from the officially sanctioned universe it might be able to overwhelm the energies employed by by the government and the police. Needless to say, they have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen, so they pay a premium bounty to anyone who collects the bootleg coils for them, under the excuse that “illegal coils are dangerous”. Which is true; they just don’t mention dangerous to whom.
In this setting, coil-hating repo man Kyoma makes most of his money from confiscating such power sources and selling them to the government. The unique coil android Mira (who is more than she seems) is near him when she sees her father die at the hands of that government, in an event which also takes out 20 square blocks of the city, knocking out herself and any others within a 50 mile radius who’s lives depend on constant coil input. The two end up having to work together to try to achieve their separate goals.
There have only been two episodes at this point, with episode 3 becoming available at 9AM tomorrow, Saturday the 23rd. That is about an hour after it airs in Tokyo, and the built in leeway in the time frame is because they will still have to subtitle it into English, which might take them more than an hour. I do like the two episodes I have seen so far, and am quite looking forward to more.
Parasyte: The Maxim was fun as an Anime, I can’t wait to see what they do with it as not one, but 2 Parasyte Live Action Films. The films have already been made and released, but I missed them, in part because the only theaters I know they showed in were in Australia. You can pick it up as an import DVD or Blue Ray, but it is just as pricey as you would expect for that release path. I guess I will have to lobby for someone to release it domestically in North America, because even though I am not a horror fan I do love comedy, and this series has a lot of that in all its iterations.