I didn’t see anything in western releases, Anime has Kiddy Girl-AND, the sequel to Kiddy Grade. Taking place 25 years later, the galaxy is once more on the brink of chaos, and two new heroines need to step forward to save it. Squid Girl is also being released this week, silly fun for the aquatically inclined.
Topping the list, Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets was an instant classic that didn’t do well in the US, since almost no one here was familiar with the French comic it was based on. We get another French film this week as well in the form of the animation Leap!, original title Ballerina. Birth of the Dragon is also out this week, and while it isn’t genre, The Hitman’s Bodyguard looks like a fun film. The Korean action-thriller The Villainess also hits the shelves this time around, if you haven’t seen it, now is your chance. TV brings us a couple of comedy favorites in the form of The Librarians, Season 3 and Red Dwarf: XII
I missed seeing it in the theaters, and it hasn’t been streaming anywhere that I could find (not even on Funimation who have the North American rights), but now it is finally available on Disc: Your Name. Featuring music by the Radwimps, it pretty much broke every theater record in Japan, and won multiple awards. Another winner this week is Westworld: The Complete First Season, an excellent reboot of the original franchise. You can stream at least some of the episodes at that SYFY link, if you haven’t seen it yet you should check it out. Project Itoh: Genocidal Organ is the latest Sci-Fi story in the Project Itoh series, dealing with some fairly current topics. Taken together, the series of feature films covers about 150 years of a parallel history, like yet unlike our own. Finally there is Trollhunters: Season One, with Season 2 available to stream beginning on December 15th.
Continuing the reboot of the franchise, War for the Planet of the Apes could be a modern retelling of the period in history when the Cro-Magnon committed genocide by wiping out the Neanderthals. Teen Wolf: The Complete Series is not quite as epic but still has its moments. The Emoji Movie is just silly animated fun, or maybe just silly. There is a documentary worth checking out this week as well: Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World has won a ton of awards, and it is nominated for more.
In Anime, Alderamin on the Sky: The Complete Series is a brilliant story that has only begun with these 13 episodes. I hope they mean “the complete series so far”, and they continue making new episodes and season, because it was one of the top 5 shows to come out of Japan in 2016. Fairy Tail: Collection Ten brings episodes 213 through 239 home, nearly 11 hours of non-stop collateral damage during magical comedy combat. Then there is Flying Witch and Servamp Season 1, should you be in the mood for additional supernatural entertainment.
The winner this time is Spider-Man: Homecoming, pretty much my favorite iteration of Peter Parker on the big screen so far. As you can tell by the link, Sony hasn’t given the character up, just lent him to the core franchise in return for pulling some of that core franchise audience into their version of the MCU. American Gods season 1 gets my vote for best TV show getting released this week, it is amazing. God of War looks like it should be the best bet out of this week’s Asian films, but somehow they seemed to have allowed the premise of Samurai Pirates to fall through their fingers. I do have to mention Ernie Kovacs: Take a Good Look, the DVD collection featuring one of the most bizarre game shows ever to air on Television. It ran from 1959 to 1961, and even the game show panelists didn’t understand what was going on. Samurai Jack: Season 5 and Samurai Jack: The Complete Series both come out this week, finishing off an excellent but also truly strange TV run. There don’t seem to be any new Anime releases this week, perhaps next time.
TV has iZombie: The Complete Third Season while movies bring us Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which seem like the best selections of the week to me. A Ghost Story may have some possibilities although it doesn’t seem quite genre to me, and while Fabricated City is more about gaming than anything else it looks like quite an entertaining film. I didn’t see anything interesting in new Anime this time around.