The obvious winner this week is Star Wars: Rogue One, arguably the best film in the franchise so far. In Anime, Naruto Shippūden Set 30 contains episodes 375 through 388 for more Ninja goodness; for reference, they are currently streaming episode 500 from Japan. Hyperdimension Neptunia is being released in a S.A.V.E. edition, which makes now a great time to add this game-to-anime project to your collection.
Tor published an excellent article yesterday about how Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind not only helped found Studio Ghibli, but set Miyazaki on the path that would define his career. It is one of the best postings I have seen on the subject, exploring both its influences and results, and now I am going to have to break the film out and watch it again, 30 years after its initial release, and see just how close she came to telling the true story. Pretty close, I am thinking.
Leading the pack this time is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the next generation series from the Harry Potter universe. I can’t wait to see where J. K. Rowling goes with this one, the first film was exceedingly tasty, probably because she wrote the screenplay herself. The other selection is A Monster Calls, a serious and powerful movie that did poorly at the box office, probably because most folks thought it was about some friendly monster. The target audience wasn’t kids at all, so most of the kids that get sent to see it by parents who had never read the book left it depressed and confused, generating a lot of bad word of mouth for the film.
In Anime, Steins;Gate: The Movie brings home the ending that the original creators always intended, where Deja Vu are only your fragmented memories of alternate time lines. This is their last chance to get it right or to lose their possibilities forever. I found Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? a wonderful series, but it really only covered the events of the first book. So I am keeping my fingers crossed that the flag The Complete Series means the complete first season, and not that they are not going to produce the rest of the story. As the series final works its way toward us, Boruto: Naruto the Movie helps usher in new generation of ninja. Fairy Tail: Collection 7 brings another half-years worth of episodes home, with Lucy kidnapped and merged with a time bomb, and all the other guilds out to get our heroes, I predict an unprecedented amount of collateral damage with this one. The war continues in Heavy Object: Season 1 Part 2, but it is a full dozen episodes despite the title.
Luck & Logic: The Complete Series has the gods rampaging over the Earth, creating all sorts of problems, one of which appears to be wiping out the Funimation and Crunchyroll web servers that stream their episode, hence no link. Diabolik Lovers II: More Blood seems to have the same fate, so I am thinking the servers may just be down for the moment. When I find them back up, I will add the links here. Finally, Inari Kon Kon: The Complete Series + OVA is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, for those who do not already own the Fox Goddess driven magical rom/com.
Assassin’s Creed was a great game and an excellent premise for a movie; I don’t know if it succeeded or not, because I haven’t seen it yet. The critics seemed to be underwhelmed, with “confusing” and “disorienting” being the two words most often used to describe it. I don’t know if that’s because none of them ever played the game, or the script was that poorly done, but either way I will stream it before I consider buying it. I also haven’t seen Sing, but there is no question that this animation needs to be a part of my permanent collection. In Anime the new title is Attack on Titan: Junior High, probably the silliest series from this franchise, but still very worth watching. We also get a S.A.V.E. edition of BlazBlue: Alter Memory; The Complete Series, for those who haven’t seen it before now.
DAOKO is an energetic J-Pop artist from Tokyo who recently had one of her songs selected to be the end theme for Shingeki no Bahamut Virgin Soul. Not bad for someone who posted their home made music videos to Nico Nico Douga, and had one of them take off. The first track is Daisuki with TeddyLoid, the second is If we are the Protagonists of the Game, the third is just called Bang. And I threw in a Rage of Bahamut Virgin Soul trailer at the end.
Tomorrow we get Sword Art Online the Movie -Ordinal Scale- in a one night special event presentation. I had to include one more trailer for it, since this one is different than the others. When we hit Friday Kong: Skull Island, with what appears to be the biggest King Kong ever put in a movie. I had to include that trailer as well, because I think both movies are going to be a lot of fun.