I find the whole 7 Things series from Anime Vice very interesting, so here is their take on the classic Neon Genesis Evangelion. At long last, it looks like part 3 out of the four in the rebuild series will finally be released in the US in February. enjoy!
Terrestrial Human
In the animated short film Sumer by Alvaro Garcia the ionosphere has been destroyed, and the planetary ecosystem followed close behind it. The animals and plants died a while ago, leaving one small group of humans in an artificial environment. In nine minutes this film tells quite a complex story, and in the year it has been making the Film Festival circuit it has won over 50 awards, including winning 14 Festivals outright. Thanks to CGI Bros for making this available online.
The choice this week is Spectre, the latest in the James Bond series, and perhaps the last that Daniel Craig will be Bond for. I appreciate the whole Day Of The Dead tie in, considering the timing. There are also a couple of other good choices, including The Peanuts Movie for classic animation fans, and Macbeth for straight-up classic fans. Myself, I will probably be making the Bond selection; I loved the Ian Flemming books, so I should support the films made from them.
Movies brings us Pixar’s Inside Out, where the main characters are various emotions running loose all across our subconscious. A Lego Brickumentary explores the history and uses of Lego’s from perspectives I had never imagined, and ended up being quite an interesting documentary.
TV has Doctor Who: Series 9 Part 1 which contains the first six episodes of season 9 of the new series. If you look at the same show in the UK they have it flagged as season 35, which is really a bit more accurate. The other offering is the single episode animation Toy Story That Time Forgot, from Disney/Pixar again.
In Anime, GLASSLIP: Complete Collection is about an ordinary person working to become a professional glassblower, but when she sees things reflected in glass, sometimes they are things that don’t happen until several days later. When she meets a boy who claims a voice from the future led him to her, she begins to re-evaluate what is going on in her world. If Her Flag Breaks is about a boy who sees “flags” over people who are about to have a major change in their life caused by the choices they make. Those changes might effect their love lives or even just whether they will live or die, and now he has some hard choices of his own to make.
Fairy Tail: Collection 5 contains episodes 97 through 120, which covers almost half a year of episodes at a price equal to Fairy Tale: Part 18, which is the more recent story, but has half the number of episodes for the same amount of money. Finally, Fafner: The Complete Series plus Movie is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means you can get the whole thing for right around $20.
Normally I do music on Saturday night’s, but normally Saturday is not Halloween. So this time around, a couple of classics in honor of the holiday. To make up for the schedule, music will be along very shortly, in honor of the new Abney Park album. The first Halloween video:
This is part of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series: The Skeleton Dance is a classic from 1929, not long after the Steamboat Willie era, and perfect for Halloween. In those days, this stuff was experimental state of the art, which tends to explain why Walt himself directed this one. The entire Silly Symphony collection was created from 1929 to 1939, and totaled out to 75 separate short animations, most of which were mini-masterpieces for their time. As evidence of this, the series won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film seven times, including the first 6 times that award was ever given out. It was also a Disney test bed for new technology, of which the single most important piece (to my mind, at least) was Technicolor, a technology nobody else in the industry would appreciate until decades later.
The second Halloween video is a more modern classic: The 8 Bit version of Army of Darkness. It may have been the third film in the Evil Dead franchise, but it became the definitive horror comedy film of its time very quickly. It didn’t have a serious contender for that title until Shaun Of The Dead hit the big screen quite a few years later. I do kind of wish I could have played the game instead of just watched it, though. These CineFix virtual remakes are quite the hoot.
The trailer for Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie is out, and the film will be in US theaters on November 10th, 11th, and 16th. This is the franchise that first brought Cyberpunk to the big screen in 1995, and along with Akira introduced American audiences to Japanese Anime. Meanwhile, the live action version of Ghost in the Shell, The Movie starring Scarlett Johansson has been pushed back to a March 2017 release, and is currently having its script rewritten.