It has been a bit since I featured the Tokyo Dance Trooper, Danny Choo, in this blog, so I figure it is time to do it again. He still has the moves, the attitude, and the armor! He still gets my vote as the best choice for this project. And then, just because you don’t feel like a guy dancing down the street in full Storm Trooper armor isn’t Nerd Enough for you, see what he does when he gets his hands on a series of dolls, and starts building their robotic control interfaces into them. Be sure to check out smartdoll.jp to get all the details. Unless you really want ALL the details about how Danny used 3D printing to create a Rapid Prototyping Environment which allowed him to create the dolls based on his anime/manga in the first place, which gave him the baseline physical model he started building his robots on. If you feel the need for that level of detail, you will find it here.
I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t appreciate Ghost In The Shell when they meet this unique cyberpunk universe, so instead of ranting about how excellent the series is this time I thought I should just share a few of the recent shorts from GITS: Arise. The first one from The Borderless Project is called Foreseeing 2027, the second is Memory, and the third is Color. There are a few more in this set, all encouraged by Katsuyuki Motohiro, the main director of Psycho-Pass, which owes its existence to the influence of this show.
In Movies, I have to name The Secret Life of Walter Mitty first, because they truly did an amazing job on the remake of this film. It is one of the few instances where I liked the re-imaged version better than the original, it is just that good. Switch with Andy Lau is a twisty little Secret Agent vs. Smuggler tale tied together with the artistic history of their nation’s culture. This action film is a Chinese equivalent to the Mission Impossible series of movies. Led Zeppelin: Good Times, Bad Times may be the definitive documentary, possibly even surpassing It Might Get Loud for sheer fun; if you are a Zeppelin fan, do not miss it.
Ripper Street: Season 2 and Bletchley Circle: Season 2 are both worthy follow-ups to their original series. They are both period pieces set in interesting UK history slices. I am sure everyone is aware of the near-fantasy Ripper legend, but Bletchley Park was one of the birthplaces of modern cryptography as well as advances in computer science like the world had never seen before. It was there that Alan Turing himself (yes, the inventor of the Turing Test ) made the first attacks on Enigma, the Nazi cipher machine, which shortened WWII by 2 to 4 years, or made it possible for the allies to win at all, depending on who’s analysis you prefer.
In Anime, Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! isn’t exactly the rom-com the title might suggest… or is it? Nyaruko, also known as the Crawling Chaos, has been sent by the Planetary Defense Agency to protect Mahiro from the rampaging demons trying to destroy him. It turns out all of the creatures from H.P.Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos are aliens, and cute girls, and they all seem to like him. Mahiro and his friends fight to survive, learn about love, play intergalactic video games, and might just save the world if everything goes right! Like most of the best anime, you can watch it streaming online before you decide to commit your money to owning it yourself. You would think I would stop mentioning that, since it is true of so many shows of all types these days. But what the heck, including a direct link is never a bad thing.
From the New World is another tale which starts innocently enough but rapidly goes off the rails. This time, it is a thousand years in the future, and Saki and her friends seem to live in a place where you can materialize anything by an act of psychic will, no technology required. But then a long-lost artifact gives the lie to the facade of their world, and they learn about the bloody secret history of how their world came into existence. Now the question is, will they live long enough to save it, for humanity and everyone else?
Berserk: The Golden Age 3: The Advent has Griffith still imprisoned by the Kingdom of Midland and the Band of the Hawk running for their lives when Guts returns to lead them to the rescue. OK, that’s a bit abrupt, but then One Piece Collection 9 continues the tale of Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates as they gather together friends on the quest to make Luffy King of the Pirates. This set runs from episode 206 to 229, but the currently streaming episode is 640 or so, expect a disconnect between them if you watch both media delivery styles. Also be aware Spice and Wolf is being released in a single box set, and Heaven’s Lost Property is as well. If you don’t already have them, they just became a bit more cost effective to acquire.
The top of the movie list this week is the Keanu Reeves remake of 47 Ronin, the latest in a long line of films, TV shows, plays and operas based on this historic true story. This is the first time I am aware of that it expanded this deep into the realm of Fantasy, but I thought the dragons were a wonderful choice. If you are more in the mood for an indi production, Knights of Badassdom is about a bunch of LARPers who accidentally summon a succubus from hell while playing in the woods. As you might expect from the description, this is a comedy/horror film, with several of my favorite actors in it.
I couldn’t find any real genre in TV except for re-releases, but Psych: Season 8 certainly comes close, considering the massive number of pop culture references the show manages to cram into every episode. This was the final season for the show, so it includes the series finale.
In western animation we have The Pirate Fairy, another adventure in Never Never Land from the gang at Disney.
In Anime, Ebiten: Complete Collection pokes fun at the art form itself, with a rabid group of anime fan girls with tenuous grips on reality, a maid on a secret mission, a Neko faculty adviser, an ass-tronomy club full of robots, aliens, and telepaths (and one poor guy who actually thinks it is a serious astronomy club), and more twisted anime parodies and allusions than you have probably ever seen collected in one place before. Expect to see the barrier between fantasy and reality shattered every 5 minutes or so. Then in Happiness: Complete Collection, the classes for magic users and non-magic users are kept completely separate until a gas explosion destroys the magical building and they have to combine the classes. Rest assured chaos and comedy ensue, as the two groups try to adjust to each other.
The winner in movies this week is Odd Thomas, the first big screen implementation of Dean Koontz’s wonderful series. But it is not our only entry; Walking with Dinosaurs is a quality first-person (first reptile?) animation that explores life in that epoch. And Jackie Chan dishes out his own style of channeling Indiana Jones with Chinese Zodiac, although his character is torn between having his monster payday and restoring his cultural heritage. And then there is The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna, a documentary with teeth.
In TV, Continuum: Season Two continues the story of time-hopping criminals and the unlikely collection of people who might (or might not) be able to stop them.
For western animation, Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher is worth looking into. Well, western animation except for the detail that the animation work itself was done by Mad House, the Japanese animation company. But the characters, background, story line, plot twists, and everything else about it is pure Marvel comic book all the way.
In Anime, Mardock Scramble: The Third Exhaust brings the final chapter in Rune Balot’s struggle to bring the man who killed her to justice. It has taken quite a while for all three feature length presentations to be released, since they came out with a full year or better between each one. Now that I finally can get the end of the cyborg revenge story, I think I am going to have to watch them back-to-back so I get all the details fresh.
Fairy Tail – Part 9 continues that excellent saga, complete with all the collateral damage you have come to know and love. In Robotics;Notes: Part 2 the members of the Robot Research Club have finished building their giant combat mecha, only to discover their work is far from over. Just to keep things interesting there is also a robot uprising and a renegade AI rampaging across the countryside.
In movies, I have to vote for Frozen first and foremost, because it is such a wonderful story, with characters I love (and love to hate), music I sing along with, and incredible animation. It also won a boatload of awards, as I suspect you may have heard; if you haven’t seen it yet, now is your chance! Also this week, the lesser known but still important Kill Your Darlings brings together a very young Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, the three people who would go on to invent the Beat Generation which spawned everything that came after. I have no idea what percentage of this story bears any resemblance to reality, but it is nice someone is exploring the possibilities within it.
In TV, the new series Atlantis makes it to disc, and while I was not as excited by it as I was hoping to be, they have created an interesting premise with some good actors who have some decent production work behind them. To be fair, I have only seen the first 3 episodes so far, I need to return to it and try it again.
In Anime, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Part 2 has Aladdin and Alibaba teamed up to take over dungeons and become very rich in the beginning. But somehow that changes into them trying to protect their country from its own ruler, and protect that ruler from a childhood friend turned Djinn. This box set includes episodes 13 through 25, bringing you to the end of the tale. Shakugan no Shana has released season 1 in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means if you shop around you can pick the first 26 episodes up for right around $20. Shana lives on the border between our world and the spirit realm, her purpose to fight demons who eat humans. When Yuji dies and meets her on that border, they discover he can increase her power, so they team up to protect the living. Finally, Upotte!!: Complete Collection includes all 10 episodes plus the OVA, about a homeroom teacher and his weapons-grade coeds. When your student’s are living weapons, the classroom gets even more dangerous than usual, as the new teacher finds out by winding up in the hospital.