In Movies About Time is a romantic fantasy involving the Groundhog Day premise; you do each important event over until you get it right. It was in the theaters just a month or two back, I feel certain they are going after the Valentine crowd with this one. It is a very nicely done movie with a lot of heart, so not a bad choice. The animated comedy Free Birds also comes to disc, but although I am an animation fan I can’t say this one really caught my attention. A better bet for animated entertainment this week is Justice League: War, a direct to DVD feature film.
In TV, while not a fantasy, the historical epic The White Queen deserves a mention, about some power mad women who stopped at nothing to get on the British throne.
We do much better in Anime this week, leading off with Fairy Tail – Part 8. This magical guild continues to do as much damage to their fellow guilds and the surrounding buildings and terrain as they do to the demons they are called upon to defeat. AKB0048 Next Stage Complete Collection is a bit silly but a lot of fun, as season two rolls out the 77th generation of the ultimate IDOL group going across the galaxy singing and shooting. Why shooting? A number of planetary governments have outlawed “things that disturb the heart”, including music. So the girls swoop down on a planet, set up a live concert which is also spread on the planetary net, and sing and dance until the police and soldiers show up. At that point, they have to fight their way back off the planet and head for the next one. If nothing else, this series is a great way to collect a bunch of AKB48 music. BTW, the English version of their home page is broken at the moment, dumping you back to the Japanese version if you try to go to it, but all of their other English pages appear to be working.
Blessing of the Campanella: Complete Collection is a mash up of medieval quests and robotic harems, with supernatural meteor showers and automaton artisans. Plus a lot of time spent hanging out at the beach in between quests and mysteries. This package includes all 12 episodes of the series plus the OVA. I found the provenance of this a bit confusing at first, since the home page with streaming video in the US is over at Funimation, but the DVD release is coming from Nozomi/Lucky Penny/Right Stuf. It turns out that the original simulcast run was at Funimation in 2010, with a DVD release from that distributor in 2011. Normally I do not post re-releases here unless they are important in some way, but I completely missed the series the first time around. Since it is new to me, I am claiming that as justification and posting it anyways.