The latest live action version of Lupin The 3rd is going to be hitting the big screen in Tokyo on August 30th, and I can’t wait to see it released in the US. The mastermind who created most of the original season was Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, and the rest of season 1 was built by Masaaki Ōsumi. But they were building on strong foundations, taking the original 1905 character Arsène Lupin created by the brilliant French author Maurice Leblanc. Maurice’s Lupin was a perfect match for Doyle’s Sherlock, and the two contemporaries shared a rather large audience between them. When the 1971 TV series kicked off it was his grandson Lupin 3rd who incorporated all the James Bond elements and dragged the show into modern times. If you are not already a fan of this program, now is the time to learn all about it.
In movies, 300: Rise of an Empire is the latest Frank Miller production driven by his graphic novels. A bit more violent than I would prefer, they are still high quality stories about human nature. I do like the cinematic style they share with that other Frank Miller project, Sin City. Speaking of style, the 2011 version of Faust by director Alexander Sokurov finishes up a tetralogy of films who’s other protagonists were not fictional: Hitler, Stalin, and Hirohito. Finally, The Chef, the Actor and the Scoundrel might be the most interesting movie released to disc this week. It is definitely an action/comedy, treating the Second Sino-Japanese War (those of us in North America lumped it in as part of WWII) as a complex backdrop into which all of the characters and plot elements fit with precision.
In TV, the Witches of East End: The Complete First Season has a supernatural mother keeping a secret from her daughters so they can lead a normal life. But that doesn’t turn out to be an option when something evil comes to destroy them all, and their only chance for survival means they must all know who they really are. This show is from Lifetime, so it will get a different treatment than other networks would grant this premise, and I look forward to seeing where they go from here. The new season begins July 6th.
In Anime, Code:Breaker: Complete Series is about a super-powered assassin employed by a secret government organization to keep everyone else in line. Then his classmate Sakura steps in to keep HIM under control, and everything cascades from there. In Leviathan: The Last Defense, Complete Collection the fairy Syrup recruits three Dragon Clan girls to form the base of the Aquafall Defense Force, and defeat the alien invaders. Meteors impacting the earth of Aquafall are sprouting monsters bent on conquering the world.
The top choice in movies this week is pretty much a matter of what kind of mood you are into. On the one hand you have The Lego Movie, a boatload of cult silliness and geek goodness. It doesn’t actually have more superheroes in one film than any other production, but it begins to approach X-Men like numbers. If you prefer some serious (or at least less silly) live action type indi adventure, The Machine is another tale of our Evil Robot Overlords, or Evil Android Overlord, in this case. It has won a number of film fest awards, including 3 from BAFTA Cymru alone. Bottom line, I think these are both worthy of being in the permanent collection.
There is also a documentary called I Know That Voice all about the voice actors you know from many animated series like Futurama or The Simpsons I think might be quite entertaining. As someone who has taken a turn around the voice actor track myself, this one will absolutely be coming home with me. There are 2 other documentaries worth mentioning: Live from Space from the National Geographic Channel, and Adjust Your Tracking, about folks who collect VHS tapes. I find it interesting you can only get the extended version (20 extra minutes of documentary) on the combo VHS/DVD version; the DVD only version is missing the extra stuff.
I should also mention a re-release of a classic you may not be aware of. 1963’s Judex is a French film re-imagining the 1914 French movie serial of the same name. This was not the creation of Movie Serials (that was the also-French-made 1908 Nick Carter film series), which later became the basis of episodic TV series when they brought them to early TV in the 1940s. Judex may also be the earliest example of Superhero stories in any format, but I have to do some more research before I will know if that is the case or not. The story line, father murdered and ruined by evil banker, son adapts secret identity and hidden lair, gathering an arsenal of technology and a team of circus performers and criminals with special talents as his minions, has been redone many times since. It was the inspiration for things as diverse as Batman, Spiderman, and The Shadow from the US and a ton of others from Europe and Asia, including K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces. In fact, in 1940 the French publication Hurrah! started a comic book version of Judex, which was really a French translation of the American syndicated Shadow comic strip; so the inspiration came full circle.
In TV Teen Wolf: Season 3 Part 2 finishes off the season 3 story, and it looks like the best project MTV has been involved with for a while. If nothing else, it up-levels everything from season 2, where they didn’t seem to be really trying.
In Anime, Busou Shinki is a harem story, where the girls are female action figures with weapons… who happen to stand 6 inches tall each. Not exactly conducive to a rich social life if the male in question happens to be multiple feet in height. The other series this time around is Shiki, a horror story that now available in a S.A.V.E. version for a real good price. This one is also a commentary on the genre itself, showing off those tropes that that draw in the audience, and making every viewer pay attention and appreciate what is going on. I am not a horror fan, but this one was worth watching.
One show I have been waiting for is Red Data Girl: Complete Series, which is an absolutely brilliant TV program. A girl is raised in isolation in a shrine, and has trouble fitting in when she is finally allowed into a public school. It doesn’t help any that computers, cell phones, and other modern electronics all crash when she comes near them. Then she finds out she is the last vessel of the goddess Himegami, and that is when things start to get truly strange.
There are a number of shows I am enjoying this season, although because of time constraints there are only 3 I have been keeping up with each week. If you are a Premium Crunchyroll member, you can watch any of these and a double dozen more an hour after they air in Tokyo. If you are not, you can watch them for free starting one week later. The current season is at episode 9 as I write this, the Summer season starts around the first week in July.
Brynhildr in the Darkness: 10 years ago Murakami lost a girl he was infatuated with in a lethal accident while trying to get a glimpse of aliens. As he heals from the accident he vows to find the aliens in her memory, which means years later he is running the Astronomy Club, searching the skies. Now she seems to suddenly turn up at his school again, revived from the dead and turned into a human weapon, but she doesn’t remember anything earlier than a decade back. She is not the only one to escape from the lab that upgraded her combat capability, and the military is out to kill all the escapees before they can reveal their secrets to the world.
Nanana’s Buried Treasure: In life, Nanana started the Adventure Club, and ran around the world collecting powerful artifacts, Indiana Jones style. She and the other club members used the proceeds to create an artificial island, where they built a city and hid the treasures. Then she was murdered in her room, and haunts it to this day, unable to rest until her killer is captured. The young man who gets tricked into renting that room for a year doesn’t have enough money left to live anywhere else when he finds it comes with a ghost. His only option is to try to bring her killer to justice, and since the killer was trying to get the treasures, that’s what he will have to do to track him down. There are a LOT of potential suspects.
No Game No Life: Genius gamer siblings Sora and Shiro are both NEETs and Hikikomori, and absolutely unbeatable in the online gaming world. One day they are contacted by a kid who is a god of a different world, where games decide the outcome of everyone’s lives and the ten commandments are gaming rules. There are 16 races in this world, and the humans are on the verge of being wiped out by the others, unless the siblings can win them back a chance to survive.
The band Passepied has a lead singer who is also a graphics artist, and she has brought some pretty interesting animation styles to her videos. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as anyone who has ever sat through the credits at the end of a feature length animation knows. There can be upwards of a few thousand animators, each working on their specialty for the small slice of the total project their production house got. Music Videos are much shorter than feature films, and take much less in the way of resources. This makes them the perfect environment to give you a sense of perspective into the process, since the size of a music video is about the same as the size of a given project slice for a feature film. Take a look at the Music Video Yes/No, and then watch the behind-the-scenes video for it, and see if it doesn’t bring the effort involved into focus.
A documentary about Studio Ghibli, and more specifically Miyazaki himself, is coming out called Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. The article the folks at Otaku USA did on it was really quite interesting, and I am now looking forward to seeing it, as soon as they release a version in English, or at least with English subtitles.