There are some amazing Anime Cosplay Music Videos being made, here are a few more you might enjoy. The first is Cosplay Fever: It’s My Life, compiled in Camden, London and shot at the MCM Expo in the UK in October 2011. The next is Cosplay Fever: Raise Your Glass from the London Film & Comic Con, July 2011. The final entry for this set is Cosplay Fever: Let Me Entertain You, recorded at AyaCon in August 2011. Be sure to visit Cosplay Fever on Facebook, where they have a lot more wonderful things to check out. Yes, these videos may be a bit old, but the spirit lives on!
The directors cut of The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec becomes available this week. I love this movie, which is the first in a series based on the graphic novels by Jacques Tardi that Luc Besson is making, but I find myself a bit annoyed. I just bought the blue-ray American release regular version when it came out in August, and now I have to decide if I want to pay for it again just to get the new version. At least it’s not as bad as Bladerunner; I have 4 different versions of that film, released in different years. This is the End is an apocalyptic comedy with a decent cast about the end of the world in Hollywood. Dead Before Dawn is a horror comedy about a bunch of clumsy students who bring a curse down on themselves, and is also Canada’s first live action 3D film. I missed both of these in the theaters, so this is another chance to see them.
The western animation choice this week is The Croods, a stone age adventure comedy from the Dreamworks team. There are also two old new releases, rendered into 3D and released on disk after their recent returns to the movie theaters. The animated The Little Mermaid, and the 1939 live action classic The Wizard Of Oz both live on in new 3D incarnations.
In TV, season one of the new version of Beauty and the Beast hits the shelves. You just have time to re-watch it before season 2 hits the small screen the following Monday. Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited 5-8 continues the 50th anniversary look back at the original Time Lords who had that part. Besides the 20 minute retrospectives of each Doctor, you also get one of the best classic episodes they were involved with. Peter Davison has Earthshock, Colon Baker has Vengeance on Varos, Sylvester McCoy gets Remembrance of the Daleks, and obviously Paul McGann gets Doctor Who: The Movie.
In Anime, Tiger & Bunny the Movie: The Beginning tells how Wild Tiger (Kotetsu T. Kaburagi) and Barnaby “Bunny” Brooks Jr. ended up as a Giant Robot Superhero team, defending their city in company endorsed Mecha’s (think NASCAR vehicles sponsorship logos) while having their battles being shown on TV. Somewhere between the WWF and Indie 500 I think. The complete series Sankarea: Undying Love also comes out this week, a simple story about a boy who develops a potion to reanimate his dead cat, and the depressed girl he meets who assumes the stuff in the bottle is poisonous, drinks it, and jumps off a cliff. When she wakes up as a zombie she finally starts to really live, but now the couple falls in love and realize they have more than a few problems to solve if they want the relationship to flourish.
Hakuoki: Dawn of the Shinsengumi Season 3 is actually the prequel to the previous two seasons, telling the story of how the Tokugawa Shogunate first sent Ronin, or Masterless Samurai, into Kyoto in 1863 to put down the rebellion. This is a historical epic, but as with anything involving both Samurai and Ninja, there is a serious spiritual/combat powers influence which most of us in the west interpret most comfortably as fantasy. Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom is the title for this season.
There are also a couple of re-releases you might want to check out if you missed them the first time around. Aria the Animation: Season 1 is about a girl who emigrates to a water world where she can pilot gondolas. The fact that the planet is Mars in the year 2417 tells you just how good humanity got at Terraformimg by then. Godannar is a classic Giant Mecha/Alien Invasion series with some serious interpersonal twists. Goh Saruwatari used his Dannar (giant robot) to save a girl child from the aliens, but lost his combat partner and girlfriend to them in the process. Years later when she came of age he married the girl he saved, and she is also now a combat pilot of the Dannars. Her mother runs the base they fight out of and is Goh’s boss as well as Mother-in-Law, and the aliens are back attacking humanity all over again. When they defeat one of the alien combat vessels they also recover Goh’s old partner/girlfriend, who has been brain wiped, and bring her home to live with them. After that, it starts getting really strange.
The world just can’t seem to have enough Gundam, and the next series to launch is GunPla Builder, a tribute to all who build and fight the Gundam Plastic Model class of Bots. It is coming to TV Tokyo this October. Thanks to Danny Choo for the heads up on this one.
If the only release I mentioned this week was Iron Man 3, it would be sufficient. It truly gave that particular subset of the Marvel franchise a beginning, a middle, and an end, making each of the previous offerings fulfill a part of the overall story arc, when they appeared to just be stand alone films when they were first made available. The TV series Doctor Who: The Complete Seventh Series is also being released, but it came out in Part 1 and Part 2 sets a while ago; this is just more cost effective packaging.
In Anime, Is This a Zombie: The Complete 2nd Season brings Ayumu’s problems to the forefront. He was murdered by a serial killer and resurrected by a cute Necromancer who refuses to talk with him. Then a magical girl with a deadly pink chainsaw and a vampire ninja each decided he was worth doing. Between his harem of mystical misfits and his decaying body, Ayumu could end up even deader before he solves the mystery of his own death! The other new anime is Rio: Rainbow Gate!, about the woman on her way to becoming the Most Valuable Casino Dealer in the world. She is Luck Incarnate, but she has a serious set of challenges in front of her. The once noble Queen Claudette has devolved into a tyrant with the support of the court and the church, and a new generation of women warriors are banding together to oust her from power in Queen’s Blade: Rebellion. Like many other programs, you can watch it on Crunchyroll.
There are a few classic anime series being re-released this week as well, including GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka is in a complete series box set, as is Blue Submarine No. 6. The 2004 live action feature film Casshern is an alternate history tale of genetic engineering in the hands of a multinational conglomerate who uses it to create mutants bent on the destruction of humanity, and the hero who emerges to save us all. Dreamworks is putting it back on US shelves for the first time in years, if you missed this when it initially came out now is your chance to catch it. It is based on the 1973 anime Robot Hunter Casshern, in that series it was androids rather than mutants putting humanity at risk.
It would not have occurred to me to enter that as a search term, but Anime Cosplay Music Videos is exactly what The TDragon is all about. Some of his work is really amazing, so I wanted to share a few of them. The first is Mulan: “A Girl Worth Fighting For”, and was created from footage shot at Ikkicon 2012 in Austin, Tx. The second is Clarity from Comicpalooza 2013 in Houston, while the third is his Men In Black tribute to the men in cosplay.
World War Z is the US movie this time around with actual high speed zombies who could really catch you when they chased you. The Hong Kong offering this time around is The Last Tycoon, not genre but pretty good.
In TV we have season 1 of Arrow, which was the best new Broadcast TV show of last year in my book. Season 2 rolls out on the CW on October 9th, and I am looking forward to it. We also get Grimm: Season Two, the best new broadcast TV show from the year before that. And to complete this weeks set, we have The Mentalist: The Complete Fifth Season, kind of a near-genre show what with it’s Not A Psychic screaming through the bullhorn.
In Anime, Sword Art Online: Aincrad Part 2 picks up two years after everyone was trapped in the murderous game, and the challenges get more deadly the further up through the levels they go. The Future Diary, parts 1 and 2 also comes out this week. 12 people now have diaries on their cell phones that can tell them of events in the future, and they are in a race to see which of them can use that foreknowledge to become a god. Only one can win; the rest will die, repeatedly, as their glimpses of the future always include their own deaths. Trust me when I say that even though these two anime’s are not lighthearted, they are both very, very good.
Michiko & Hatchin is also being released with both parts 1 and 2 coming out on the same day. A sexy prison escapee rescues an abused girl, and their lives become entangled as they search for the man in their past they have in common.Naruto Shippūden: The Lost Tower is a feature film length story that has Naruto traveling back in time, visiting ancient civilizations, and getting in trouble while trying to save the day. Finally, Golgo 13: Complete Collection puts all 50 episodes of the TV series starring the assassin’s assassin in a single box set. Mind, there are also two live action movies, an animated feature film, an OVA, a radio play, and six video games all for the same character. Every one of these is based on the Manga Golgo 13, which is the oldest manga still in publication, having started in 1969.