Tessa Violet was known as Meekakitty when she recorded I’ll Be Your Star Trek Girl and her video of the ALL CAPS classic Don’t Unplug Me. Now she has another instant classic with Sorry I’m Not Sorry under her own name, the fist track presented here, and I have to say I love her music. Sadly, her Star Trek Girl video has been removed from the internet except for bootleg copies, so I can’t post it here. It sounds like her Don’t Unplug Me instance has some corrupt audio around the 3rd verse, but otherwise it appears to be both intact and legal, so I do get to include it. The third track of the set (and she has a TON more songs, please check them all out) is her Wizard Love, a Harry Potter Music Video that she recorded with heyhihello which should be in everyone’s collection. The final track is a bit of a tribute to Alice herself, and if you haven’t already been following Tessa Violet for years, now you know why you should be. For more, grab her songs on iTunes or pick up her Maker Shop album.
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Aardman Animations of Wallace and Gromit fame have put together their first VR presentation, Special Delivery. It was made for Google Spotlight Stories, who made this into one of their presentations and translated it into an app for Android and IOS Google Cardboard phones. Much like their Shaun the Sheep TV and Film programs this Pink Panther-like video doesn’t bother with words, but creates its humor from the visuals. This is WAY cooler in the 360 degree VR environment of a Cardboard headset, and even just an Android or Apple phone without the headset allows you to interactively change what you see by turning which way the phone faces. But even the flat version you can see on a desktop or laptop running Firefox or Chrome is fun and gives you an idea about what is going on. The second video gives you a peek behind the curtain with a making-of.
Identicals sounds like something from the mind of Philip K. Dick, with a series of near identical people taking over each others lives and leaving dead bodies in their wake, but it is written and directed by Simon Pummell. It has been making the Film Festival rounds for the last year, and will get a wide release in Theaters, VOD, and Digital on March 25th, with DVDs coming out the following week.
The Jungle Book Big Game Trailer gives you an idea of where they are going with this latest iteration of Kipling’s masterpiece as well as a glimpse of the merged Live Action/CGI environment they will be building it in. Come April 15, I hope to be in the theaters for this one.
Studio Ghibli’s Only Yesterday and live action Gods of Egypt both hit the big screen this weekend. The 1991 animated classic Only Yesterday has finally been released in the US now, 25 years after the rest of the world got to see it, and is filled with exactly the kind of touching heart-felt story one expects from them. Its run in the theaters is extremely limited, opening in a single theater in New York on January 1st and expanding on Friday to another double dozen cities. If you are not close enough to make one of them, it will be in still more cities each week over the next four, and then released on DVD for the first time in this country. Gods of Egypt is the flip side of that coin, brand new live action/adventure epic fantasy, although I do admit to studying the trailer carefully looking for a Stargate. I look forward to seeing at least one of them.
There is very little genre coming out this week, with the animated Disney fantasies The Good Dinosaur and The Lion Guard being pretty much the only Western exceptions. Anime does a bit better, with Tokyo ESP: Complete Series taking place in a world where flying fish bestow paranormal powers, and only the penguin can overcome them. Meanwhile, police without powers are rounding up all the gifted they can get their hands on, and are either killing them outright or forcing them into concentration camps where they are worked to death. This is not a good time for Rinka to gain powers, but she does the best she can with them to protect her family and friends. In Ga-Rei-Zero: Complete S.A.V.E. two sisters are teenage exorcists fighting demons using sacred swords each night, until one of them becomes possessed. Now the other sister has to decide whether to kill her, or let her run around slaughtering innocents.