In the form of an animated music video with the song What Good Is Love sung by Janelle Monáe. I enjoyed the first movie, and am looking forward to Rio 2 when it comes out on April 11th.
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.
The most interesting film this week has to be Her, a story about a writer who installs a new artificially intelligent operating system designed to meet his every need, and discovers himself drawn into a relationship with it he never expected. Don’t expect explosions and chase scenes, Spike Jonez doesn’t usually do that kind of science fiction; this story is all about intelligence and the heart. We also get Walking with Dinosaurs 3D this time around, quality animation with a story about survival and triumph. This is from 20th Century Fox, with BBC Earth doing the UK airplay, and plays a lot like some of the better classic Disney stories. I think I will probably have to see them both, and I have to say it is nice to have a choice between two stories that have never been told before. It comes complete with a free Augmented Reality App that lets you take photos of your surroundings with dinosaurs in them and a lot more.
I usually hit movies first, but Day Of The Doctor gets the number one spot this time around. This is after all the 50th Anniversary Doctor Who Special, and definitely had more Doctors than any other episode. While we are on the topic of TV, I should mention Futurama: Volume 8 and Futurama: The Complete Series will both be hitting the shelves this week.
Another break from my normal structure; I usually do live action movies first, but Despicable Me 2 has to start out the movie presentations this week. It was way too much fun, and you just can’t have too many minions. The other movies worth mentioning have either Cantonese or Mandarin as their primary sound track, including Man of Tai Chi. Note that that is the second Asian-centric film Keanu Reeves has starred in this year, and the first one he has directed. Saving General Yang takes place in 986 AD, and involves the famous Yang Family Generals. For something different, The Rooftop seems to be a Taiwan gangland musical with lots of singing, dancing, and fighting. It looks like a fun film to check out.
In Anime, Bleach: Season 19 brings us up to episode 279. To put that in perspective, they are up to episode 366 streaming from Japan, so the DVDs are finally starting to catch up with the streaming sources. Another returning favorite is Fairy Tail: Part 7, bringing episodes 73 through 84, and they are also releasing Fairy Tale: The Movie this week, so you get a double dose.
Btooom!: The Complete Series is about a combat game which suddenly changed when the 7 best players in the world were kidnapped, and woke up on an island with a bag of bombs each and holes in their memories; now they have to kill each other off and be the last one standing to escape, or so they are lead to believe. Finally, in the main series, a bunch of friends had their bodies repeatedly swapped so they never knew who they were going to be next, had their ages change at random, and had their desires overwhelm them and take control, all being done to them by an outside force. Now, in Kokoro Connect: OVA Collection, their inner emotional state is suddenly being projected into one of their friends, including phobias and suppressed desires, sometimes with near lethal results.
Coming out on Wednesday rather than Friday this time, Frozen looks like a fun ride. If the trailers are anything to judge by, this one looks a lot like Tangled, which I really enjoyed.
It is difficult to get an arch-enemy when you are hours or days old, but somehow Sleeping Beauty managed to pull that off. Maleficent is the story of how that came about, kind of the prequel to Disney’s 1959 classic fairy tale animation. It will be hitting the big screen on May 30th 2014, starring Angelina Jolie, and being just a bit more live action then the last Disney film on the topic.