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Something to Watch: Discs

Movies brings us The Man From U.N.C.L.E. for our original release, so if you missed this excellent film in the theaters you now have another shot at it. While there isn’t anything previously unreleased in it, I do have to mention The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki brings together everything Disney has distributed by him in a single box set. No TV to speak of this week.

In Anime, Buddy Complex: The Complete Series is a story about time travel, interstellar combat, giant mecha’s, and all the other things that make high school such a learning experience. Tiny though the story arc is for Sword Art Online II: Calibur, it is still world class and well worth watching as the SAO franchise keeps gathering momentum. Finally, Invaders of the Rokujyoma!? brings a collection of characters that include a girl ghost, a Magical Girl, a luscious Subterranean bombshell,
and a fiery space princess!

Something to Stream: RWBY

Yes! Team RWBY is back, with still more combat comedy and adventure as they roll into volume 3. If you are new to the series, start off with the original 16 episodes of RWBY, then go through 12 more for volume 2, before hitting the new series. This show is being created in Poser Pro by the folks at Rooster Teeth, of combat comedy masterpiece Red Vs. Blue fame. I find this story fascinating, and can’t wait to see where they take it from here.

Short Animation: Sumer

In the animated short film Sumer by Alvaro Garcia the ionosphere has been destroyed, and the planetary ecosystem followed close behind it. The animals and plants died a while ago, leaving one small group of humans in an artificial environment. In nine minutes this film tells quite a complex story, and in the year it has been making the Film Festival circuit it has won over 50 awards, including winning 14 Festivals outright. Thanks to CGI Bros for making this available online.

Something to Watch: Discs

Movies brings us Pixar’s Inside Out, where the main characters are various emotions running loose all across our subconscious. A Lego Brickumentary explores the history and uses of Lego’s from perspectives I had never imagined, and ended up being quite an interesting documentary.

TV has Doctor Who: Series 9 Part 1 which contains the first six episodes of season 9 of the new series. If you look at the same show in the UK they have it flagged as season 35, which is really a bit more accurate. The other offering is the single episode animation Toy Story That Time Forgot, from Disney/Pixar again.

In Anime, GLASSLIP: Complete Collection is about an ordinary person working to become a professional glassblower, but when she sees things reflected in glass, sometimes they are things that don’t happen until several days later. When she meets a boy who claims a voice from the future led him to her, she begins to re-evaluate what is going on in her world. If Her Flag Breaks is about a boy who sees “flags” over people who are about to have a major change in their life caused by the choices they make. Those changes might effect their love lives or even just whether they will live or die, and now he has some hard choices of his own to make.

Fairy Tail: Collection 5 contains episodes 97 through 120, which covers almost half a year of episodes at a price equal to Fairy Tale: Part 18, which is the more recent story, but has half the number of episodes for the same amount of money. Finally, Fafner: The Complete Series plus Movie is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means you can get the whole thing for right around $20.

Happy Halloween! Skeleton Dance, 8 Bit Army of Darkness

Normally I do music on Saturday night’s, but normally Saturday is not Halloween. So this time around, a couple of classics in honor of the holiday. To make up for the schedule, music will be along very shortly, in honor of the new Abney Park album. The first Halloween video:

This is part of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series: The Skeleton Dance is a classic from 1929, not long after the Steamboat Willie era, and perfect for Halloween. In those days, this stuff was experimental state of the art, which tends to explain why Walt himself directed this one. The entire Silly Symphony collection was created from 1929 to 1939, and totaled out to 75 separate short animations, most of which were mini-masterpieces for their time. As evidence of this, the series won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film seven times, including the first 6 times that award was ever given out. It was also a Disney test bed for new technology, of which the single most important piece (to my mind, at least) was Technicolor, a technology nobody else in the industry would appreciate until decades later.

The second Halloween video is a more modern classic: The 8 Bit version of Army of Darkness. It may have been the third film in the Evil Dead franchise, but it became the definitive horror comedy film of its time very quickly. It didn’t have a serious contender for that title until Shaun Of The Dead hit the big screen quite a few years later. I do kind of wish I could have played the game instead of just watched it, though. These CineFix virtual remakes are quite the hoot.

Descendants

The short animation Descendants is a wonderful and touching piece of work, but thanks to the CG Society publishing of the article it is even more than that; it is an excellent tutorial in animation production. When you read the Making Of, you get an understanding of what some of the challenges are in the animation process, and some of the options available for solving each one. So if you have ever considered making your own animation, watch this amazing example, read the Making Of, and consider how to apply its lessens to your own production.

Descendants from Goro Fujita on Vimeo.