The new season of Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga has begun with Rin Okumura now under the direct supervision of Shura. He either gets his flames under control and uses them to defeat evil, or he gets wiped out himself as part of the problem. This is the first week of the winter season, I am going to have to spend some time and check out the new shows as well as the returning ones. There is the usual collection of reviews at Anime News Network to get you started, with shows streaming at Crunchyroll, Funimation, Daisuki, and Viz, among others.
Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale is the feature film coming to theaters later this year, continuing the saga. This trailer has the Lisa theme song as its core, and a story line based on a nightmare from VR starting to spread into reality by way of AR. Not just based on the light novels by Reki Kawahara but actually written by her specifically for the movie, I am looking forward to seeing this one on the big screen.
Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga Episode 1 is coming to DAISUKE on January 6th! The new season of the show will be streamed by DAISUKI across an area that includes the US, Canada, Oceania, and Europe, so if you live in one of those you are just days away from all new episodes.
With the Christmas buying season over, very little in the way of new movies or TV is coming out this week. Operation Avalanche is another retelling of the Apollo Mission to the Moon as a conspiracy rather than the actual event. Based on the trailer, I suspect that Moonwalkers starring Ron Perlman was a more amusing variation on the concept. The real winner this week is Rurouni Kenshin Part III: The Legend Ends, bringing the latest live action cinematic retelling of the Samurai legend home. Finally, in Anime, The World God Only Knows: Ultimate Collection packages up both seasons plus the OVAs into a single box set for the first time. And that is pretty much it for this time around.
2016 was an amazing year for music, so to wave bye-bye to it I wanted to add a few tunes I hadn’t had the chance to post earlier. The first track is One OK Rock’s I Was King from their upcoming album Ambitions, which will be released on January 13th. The next one is Blood On The Edge (the theme from the Anime Strike the Blood, OVA version) from Kishidan Cult & THE Akishin Rockets, posted online in November and just released a few weeks ago. The third is Never Gave Up by All Off, a band that’s been rocking Japan since 2004; that track was posted in January of this year. Their single Refrain Boy is the ending theme for Anime Mob Psycho 100, if you thought they sounded familiar.
We get two versions of Princess Mononoke in movie theaters this January, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Studio Ghibli classic. On January 5th you can see the original Japanese version with English subtitles, while on January 9th you can watch the English Dub version. Both versions were the work of Hayao Miyazaki, but you may not be aware the English language version was written by Neil Gaiman, and performed by such talents as Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, and Gillian Anderson! The special event screening is a combined project of Fathom Events and GKIDS.