Welcome to the Winter 2016 Anime season where we finally get Gate Season 2 and a ton of other shows! Schwarzes Marken is the new season of the BETA invasion of Earth battles, this time featuring the 1983 East German Army. Once more the human forces are so busy trying to gain an advantage over each other that they are ordered to let other humans die rather than combine against their true enemies (one the alien invaders, the other the commanding officers who issue those orders). Erased has a manga artist protagonist who is forced to repeat the past moment which last threatened his life until he gets it right and survives it. Durarara X2 The Third Arc is also about to start, along with Lupin The 3rd Part 4, both series that don’t really need an introduction from me. Those are just the shows that caught my attention right out of the box, there are a number of others that I need to look into before reporting them here.
I am happy they have renewed The Expanse for a second season, because there is so much story in the books that there was no way they could fit it into just 10 hours. Of course, they haven’t aired all of the first season yet, but it is good to know another one is on the way.
This amazing tribute to Hayao Miyazaki is from dono on Vimeo. He built it using Blender (3D modeling and animation), Gimp (graphics/painting creation/editing), Octane (real time 3D rendering) and Natron (matting, masking, and compositing). I will point out that all of them except Octane are free, open source software that rival any of the commercial software packages which do the same job. I am sure everyone will be surprised that the music he used is by Joe Hisaishi. It looks like he modeled and rendered the scenes, sets, and backgrounds in 3D but composited the original 2D characters into those scenes, including scenes they were never in before for some of them, creating a wonderful visual effect. Many thanks to Nerdist for the heads up on this one, and my only problem now (as someone else said in the comments) is deciding which Miyazaki masterpiece I want to re-watch tonight, after watching so many old friends on the screen together after all this time.
Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki from dono on Vimeo.
Put together by John SmithVFX, this Sherlock/Doctor Who mashup from 2013 is quite nicely done. Looking at the Wholock VFX Breakdown, which is the second video here, it becomes obvious this was primarily a masterful job of masking, compositing, and chroma/light balancing to create the finished product.
Pretty much nothing this week, unless you are near one of the theaters showing Detective Chinatown, and even that won’t be available in very many theaters until next week. This might be a good time to catch up on recent movies you have missed.
In Movies we have the somewhat silly The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, complete with an attack squad of zombie kitty cats. I suppose I should also mention Deathgasm, another horror/comedy but with a heavy metal beat. I think the non-genre Memories of the Sword, a historic fantasy of Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (roughly a thousand years ago), is the best movie bet this time around. I did not see anything genre in TV this week, and Anime only has one new release; Dai-Shogun: Great Revolution. That one is from a parallel universe where giant steam-powered robots fought off the foreign ships, so the 1868 Meiji restoration never happened. Japan is left still fragmented, with various warlords running different areas and the Tokugawa Shogunate fighting internally for control of the fragments.