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Something to Watch: Online Pt. 1

This is a huge topic, so to begin I will break it down to a tiny subset with a very limited scope, so it doesn’t run away from us right out of the starting gate. Since this is my introduction post to the topic, it will be confined to:

1) Anime
2) Generic Servers
3) Free Sites

There are a lot of places online to watch Anime, which is a great way to pick out the good ones before laying your money down for the DVD’s. I spend so much time watching great animated sci-fi and fantasy this way, I figured it was about time to make it part of my Blog entries. To begin, I just want to mention a few of the generic video servers, and I should also mention the updated Anime Nation App with all new functionality for watching through your iDevice.

Hulu is of course now running Hulu Plus, but it also has just added several new titles to its free Anime Network section, including Xam’d, Blue Drop, Ghost Hound, and the second season of Hell Girl, to name just a few. Outside of that company there are a ton of classic titles, like Full Metal Panic (including all series), Vandread (both seasons and the OVA), Gad Guard, and Kaze no Stigma, and the inevitable whole lot more. There is an entire additional range of recent works, including D.Gray-Man, Sands of Destruction, and Birdy the Mighty: Decode. Those titles are just the tip of the iceberg, and don’t even begin to impinge on whats available in the premium section of the video service.

It gets a bit blurry when you try to follow a given production house, even when they are importing and converting, rather than creating, their works. As an example, Funimation Online Video can point you to their own internal company servers, or the Hulu Servers (that last link was to the feature film Vexille: 2077 Isolation of Japan), or to their YouTube Site where you can watch some great new titles like Birdy the Mighty: Decode and classic recent additions including Vandread and Witchblade. The title duplication was not an accident, just serves to indicate that the edges of what is available from various sources does include a lot of overlap, and rightly so. The more formats and servers supported, the wider the potential audience becomes for a given program; which works very well for the content creators long run, since it helps create the largest possible market for their product. But at its heart, their product is stories about the human condition, whatever the media they use to present them, as all stories must be.

Another great source is Anime News Network, which maintains its own set of streaming servers. This site has a unique set of programs you won’t be able to see anywhere else, and my personal favorite series in their current collection is Oreimo. You get woken in the middle of the night to discover your little sister is an Otaku in so deep she is creating her own Manga’s which are now being turned into Anime’s. As the honorable Big Brother, you do everything needful to protect her.

Finally for today, this link is the winner: you can click to watch the US premiere of Fractal, when it becomes available.

Singularity Music: 6

The first video is from a band that lost their instruments but refused to stop playing. New York Cities Atomic Tom took music creation apps from their smart phones, hit the subways, and recorded another version of their local hit. If you like the song, you can download it free on iTunes. I am sure Steve Jobs thinks it is another advertising campaign generated by his company. The second track is from Future Music Camp Mannheim 2009, and features 2 conductors direction 12 people running the Brian Eno music app Bloom. They ran the camp again in 2010, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was coming around again this year.

Something to Do: Movies

This Friday, January 14th, the movie to attend is The Green Hornet, a tribute to the 1960’s TV show starring Bruce Lee, and referred to as The Kato Show all throughout Asia during that time period. This version is NOT directed by Stephen Chow, who brought us such masterpieces as Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, as I previously reported. He had been involved with the project, but walked away from the Director spot in 2008, and the Kato roll in 2009; I really need to check web pages more carefully for story dates so I am not reporting expired information. This has come a long way since 1940, when it was produced as a movie theater serial of 13 episodes or so, itself based on the original Radio Plays of the early 1930s. Unlike most of its contemporaries The Green Hornet was a radio play first, not a pulp or comics series, and every episode ended with the newspaper boy hawking his wares by shouting out the headlines for that story (bad guys in jail) ending with the phrase The Green Hornet Still at Large!!

Something to Watch: DVD’s

A whole lot of titles being released, or mostly re-released, this week hoping to ride on the coattails of the new Green Hornet movie. The Green Hornet: Movie Edition, The Green Hornet: Original Serials, and Kato & The Green Hornet are all repackaging of the 1940 Green Hornet serials from Universal Studios. Note that the one that starts off with Kato’s name is coming out of South Africa and being sold predominantly across Asia. I find it disappointing that I have located no reference to the 1960s Bruce Lee TV show being re-released this week, as existing editions are a bit pricey if you can track a legal copy down at all. However, The Jade Tiger is going on the shelves Tuesday, so martial arts fans will have something new to watch.

The animated feature film this time around is Alpha and Omega, which has some quality animation work and an excellent vocal cast. It is targeted at the younger set, so don’t expect anything too profound out of the plot line, but a good choice for sharing with the family.

Interestingly enough, 2010’s Piranah 3D is actually being released on 3D Blu-Ray this week, while 1989’s Alien from the Deep seems to have neither a Blu-Ray or 3D version. Personally, I won’t be seeing either one, not being a horror fan.

On TV, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea: Season 4, Vol. 2 finishes up the final episodes of that series, so you can now have the entire thing in your collection. As with almost any other TV program from the 60’s (Star Trek and Twilight Zone being the notable exceptions) it is a bit campy, but still fun.

In Anime, 11 Eyes: The Complete Collection tells the story of two friends who are transported into the strange world of Red Night, and must vanquish evil spirits and other foes in order to escape. The other selection is Black Butler – Season 1 Part 1, about a boy who trades his soul for revenge on those who murdered his parents, and the Demon Butler who dismembers his enemies. You can watch it on Hulu to help you decide if you want it in your collection.

If you are looking for something lighter than those two, there is an anime series about an Otaku girl who’s secret hobby is gradually revealed to her friends and family I can recommend: Oreimo. It is currently streaming online for free over at Anime News Network, and every Sci-Fi, Manga, Anime, or Gamer Fan will recognize a bit of themselves in this one. They just posted the final episode the other week, so you can watch the whole thing in one go if you like; it is almost addictive enough that you might even if you don’t intend to.

Music for Anime: Joe Hisaishi

Joe Hisaishi has built some interesting music for some quality Anime productions, most notably for Hayao Miyazaki’s incredible animated stories. Miyazaki is the world famous co-founder of Studio Ghibli,, and some of the wonderful stories that Joe built the scores for include Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. From which list you will no doubt have figured out that Disney Distributes Ghibli in the US, because their quality for amazing animation is on a par. And Joe has been doing some of the best musical scores for Ghibli, which is a bit more complex than it might at first seem.

We all know that every good Movie and TV show, whether live action or animation, has an opening and closing theme that ideally sets the tone and expectations for the program as a whole. And we all realize (even if we don’t notice it on any specific show) that within any good program there are variations of one or both of those theme songs that enhance scenes emotionally and make it obvious that we are in a chase, or combat, or romance, or one of the other standard kinds of situations. The ones that become easiest to miss are also the ones that stitch together the presentation at the most basic level; the interstitial music, the tones or brief riffs that introduce a transition from one kind of scene to the next. Trust me when I say Joe Hisaishi has mastered all of those musical flavors, and built some of the most complete and inspiring sound tracks for each of the projects he has taken on. Just in case you still think you don’t already know who he is, this short selection of tracks should prove otherwise to you.

And for those in the audience that thought if it wasn’t Rock-N-Roll I wasn’t interested, you were mostly right. But I haven’t heard orchestral music twisted around and tied tight to a story line like this since I sat in the audience and had Leonard Bernstein play Peter and the Wolf for me live one day; that kind of experience really does change your perspective.