Today is the first day of the 17th Annual SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival, with a host of amazing films, including 7 world film premieres, 13 UK film premieres, and SCI-FIDO, the world’s only cosplay for dogs! It runs for 10 days total and includes goodies like the movie Virtual Revolution and this year’s assortment of Sci-Fi Games. Wish I could be there this time!
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Everything seems to be animated this week. It is always a treat to get a new title from Studio Ghibli, Ocean Waves is available this week for the first time in the US. It was made in 1993 as a TV anime, but at 152 minutes long rates as a mini-series. In anime, My Hero Academia: Season 1 has a hoard of high school students with superpowers, and a guy who enrolled in the most prestigious school for Heroes with no powers at all. Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle: Complete Collection has mechanical dragons used for aerial combat, with the prince and princess from adjacent kingdoms battling it out to see who gets Top Gun status, at least at first. Aria the Scarlet Ammo AA is another season of those girls with guns getting into more trouble, and in Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid you cannot separate the women from the weapons.
The animated romp Spark: A Space Tail comes out this week, for those of us who consider silly fun an art form. There is also a documentary I am hoping to see, to see if they did the man justice: Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary brings the story of this musical legend to the big screen. He created music the world had only dreamed of until then, and I suspect it will still be played 100 years from now, and longer.
The best movie this time is a true story: Hidden Figures has to be one of the best films of the year, or last year at least. If you haven’t seen it yet, now is your chance! Mars: Season One is a mini-series presented on National Geographic all about the upcoming Mars Colonization project. Monster Trucks is silly fun for the entire family, a very friendly invasion indeed. And then there is Tangled: Before Ever After Volume 1, an animated prequel; the production values on this one are way below the original films (1930s at the most recent, it appears), but they are at least trying to tell a new story.
In Anime, Is the Order a Rabbit?? – Season 2 brings us lots more silly fun, and Toriko: Parts 1-4 contains the first 50 episodes (4 seasons, or one year, depending on how you prefer to count) of the ultimate food porn combat comedy! I think the streaming service is up to episode 148 or so at the moment, to put that in perspective.
Tor published an excellent article yesterday about how Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind not only helped found Studio Ghibli, but set Miyazaki on the path that would define his career. It is one of the best postings I have seen on the subject, exploring both its influences and results, and now I am going to have to break the film out and watch it again, 30 years after its initial release, and see just how close she came to telling the true story. Pretty close, I am thinking.
Disney/Pixar just posted Dante’s Lunch – A Short Tail, and it was too much fun to keep to myself. It is a short slice of Coco, which opens in U.S. theaters on Nov. 22, 2017. I am also including the official teaser trailer, for those who haven’t seen it yet.