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Something to Stream: Sky Wizard’s Academy

One of the new Anime shows streaming this season is Sky Wizard’s Academy, being hosted on the Funimation service. The story is straightforward enough according to the official site: Forced to retreat to floating cities due to an invasion of magical armored insects, humanity must now depend on Sky Wizards to battle the menace. The primary characters are almost that simple and straightforward, except for the collection of misunderstandings surrounding the protagonist as he meets his team for the first time.

I have to admit, this show did not attract my attention right away, so I only watched the first episode a few days back. I found it quite enjoyable as an introduction to a new series goes, and it does look to have a great deal of potential. If reviewing these kind of things was my day job I would have no doubt binge watched my way up to this week’s offering, episode 8, but sadly I have to work for a living. But I did enjoy the first one enough to make it worth mentioning in this post, complete with the link to its streaming home page and the trailer from there, so you could watch it and come to your own conclusions.

Aurora Official Trailer #1

This is the first Aurora Official Trailer, and it makes the potential movie look very interesting. In 2020 super-computer Kronos concludes that human beings are the biggest threat to the planet, and takes action. The movie begins in 2080, when Andrew meets Calia, a girl heading back to robot-free Aurora and latches on to her for dear life. This is yet another of those movies where frail humans like ourselves go toe-to-toe against our Evil Robot Overlords, and I have to tell you, our prospects are not great. But we might just have a chance. This Swiss science fiction film looks like it has some potential, and I hope I get a chance to check it out on the big screen.

Attack On Titan Movie US dates

Funimation has announced the US dates for the live action Attack On Titan movies to be in theaters, with September 30th for the first, and October 20th for the second. They made the announcement a bit over a week ago, I have been trying to find a list of theaters that will be showing it to link here, but I just haven’t found one. The official movie page does have an opt-in email registration where you can sign up to get those announcements as they become available, at least. In the meantime, here is the official US trailer.

Something to Do: Movies

The film Z for Zachariah takes place after the end of the world, where the three known survivors end up in a love triangle. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and author Robert C. O’Brien had another of his books turned into a movie, The Secret of NIMH. But I am just not sure that a movie with only 3 actors in it can hold my attention all the way through. The other option this week looks more interesting to me, but may be on far fewer screens: Memories of the Sword is a Korean historical fantasy taking place during the Goryo Dynasty.

Something to Watch: Discs

In Movies I have to consider Big Game a fantasy, even though I don’t think that was the intention of the film makers. The plot has a thirteen-year-old boy armed with a bow and arrows who has to save the President (Samuel L. Jackson) from a group of kidnappers while fleeing across Finland. The trailer was quite nicely done, I think it might just be a fun film. We also get Lego DC Super Heroes: Justice League Attack of the Legion of Doom!, action adventure on the silly side from DC Comics and Warner Bros. Studios.

TV has The Walking Dead: The Complete Fifth Season, which gives you plenty of time to catch up with the show before season 6 starts on October 11th. I figured this program would last two seasons, three tops; I obviously underestimated the attraction of Zombies. While not genre, I enjoy the show a lot and so will mention Elementary: Season 3 also comes out this week. The network the show runs on, CBS, now has its own OTT streaming service, CBS All Access, allowing you to watch the shows the day after they air on your computer, tablet, or smart phone.

In Anime the new show is Kamigami no Asobi: Ludere Deorum, in which Zeus decides that the gods have lost touch with the mortal world. His solution is to kidnap Yui and throw her into a garden with 8 hunky gods, assigning her the job of teaching them about humanity and mortality. The gods being so easily bored, things get way more interesting than most mere mortals would ever find comfortable.

There are also a number of returning shows with new seasons, which run the gamut of categories. Love Chunibyo & Other Delusions! Heart Throb brings season 2 home, to follow in the footsteps of the original story. Not only does he have delusional Rikka to deal with, but now his childhood delusional reinforcement buddy Satone Shichimiya is back, ready to drag him into a fantasy world he may never escape from. The combat-gamer series Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works, better viewed on their CrunchyRoll Page, also brings us a new series worth of episodes. And as usual Fairy Tail: Part 16 brings us another 11 episodes in this wonderful ongoing saga.

God Eater

My favorite Anime series this season was GATE, and it pretty much still is. But now Daisuki has an exclusive on a new truly kick ass show that has caught my attention: God Eater is an amazing project, using edits and camera work normally reserved for the better live action programs, and almost never seen in animations. The animation quality itself is also far better than normal, with a lot more attention to detail. I should mention that by “Exclusive” I don’t mean they are the only service that has it, but it looks like they do have any given episode a good 4 weeks ahead of the competition. So if you find this one as worthy of attention as I do, that is an excellent reason to sign up for a Free Daisuke Membership, and maybe even consider getting a premium/paid membership, if you like what you see there well enough.

The core story line is also grittier than the other offerings, but seems to be extracted/stolen directly from Attack On Titan; giant god-like creatures are breaking through the protective walls humanity is hiding behind, and eating everybody they can catch. While they are doing all the parts of it so much better than we have seen before, it is sad that they didn’t come up with their own plot line, but only swiped someone else’s story. Of course, the people that read the original Manga might argue with that interpretation, but that is how it appears to me.