Welcome to the Winter 2016 Anime season where we finally get Gate Season 2 and a ton of other shows! Schwarzes Marken is the new season of the BETA invasion of Earth battles, this time featuring the 1983 East German Army. Once more the human forces are so busy trying to gain an advantage over each other that they are ordered to let other humans die rather than combine against their true enemies (one the alien invaders, the other the commanding officers who issue those orders). Erased has a manga artist protagonist who is forced to repeat the past moment which last threatened his life until he gets it right and survives it. Durarara X2 The Third Arc is also about to start, along with Lupin The 3rd Part 4, both series that don’t really need an introduction from me. Those are just the shows that caught my attention right out of the box, there are a number of others that I need to look into before reporting them here.
This amazing tribute to Hayao Miyazaki is from dono on Vimeo. He built it using Blender (3D modeling and animation), Gimp (graphics/painting creation/editing), Octane (real time 3D rendering) and Natron (matting, masking, and compositing). I will point out that all of them except Octane are free, open source software that rival any of the commercial software packages which do the same job. I am sure everyone will be surprised that the music he used is by Joe Hisaishi. It looks like he modeled and rendered the scenes, sets, and backgrounds in 3D but composited the original 2D characters into those scenes, including scenes they were never in before for some of them, creating a wonderful visual effect. Many thanks to Nerdist for the heads up on this one, and my only problem now (as someone else said in the comments) is deciding which Miyazaki masterpiece I want to re-watch tonight, after watching so many old friends on the screen together after all this time.
Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki from dono on Vimeo.
In Movies we have the somewhat silly The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, complete with an attack squad of zombie kitty cats. I suppose I should also mention Deathgasm, another horror/comedy but with a heavy metal beat. I think the non-genre Memories of the Sword, a historic fantasy of Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (roughly a thousand years ago), is the best movie bet this time around. I did not see anything genre in TV this week, and Anime only has one new release; Dai-Shogun: Great Revolution. That one is from a parallel universe where giant steam-powered robots fought off the foreign ships, so the 1868 Meiji restoration never happened. Japan is left still fragmented, with various warlords running different areas and the Tokugawa Shogunate fighting internally for control of the fragments.
Art Rock band The Oral Cigarettes have put together some tasty tunes over the years, so I wanted to share a few of them with you. The first one is their track Hey Kids, which was the 2nd OP song for the anime Noragami Aragoto (the first Noragami OP was Hello Sleepwalkers). The second song is this year’s hit Amy, and the third is 2014s Star Get. I think this band has a lot of promise, and I can’t wait to see where they go from here.
Noragami means something like Stray God in English, and the slacker stray god at the heart of this story doesn’t have a clue how to grow his worshiper base. Yato is a minor god without a single shrine and with no divine weapon, but he wants to make it big. Then he meets a girl named Hiyori who changes everything in and about his world. I like the music and the animation style in this one, and look forward to seeing many more episodes; hope those episodes get created!
Movies have Cooties this week, about grade school zombies and the teachers who are trying to escape them. This comedy/horror film had mixed critical reviews and low box office, but a lot of that was due to the fact that it only showed up on a handful of screens in the US. TV has The Flash: The Complete First Season w/Figurine for collectors, but the figurine isn’t wearing the red suit, it is wearing the yellow one. AMC is releasing Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1 and The Walking Dead: Season 5 Limited Edition this week as well.
Anime has Space Brothers: Collection 6, bringing home episodes 65 through 75, and bringing Mutta to his final tests; if he passes them, he will officially be an Astronaut. Fairy Tail: Part 18 brings still more magical collateral damage in episodes 200 through 212. I should also mention Mobile Suit Gundam: Collection 02, because even though it is a re-release of the original series, it is the first time it will be available in HD to North America.