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Something to Watch: DVDs, 14Jan14

In Movies Riddick hits the shelves this week, both as a stand-alone and as part of the Riddick: The Complete Collection 4 film package. For those scratching their heads, this includes an animated story called Dark Fury that was released direct to DVD just after the first film came out. The remake of the cult film Carrie is also out this week.

I haven’t found any genre TV coming out this week, but Top Gear: Season 20 is being released, and they are always a lot of fun.

In western animation, Marvel Knights: Wolverine versus Sabretooth is being billed as the final battle between these two long-time foes. The Marvel Knights brand is for showcase stories that allow the best writers and illustrators to push the bounds of cannon, if not ignore them entirely, so anything is possible. I should also mention that this is a motion comic, rather than a true animation, a media style that Marvel excels at.

In Anime, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic is your basic dungeon quest, merging and changing the stories of Alibaba and Aladdin. This set is season 1, giving you the first 13 episodes of the series. The show is also streaming on a number of services, including Crunchyroll and Hulu. The release of Naruto: Shippuden Box Set 17 brings us episodes 206 through 218 of the ongoing story of the 9 Tailed Fox. The current episode streaming on their site is 344, if you were wondering. Also beginning to catch up, One Piece Season 5 Part 5 brings the tail of Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates to episodes 313 to 324. Of course, the currently streaming episode from Tokyo is 627.

Manga 2.5

Somewhere between Manga and Anime, Manga 2.5 is following in the footsteps of Marvel and others, producing Motion Comics of popular Manga. They start by getting a contract to produce a popular Manga, then scan the whole thing in. They remove the dialog balloons and replace them with Japanese voice actors and English subtitles. Since they are embedding audio they also add sound effects as appropriate. The panels or frames are broken apart and colored, and limited animation in the style known as Motion Comics are added. The end result is something that you watch happen rather than read, for a lot less money then it takes to create a real animation or anime.

It is an interesting art form, and I do like the stuff produced by Marvel a lot. So far all I have seen of this group are a few trailers, but it has the potential to be quite good. If you were interested in trying your hand at this kind of thing, Smith Micro has an excellent software suite for a reasonable price with Motion Artist. It has a bit of a learning curve, but the software lets you be creative while automating a lot of the tasks; for instance you can set up the key frames and it automatically generates all the tween frames that get you from one key frame to the next. Trust me when I say having to animate each and every frame yourself gets tedious real fast, whether at 24 frames/second (fps) for film or 29 fps for TV, whereas you might have 4 to 6 key frames per second. Another very useful function is having the mouth layers pre-built for speech with a module that automates building the phonem map out of your imported MP3 file. Lip sync is about the hardest kind of animation to do, from my perspective, all that fiddly stuff should really be done by the computer anyways.

Upcoming Movies, 2014

Hello, and welcome to the future! There are a ton of films coming out in the New Year, I am just going to touch on a few of the better known ones that I am excited about. From Marvel, we are getting Captain America: The Winter Soldier on April 14th, Amazing Spider-Man 2 on May 2nd, X-Men: Days of Future Past on May 23, and Guardians of the Galaxy on August 1st. The dates are best guesses, since production or contract realities may shift them about, as always.

We get 2 from Michael Bey this year, Transformers: Age of Extinction on June 27, and for some reason he is also doing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Megan Fox on August 8.

Besides the ones already mentioned there are several other sequels and/or reboots, with Godzilla on May 16th, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For on August 22, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes on July 18th, The Hunger Games Mockingjay (Part 1) on November 21st, and The Hobbit: There and Back Again on December 17th.

There are also a number of unique properties that have not previously been movies that I am eager to check out, most of which are smaller independent films which I will be mentioning down the road. A few of the larger productions include The Lego Movie on February 7th (that one looks like a serious hoot), The Edge of Tomorrow on June 6th, Jupiter Ascending on July 23rd, and Interstellar on November 7th.

Yes, it should be a hell of a year for movies, and I am looking forward to it.

Something to Watch: DVDs, 31Dec13

Shaolin Warrior comes very close to being genre, since all martial arts movies are fantasy films at heart. I don’t mean because of the various gods and demons that sometimes populate them, that is a matter of personal belief and spiritual worldview. I am referring to the superhero-like powers the fighters have, which enable them to do many things on a par with Captain America, Thor, or Spider Man. The other movie that looks interesting this week is CBGB, a movie about the punk scene centered around the legendary club n New York.

In TV there is a BAFTA-nominated fantasy/supernatural program focused on teens called Wolfblood. They are high school aged werewolves who must hide what they are even from their closest friends, or their entire specie may be hunted down and killed. Like being in high school wasn’t stressful enough. This release is the first season of the CBBC series, hopefully season 2 will be along soon.

In Anime, So I Can’t Play H: Complete Collection is not the most subtle series you will run across (Hint: in these kind of titles, the H always stands for Hentai). This is about a teenage boy who makes a deal with a Shinigami to let her use some of his essence to stay in this world, but instead of taking years off his life like a normal goddess of death would do, she drains off his lecherous libido. Now he has to figure out how to get those feelings back, or he will completely miss out on a major aspect of any mans youth. Fate/Zero: Complete 2nd Season continues the epic of the Holy Grail Wars, with Zero being (rather confusingly) the 4th such war, but the first one to take place.

Ikki Tousen: Great Guardians is the third series in the original martial arts with exploding clothes franchise. Each of these high school students is the reincarnation of one of the most famous martial artists from throughout history, and they will battle it out to see who is the best. Chrono Crusade is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means if you shop around you can pick up the entire series about the premiere Combat Nun of the 1920s (and her demon sidekick) for around $20.

Something to Watch: DVDs, 10Dec13

I usually hit movies first, but Day Of The Doctor gets the number one spot this time around. This is after all the 50th Anniversary Doctor Who Special, and definitely had more Doctors than any other episode. While we are on the topic of TV, I should mention Futurama: Volume 8 and Futurama: The Complete Series will both be hitting the shelves this week.

Another break from my normal structure; I usually do live action movies first, but Despicable Me 2 has to start out the movie presentations this week. It was way too much fun, and you just can’t have too many minions. The other movies worth mentioning have either Cantonese or Mandarin as their primary sound track, including Man of Tai Chi. Note that that is the second Asian-centric film Keanu Reeves has starred in this year, and the first one he has directed. Saving General Yang takes place in 986 AD, and involves the famous Yang Family Generals. For something different, The Rooftop seems to be a Taiwan gangland musical with lots of singing, dancing, and fighting. It looks like a fun film to check out.

In Anime, Bleach: Season 19 brings us up to episode 279. To put that in perspective, they are up to episode 366 streaming from Japan, so the DVDs are finally starting to catch up with the streaming sources. Another returning favorite is Fairy Tail: Part 7, bringing episodes 73 through 84, and they are also releasing Fairy Tale: The Movie this week, so you get a double dose.

Btooom!: The Complete Series is about a combat game which suddenly changed when the 7 best players in the world were kidnapped, and woke up on an island with a bag of bombs each and holes in their memories; now they have to kill each other off and be the last one standing to escape, or so they are lead to believe. Finally, in the main series, a bunch of friends had their bodies repeatedly swapped so they never knew who they were going to be next, had their ages change at random, and had their desires overwhelm them and take control, all being done to them by an outside force. Now, in Kokoro Connect: OVA Collection, their inner emotional state is suddenly being projected into one of their friends, including phobias and suppressed desires, sometimes with near lethal results.