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The Gu Family Book

I was watching the epic fantasy The Gu Family Book, about a nine tailed fox guardian spirit who falls in love with a human and fathers a demi-god with her before tragedy strikes. That tragedy kills her, turns him into a thousand-year demon, and leaves the child to be raised by a human family who have no concept of what he is. I was watching it off of my local independent outlet which included programming from the Korean language channel MBC by having my DVR set to record a two hour block of time Monday through Friday on that channel number. It had to be set that way because the program guide information submitted to TV Guide by the local re-broadcaster bore no resemblance to reality, so timed recording was the only option.

I managed to record and watch the first 22 episodes, then my cable company changed the programming of my set top box to “improve” it’s ability to locate shows by title or actors when running a search. In the process they broke the DVR function so it could no longer do recording by time blocks but only by program names as listed in the TV Guide service or in one of their online streaming affiliates. Not only have I never seen how that show ended, having lost the final two episodes of the series, but I have also lost all the shows they ran after that, as well as shows off of another 7 channels that also are rather slipshod in updating their TV Guide listings. It looks like I am finally getting some relief from this issue from two separate quarters. First off, as you can see from the embedded trailer, NBC/Universal will be releasing the series to DVD in 3 months or so, allowing me to add it to my permanent collection. Of course, since I can not speak or read Korean I am a bit unclear on whether it will be released in the US or only in Asia, but one can hope. I consider this show to be the best epic fantasy out of Korea for 2013 that I have found so far, so I will certainly be picking it up. More immediately, this series and a whole lot of other Korean TV Dramas are available for streaming on the MBC Hulu Plus channel, so I can finally see how the story ended.

Now if only my cable company would fix its broken set top boxes to give me back the ability to record program blocks by time and channel. If they don’t solve it soon, I guess I will have to buy a TIVO box, which does have that ability, and give my cable company back their broken DVR.

Something to Do: Movies, 10Jan14

Her opened in very limited release back in December, this week it goes into wide release, after winning a number of awards. The Legend of Hercules also comes out this Friday, and it looks like they took some pains to keep it close to the original story line.
In somewhat more limited release is EVANGELION: 3.0 – You Can (Not) Redo; mostly it will only be playing for one day in each theater, but there are a bunch of US and Canadian theaters on the list. Two of the theaters are within driving distance for me, I can’t wait to see the latest chapter in the rebuild of the franchise on the big screen.

Something to Watch: DVDs, 7Jan14

In Movies, Big Ass Spider! includes two actors I really like, Greg Grunberg and Ray Wise, and is very Tremors-like in its approach to dealing with the giant rampaging arachnid terrorizing Los Angeles. And yes, Greg is once more playing a cop, but a non-telepathic one this time. The other movie of note isn’t genre, but a fun little comedy about identity theft, desperate marriages, and gangland murder called Key of Life. It is in Japanese with English subtitles.

In TV we have Being Human: The Complete Third Season, the Syfy channel remake of the excellent British TV series. We also get the Blue Ray release of Star Trek Enterprise: The Complete Third Season. It has been available since 2005 in DVD, this is its first time available in Hi def, as far as I am aware.

For Western animation Archer: The Complete Fourth Season give us more bumbling spys to grin about.

Anime brings us Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne Season 2, also referred to as Set 2, with more intergalactic combat and intrigue, and alien mysteries to solve. And did I mention the giant robots the girls fly into battle? Aria The Natural: Part 1 is the first 13 episodes of season 2, and continues the story of the three friends determined to become the best gondoliers on the planet Aqua (called Mars before it was terraformed).

I don’t usually mention re-releases, but Patlabor: The Mobile Police Collection 4 comes out with episodes 37 through 47 of pure giant robot police mayhem, and this time around they have Blue Ray covered. This aired in Tokyo from 1988 through 1994, and pretty much set the standard for wacky police mecha shows, with a host of Anime giants involved with the production.

Manga 2.5

Somewhere between Manga and Anime, Manga 2.5 is following in the footsteps of Marvel and others, producing Motion Comics of popular Manga. They start by getting a contract to produce a popular Manga, then scan the whole thing in. They remove the dialog balloons and replace them with Japanese voice actors and English subtitles. Since they are embedding audio they also add sound effects as appropriate. The panels or frames are broken apart and colored, and limited animation in the style known as Motion Comics are added. The end result is something that you watch happen rather than read, for a lot less money then it takes to create a real animation or anime.

It is an interesting art form, and I do like the stuff produced by Marvel a lot. So far all I have seen of this group are a few trailers, but it has the potential to be quite good. If you were interested in trying your hand at this kind of thing, Smith Micro has an excellent software suite for a reasonable price with Motion Artist. It has a bit of a learning curve, but the software lets you be creative while automating a lot of the tasks; for instance you can set up the key frames and it automatically generates all the tween frames that get you from one key frame to the next. Trust me when I say having to animate each and every frame yourself gets tedious real fast, whether at 24 frames/second (fps) for film or 29 fps for TV, whereas you might have 4 to 6 key frames per second. Another very useful function is having the mouth layers pre-built for speech with a module that automates building the phonem map out of your imported MP3 file. Lip sync is about the hardest kind of animation to do, from my perspective, all that fiddly stuff should really be done by the computer anyways.