The series Rin-Ne is about Sakura, a girl who accidentally crossed into the spirit world as a young child, and ever since she sees all the ghosts around her. It is about Rinne Rokudo, who is one quarter Shinigami, a group of Japanese supernatural creatures occupying the same spiritual niche as the Grim Reaper. Some of them help lost spirits pass on to be reincarnated, while others try to lure people to their deaths. And the show is mostly about all the trouble those two get into any time they are hanging out together. The show started last season, and Crunchyroll is currently simulcasting episode 18, with new episodes airing each Wednesday at 3AM EDT. It is based on the Manga of the same name written and drawn by Rumiko Takahashi, the hardest working, richest and most famous female Mangaka in Japan. Pretty much everything she has ever done has sold millions of copies and been turned into iconic Anime classics. One last detail; the closing theme for the series is the song TOKINOWA by Passepied, one of my favorite art-rock bands from Japan.
August has some movie releases I have been waiting for, and this week we get Marvel’s reboot of the Fantastic Four. This is the origin story, where Reed Richards and company enter an alternate universe which changes them in ways they never anticipated. They are also bringing Victor Von Doom to the big screen with this one, and I have hopes that this release will rekindle the franchise. The series was always a favorite of mine because scientists were the superheros rather than the villains.
It isn’t the only choice this week as we also get the animated silliness of the Shaun the Sheep Movie. Built by the same Claymation specialists who bring us Wallace and Grommet, the stories are always packed with a lot of visual humor and very little in the way of dialog. Frankly, you don’t need words when you can tell a story with images this well, and I have to think that boosts their profit margin tremendously with international distribution. To translate the spoken part of one of these can’t take more than 3 people in the studio for one afternoon to lay down the recording, and maybe 10 hours of editing, mostly to mix the voices with the music and sound effects.
There is another animation also worth looking into this weekend for entirely different reasons; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. This is a group project, with many award winning animators and animation directors from around the world contributing different “chapters”, and some world class actors doing the voice overs. It has already won a number of awards on the Festival circuit including Cannes, and sadly like most truly independent movies it isn’t going to be in a lot of theaters; only New York and LA this weekend, and while it will be hitting around 40 cities in North America during the following weeks, it generally is in a single theater per city. I have already posted trailers for the first two films (scroll down and back through my blog, they are obvious), now here is one for this wonderful creation.
Since 1832 the Strasburg Rail Road has been running steam trains through Pennsylvania, and is the oldest continuously running steam powered train service in North America. So it is only fitting that in October it will be hosting the Steampunk unLimited, a festival of musicians, craftsmen, authors, and cosplayers taking place in and around the massive trains. Some of the musicians include Abney Park (the first track here), UnWoman (the second song on the page), and Frenchy and the Punk (the final track here). I couldn’t find their author listing, or I would have posted it here.
If you have ever read the books from R.L. Stine’s series Goosebumps, you already know why you have to see this movie. For those of you that haven’t read the books or short stories, here is the Goosebumps Movie trailer (Not to be confused with the TV Show from the late 90s).
The summer season has just started, with most shows only having 1 or two episodes streamed so far, but I have already become addicted to one of them: Gate. When I saw the first episode, and a portal between parallel universes opened up, I was certain it had to be based on the Hell’s Gate series by David Weber and Linda Evans. The first book in 2006 saw two Parallel Universe crossing civilizations, one based on magic with dragons, gryphons, spells, and wizards, and one based on advanced steampunk science and technology, stumble across each other. During that first encounter, where neither side understood the others language or customs, a series of mistakes and misunderstandings led to a massacre, with subsequent encounters leading to all out war between the two cultures.
It turns out I was wrong. It was actually based on Takumi Yanai’s Gate: Jieitai Kanochi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri, a 2006 Japanese Fantasy Novel series later turned into an assortment of Manga, and finally the Anime. In it, a portal between universes opens up in Ginza, and an invading hoard of dragons, elves, ogres and wizards attack Tokyo. They get beaten back by the JSDF, who go on to secure a foothold on the other side of the gate. Tanks, missals, and other modern weapons give the Self Defense Forces a noticeable edge in the combat theater, although the fighting is anything but one sided. The protagonist is Yōji Itami, a serious Otaku who is promoted because his quick thinking saved a lot of lives during the initial battle. He gets put in charge of a squad sent to do reconnaissance and see if they can find a way to get the other side to the peace talks table. This seems appropriate, since the author is also a serious Otaku (he has to be to write this kind of story) who is a former member of the JSDF.
You can watch the stream on Crunchyroll, the third episode just went live this afternoon for Premium members. If you are a free member (yes, membership is free, but the paid service doesn’t have commercials, comes in HD, and you can watch the shows the same day they air in Japan) you can watch the first two episodes right now, and today’s episode next Friday.
Amazon put together a number of TV series pilot episodes, and put them streaming on line, asking people to vote for the ones they wanted to see as a series. Ridley Scott’s interpretation of Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle got enough votes that it is coming to Amazon Prime this fall; they unveiled the new trailer at Comic-Con this weekend.