After watching this, I had to share it here. There are several excellent 3D illusions, a shoe shot that is almost as good, and a cat pretending to be 3D. Thanks to Vulture for the heads up on this one.
Yes, I know this has been out for weeks, but I don’t care. I just finished watching The Angels Take Manhattan, and now I can not wait to see the x-mas special. There is never enough Doctor Who in the world. And yes, I had not seen that episode before; I saved it until I was able to watch it with a friend.
The builder of this 2 foot tall (OK, 60 centimeters, but who’s counting?) robot incarnation of Hatsune Miku goes by the name of Rozen Zebet, and he released this video Saturday to show just how good his replicant is. While I personally like the holographic versions they use for the live stage performances, this one is quite tasty, and definitely shows some of the improvements robotics have come up with in recent years. Thanks to the Anime News Network for the heads up on this one.
The only genre I could find this week was Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, the fourth outing for this franchise. I thought the original film had a unique premise and was quite well done, but every entry since seems to be a formula driven way to take home a pay check for the core cast and crew. This is probably a good weekend to see something you may have missed in recent weeks, like Wreck It Ralph or Rise of the Guardians, both of which have now been short listed for an Oscar nomination.
Top of the movie list this week has to be Men In Black 3, one of the few franchises that have actually gotten better with each new movie. In fact, I might even be tempted to get a 4K 3D TV for this one after seeing it in the theater. Also this week, ParaNorman is an animated comedy about a kid who is just a bit different.
I could not find any new releases under TV, except for a mention of the 1993 made for TV version of Frankenstein possibly being released, but even there I could find no verification. Surprising, since we are deep into the Xmas buying frenzy, and I would expect them to be releasing lots of stuff to pry open our wallets.
I only see two new releases in Anime, both of them involving mercenaries wandering through historic epoch war zones. In Berserk: The Golden Age Arc; The Egg of the King the war zone is the Midland Kingdom, which based on the armor and outfits looks a lot like late Roman period England. For Intrigue in the Bakumatsu: Irohanihoheto, Collection 2 it appears to be the Shogunate era of Japan. In both series everything is in continual flux, just like any real war zone, as alliances break and shift, and the battle continues.
21 animated films in different categories have been submitted for Oscar consideration, according to an article in the Hollywood Reporter. The offerings include computer generated, hand drawn, and stop motion productions from a variety of sources, which pretty much covers your choices of how to create animations. The Short Animated Films category alone had 56 works being looked at, which was narrowed down to a short list 10 films long, and will probably be trimmed further to result in 3 to 5 actual nominees in that category. I haven’t seen many of them at all, except for John Kahrs’ Paperman which impressed me no end. It was the short piece just before Wreck-It Ralph in the theaters, which is itself under consideration. Other contenders include Studio Ghibli’s Up on Poppy Hill, Disney’s Brave, and Peter Ramsey’s Rise of the Guardians. The number of quality animation pieces just keeps growing year after year, and there are some wonderful films in the race this time around; I can’t wait to see who gets to take home the statues.