Another excellent CG animation, Exode won a dozen awards on the festival circuit, including one from SIGGRAPH last year. The animation was done by Kathleen Cartier, Sandrine Gimenez, Nicolas Mrikhi, Baptiste Roy, and Thomas Saez, with Yuichiro Maeda creating the music. This was another graduation film project from Supinfocom Arles in France.
EXODE from Exode movie on Vimeo.
This Variety Artisans special is all about how the visual effects were put together for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the amazing continuation of the series that has taken the franchise to the next level. They produce a new episode of Artisans every week, and every one so far has given excellent insight into the approach creators of the various disciplines take to achieve their results. If you want to create your own stories in a visual media, there is no better place to become inspired than from this series.
There are less than positive implications sometimes when a Humanoid Robot With AI meets the cold, cruel world. This interpretation on how it might work out is not exactly comforting to the intelligence at the core of this story, and should not make the rest of us feel very easy about it. When the time comes that we face these situations, I hope you are ready to stand up and be counted among those who believe in freedom and justice.
The primary option this week is Deadpool, a unique anti-hero in the Marvel pantheon. I will definitely be in the theater for that one, but that isn’t to say it is the only option. There are two music inspired films as well, Bigger Than the Beatles being about the Beach Boys and songwriter Charlie Manson, and Punk’s Dead: SLC Punk 2. I don’t think either of those are in too many theaters, and the only web site I could find for the first one had been hacked and taken over by a fashion blogger, so I am sticking with the Marvel offering this time around.
Freaks of Nature has a strange premise: Zombies, Vampires, and Humans all live in harmony, until Aliens invade the Earth. The cast includes Patton Oswalt and Joan Cusack, which is enough to convince me I need to see this Comedy/Horror. I should probably also mention Spectre, Daniel Craig’s last turn as James Bond, which didn’t do that well with the critics, but might still be worth watching. The Horror film Crimson Peak didn’t have a lick of comedy in it that I heard about, so I will be passing on that one. If there was any genre TV this week it snuck right past me with nary a ripple.
In Anime, Shirobako 1 is the rather recursive tale of 5 women who work for an Anime company, and according to the reports it is a fairly accurate depiction of the industry. This is the first half of the series, with the second coming along in May. Likewise Akame ga Kill: Collection 1 is the first half of its series, with a group of renegade assassins out to bring down the corrupt empire which bought and trained them. Finally, Lord Marksman and Vanadis: The Complete Series tells of two enemies who must work together to save a nation from destruction.
Japanese rock band Bump of Chicken have a new album coming out this Wednesday, February 10th, called Butterfly. The first song is the title track, the next is their 2014 hit Ray, and the third is Hello World, released as a single last April and now part of the new album. These tracks are a little more pop than I usually prefer; they started as Alt-Rock with some mainstream Rock tracks, but the songs that sold a lot of copies sounded like these, so their style has changed over the last few decades. But not every time; the tunes used in the Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (the original series) and Blood Blockade Battlefront were excellent, so I had to include one of them here as well.