The winner this week has to be Marvel’s Doctor Strange, a real powerhouse of a movie, and one of my favorites for 2016. In Anime, every title listed this time is the complete series, so you won’t be missing anything with any of these. Actually, I Am is about a boy who can’t keep a secret, so he confesses his love to a girl… who tells him a secret about herself: she’s a Vampire. If he leaks this secret to anyone, she will be forced to leave school, but it seems everyone at that school has a secret, and he begins to learn them all. In Amagi Brilliant Park there are scantily clad fairies, giant mice and sniper-trained sheep occupying a run down amusement park that really is a magic kingdom in need of rescuing. The Betrayal Knows My Name is a story of love, reincarnation, and constantly mounting danger, with a twist. There are two titles this week that I thought were already both released, but I can’t find evidence to prove it. Red Data Girl is being released in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can pick up the entire series for under $20. The classic Scrapped Princess is also coming out on disc as a complete series; I thought it had done that a decade ago, but all the references I can find are for single volumes with 4 episodes each, no collection.
The Irregular at Magic High School anime series has a Feature Film coming out in Japan on June 17th, and it just got its first trailer. The original voice cast is here, but both the director and the anime studio have changed since the original TV series came out in 2014. I have no idea how much those changes might change the dynamic of the story-line, but it was solid as a light novel, solid as a TV series, and I expect it will be solid as a movie. Thanks to the folks at Otaku USA for the heads up on this one.
Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei Movie PV by pKjd
We get a couple of very different movies this week. The gritty near future dystopia The Girl with All the Gifts, based on the novel by the same name from Mike Carey, is a story of spoor crazed zombies and human experimentation. On the other hand the fantasy Rock Dog is about a Tibetan Mastiff who wants to play music rather than guard sheep. I know which one I will be watching; how about you?
This week we get Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio, a delightfully twisted look at comic book superheroes that may be my favorite Doctor Who Christmas Special. We also get the 2014 remake of the 1946 French classic La Belle Et La Bete or Beauty And The Beast, which one reviewer tagged as 50 Shades of Fur.
In Anime Noragami Season Two: Aragoto minor god Yato is still broke, still shrineless, and now fighting for his life as major war goddess Bishamon hunts him down. Even more life threatening, Assassination Classroom Season Two: Part One brings the next 13 episodes of this entertaining series. While I really like Asterisk War: The Academy City on the Water, the release of Blu Ray 3 puts 5 episodes on a disc and charges the price of a complete series for them, so I will stick to the streaming service version. Ultimate Otaku Teacher: Season One, Part Two brings the next dozen episodes of this humorous and offbeat slice-of-life for the socially inept home. Re-releases in more affordable bundles this week include Freezing Vibration: The Complete Second Season in an Anime Classics edition (generally around or just under $30), and Unbreakable Machine-Doll in a S.A.V.E. edition (generally right around $20). Machine Doll is the complete series plus the 6 OVAs, which make it a very good deal.
A short featurette about the next Avengers movie, with a bit of the thinking behind the franchise, and maybe a spoiler or two.
The choice this week is obvious: The Great Wall took 1,700 years to build and was over 500 miles long; so just what was it built to defend against? The Western mercenaries came to buy the latest super weapon, gunpowder, but one of them found a war worth fighting. This is where you will find me this weekend, enjoying this joint Chinese/US production.