Strider’s Web – Page 92

Something to Stream: My Hero Academia Launch Party

The My Hero Academia launch party will be streaming live online over at Funimation beginning at 1AM Eastern Time this Sunday, April 3rd. Usually when a new show launches they just play the first episode an hour or half a day after it airs in Tokyo. This time, there will be live pre-show and post-show programming, complete with a chat/IM interface allowing you to talk to the hosts and guests. They will be throwing in some giveaways, although they are vague about what that entails.

Of course, you need to subscribe to their service to get access, but you can use their 2 week free trial to check it out (along with everything else they offer), and then cancel before the regular payments start if you didn’t find anything you were interested in.

I haven’t previously seen Funimation do anything like this to launch a new series, if it works out for them perhaps we will get more of these kind of events. If they put the time and effort in to do it right, it could be an excellent Value Added feature of their subscription service, becoming worthwhile for their business model and their subscriber’s entertainment both. I look forward to seeing how they do on this one, and am keeping my fingers crossed.

Roadkill Redemption

The animated short Roadkill Redemption was created by Karl Hadrika. Or most of it, at least; he did the story, animation, modeling, rigging, compositing, editing, lighting and sound design, but the voice was Lidia Labuda. This one made him a 41st Annual Student Academy Award Finalist, which is fairly impressive for a single person production. He did go on to join Warner Bros, where for the last year he has been on the team creating Bunnicula (yes, about a bunny vampire), which is now airing on the Cartoon Network.

Ratchet & Clank Trailer

If you have played this even once, the reality of the Ratchet & Clank movie can be summed up with their tag line: Kick Some Asteroid! It will be on the big screen at the end of April, just a handful of weeks from now.

Loving Vincent trailer

Imagine an animated feature film where each frame was painted by Vincent van Gogh; that is the concept behind Loving Vincent. So far just over 100 artists world wide have made the production team, and even if all they end up producing is the trailer they will have created something interesting. This is from Breakthru Films, the Polish film studio that created the award winning Peter And The Wolf a few years back.

Something to Do: Movies

The genre film this week is Pandemic, but I would rather seem Miles Ahead. The first is about a plague that threatens to wipe out all life on Earth and turn us all into Zombies, and I have already seen that movie twenty times too often, each time with a different cast. Miles Ahead is an indiegogo funded film about musical genius Miles Davis at a critical point in his life that I think has a lot of promise. So this time around I will be listening to the music.

Something to Watch: Discs

Humans, Season 1 is about Synths, near-human robots who may be more than they appear. It was shown on AMC (US), the BBC (UK), and ABC (AU) and is based on the Swedish science fiction program Real Humans, which has won a number of awards. Kudos Film and Television remade it for English speaking audiences with a somewhat changed plot line, and Acorn is releasing the uncut UK version on disc.

In Anime, the Utawarerumono OAV adds three new stories to this world of magic and combat, with just a bit of silliness thrown in. The other two new releases are about the genre rather than genre themselves; Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun is a rom/com about a Manga artist, while Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend is a rom/com about a high school otaku who decides to build his own game about a girl in his class.