Sing is an animated reality show from the folks who did Minions, Despicable Me, and The Secret Like Of Pets. It has an all star cast, including Scarlett Johansson as a punk-rock porcupine, and features somewhere around 85 songs. It will be on the big screen December 21st, and I will definitely be in the audience for it.
Pixar in a Box is a free online animation training curriculum developed as a joint venture by Pixar and the Khan Academy. The classes include effects, character modeling, rigging, sets and staging, and rendering, as well as a number of important topics that may not have occurred to you are part of the process. I am signing up with Khan Academy (mostly so I can save my progress and don’t have to wonder where I am on a given course) and checking out the wide range of free math, science, and computer programming online classes they have to offer, starting with the animation training. That isn’t all they have of course; history, art, economics, and many more topics are also available. But I only have so many hours a day that aren’t spent at work, so I have to choose which classes I take carefully. To give you an idea of what they have on offer, here is the Pixar class overview that they start the training with.
Ghostbusters is the obvious movie choice this weekend, but not the only one. Phantom Boy is a French animated feature film noir presentation in which a boy with superpowers trapped in a wheelchair helps a policeman (also trapped in a wheelchair) attempt to bring down a mob boss. This is from the folks who made A Cat In Paris, a truly amazing animation; you can expect that same level of quality here.
Movies have The Divergent Series: Allegiant, which was the final book of the trilogy but only the third out of four films. Like certain other books-into-movies series, they broke the final volume out into two films. There is something to be said for the argument that there was too much going on in the book to tell the story in a single feature length presentation, but the same is true of every book ever converted. Which tends to lend weight to those who argue that it is greed on the part of the movie companies, trying to milk every last buck out of the audience, which causes the last book in a series to be broken in two. I wasn’t able to find any other genre movies or TV shows this week, although Road Games is dystopian enough to be considered (no direct relation to the 1981 Hitchcock classic of the same name, but it was certainly an influence).
We do noticeably better in Anime, beginning with the Osamu Tezuka classic masterpiece Belladonna of Sadness, which has never before been released in the US. The artwork, animation, and soundtrack have to be experienced to be understood, much as the films contemporaries, Fantastic Planet and Wizards, were unique in ways that made them difficult to describe. A bit of caution is appropriate, because this feature presentation is nothing like Astro Boy or Tezuka’s other kid-friendly works. The original Belladonna was not for children, and this release is unrated, but it is probably somewhere between a hard R to a soft X if it is uncut, with a distinctly feminist plot line.
In more current anime, A Good Librarian Like a Good Shepherd is the story of a boy who is the only member of his schools Library Club, until the mysterious Shepherd sends him a text message, enabling him to rescue a girl. Her joining the club is just the first step in what turns out to be a somewhat supernatural progression of events. Speaking of supernatural, Rin-Ne 1 contains the first 13 episodes of the Anime about half-Shinigami Rinne Rokudo. Based on world famous Rumiko Takahashi’s Manga series Rinne of the Boundary, it tells how Sakura Mamiya meets and befriends Rin-ne as he works to help the spirits of the departed overcome their regrets and move on to the Wheel of Reincarnation. The Manga, which has been continuously published since its inception in 2009, hit the 30 volume mark last April, and as of this week the Anime is up to episode 39.
In Yatterman Night, 40 years ago a pair of heroes known as the Yatterman defeated a dangerous gang threatening the population of their country, and went on to rule it and protect them. But their descendants are oppressing the nation now, using that population for forced labor, and the descendant of the gang leader steps up to be this generations hero. This is the latest installment to the anime franchise, which stretches back to its initial episode in January of 1977, and was itself the sequel to the earlier series Time Bokan. Finally, Robotics;Notes: Complete Series is being released in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means you will be able to pick up the whole thing for less than a single season went for when it first came out.
The Pillows will be doing the music for the FLCL sequel, just like they did for the original. They also recently released their 20th album, Stroll and Roll. Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto will also be returning for FLCL2, and joining the team for the first time is Katsuyuki Motohiro, director of Psycho-Pass. The original 6 episode series was groundbreaking and quirky, I can’t wait to see what they do with the new one. The first track is from that original series, Ride On Shooting Star, the second is I think I can, and the third is No Self Control
There will be 85 hours of VR programming coming out of the Olympics watchable by way of the NBC Sports app. Sadly the plan is to make this only available to Samsung Galaxy smartphones compatible with Gear VR, and that only after logging in with their pay TV provider. I fully understand and agree with the need to authenticate viewers before allowing them access to their premium content; they are paying an awful lot of money to get the exclusive distribution rights, after all. But there are a lot of us VR junkies running everything from Google Cardboard with an iPhone or non-Samsung android phone, on up to the Oculus Rift crowd driving their $500 VR headsets with their $1,500 computers with the massive graphics cards, who could be watching this programming if they would allow us a paid authentication path into it as well.
Still, this is the very first time any VR access to the Olympics has ever been available, and the second major sporting event to be hosted in this format this year (the first being the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which came with a Google Cardboard viewer you could fold up and use with your smartphone to view the photo shoots in VR). There is a good chance their app builders have only been able to make it work on the Samsung version of Android so far, limiting it to the Gear. I certainly can’t imagine they don’t want to sell the programing to every one they could, although if they didn’t develop the VR app themselves they may be at the mercy of the contracts signed by the folks who did create it. So I for one will be keeping my fingers crossed that they manage to deploy it to the iPhone iOS and other Android builds in time for the rest of us to sign up for it and enjoy it during the Olympics. Although we wont be able to see it live; there is a bit of a delay in editing and processing the stereo 360 degree SuperHD 8K video into a formatted stream that can be fed to the app, and yes, that is a 4K movie theater resolution video stream for each eye. And even if they don’t have a way to deliver it to anything but a Gear for the Olympics themselves, once they have it recorded the rest of us can enjoy it down the road when they do get the app working for all the other platforms. Thanks to VR Scout for the heads up on this one.