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Spring Anime Lineup

Crunchyroll has started playing the spring anime season shows, and it is off to a great start; you can see the lineup here. I thought I should mention a few of the ones that look promising to me in case you might want to check them out.

Attack On Titan is a tale of humanity trapped within a walled city by giants who seek to eat them. The Scouting Legion are the only ones brave enough to explore beyond the walls, and mostly they just die… a lot. Eren may be the one to pull humanity through the walls into the future.

HENNEKO – The Hentai Prince and the Stony Cat is about two people who went to beg a favor from a god, only to have their wish granted by having a part of their mind removed. Now they each act in ways they never expected, and are trying to find their ways back to being themselves, complete with the lost bits.

DEVIL SURVIVOR 2 is fairly Gantz-like; thirteen people die, and are given the choice to live, enlisted into the front line with the war with demonic forces attacking their family and friends. Only the summoning spells are built into cell phone apps, and a secret government agency has a completely different set of such apps. It looks to be quite the winner so far.

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet brings a taste of Earth with a serious twist, and may be the most interesting series of all. Our protagonist starts out in combat protecting the survivors of humanity from alien attackers while looking for a new planet to live on. He then gets spat out the side of a collapsing wormhole to a random segment of space/time, where things get really strange. This is me urging you to watch the first episode, beginning to end, and see if you don’t like it too. I suspect this one may end up being my favorite series of the new season, it has everything from the paratemporal to the transdimensional, and with a double helping of attitude just for spice!

There are more I haven’t checked out yet, I will post again if I find any more good ones.

Something to Watch: DVDs, 23Apr13

Fairly thin on the shelves this week, Jurassic Park 3D is the only movie of note, and it is left over from 1993, updated for some new technology. Unlike many movies that have been updated to a 3D format, this one is quite worth the effort, in that the 3D processing actually enhances the film experience. There is also a collection of short experimental pieces called Tunnel Vision: The Underground Films By Raz Mesinai which could have some interesting entries in it. Finally there is the made for TV Pegasus Vs. Chimera, which still seems to have a web page.

I didn’t find any live action TV this week, but Marvel Knights: Inhumans is a dark animated feature just over two hours long that looks very interesting. If you followed the Inhumans through their graphic novel adventures with the Fantastic Four and others, you have an idea of the kind of scope this group has for telling a serious story.

In Anime, Rosario + Vampire are releasing both season one and season two as two boxed sets on the same week. Tsukune’s grades suck, so he only has one school that will accept him, but when he get’s there he discovers it is a school for monsters who consider humans lunch. In fact, before long a beautiful vampire girl is snacking on him, and sharing her lunch with a few close supernatural girlfriends. But when real danger threatens, Tsukune unlocks Moka’s super-monster seal, and all hell breaks loose. Psychic Detective Yakumo contains all 13 episodes of the series where the dead tell the crime fighting team what they know about their murders, and the duo has to work hard and fast to avoid joining the rolls of the deceased. It all started when Haruka tried to help a possessed friend get free from her controlling spirit, and got more dangerous by the moment from there.

Naruto Shippūden Box 14 brings us to episodes 167 through 179, a critical juncture where Naruto has manifested eight of his nine tails during the battle over Leaf Village. Does he now have sufficient power to save his friends? Hakuōki: A Memory of Snow Flowers is an OVA collection of 6 episodes in which a Shinsengumi warrior must disguise herself as a geisha in order to gather the intelligence her side needs to win, as Kyoto teeters on the brink of war. Not all of the dangers in the mission require a warriors heart to overcome them.

Galaxy Express 999: Complete Series 2 continues the old-school anime series with the 1998 sequel to the original 1979 show.

A Few Favorite Films

I have gathered together a few favorite films to keep me distracted during recovery for the next few days, starting with 2009’s Fish Story. This excellent Japanese Sci-Fi tale covers multiple decades and generations, showing how a punk rock song saved the world through a series of circumstances that don’t at first glance appear to be related. Luc Besson’s Angel-A is also in the collection, a French film about an angel who has fallen to Earth to save the heart and soul of a petty criminal. And then there is Iron Sky, about the Nazi’s who fled to the Moon at the end of WWII and are now returning to invade the Earth, from the Finnish film making team that brought us Star Wreck. That last one even has an English sound track, so I won’t have to read the subtitles, hurrah! If you have missed seeing any of these amazing films you can watch them on many VOD or Streaming services, such as Netflix, and I recommend dong so soonest!

New Lone Ranger trailer

The new Lone Ranger trailer is out, and I gotta say I am now expecting two thirds of the film to take place on trains. They obviously have assembled a great team for this project, and everything I have seen so far is excellent. Now I just need to be patient enough to wait until it is actually released in July so I can attend the IMAX 3D version (at least I hope it is being released in that format).

Something to Watch: DVD’s, 16Apr13

Donnie Yen’s movie Dragon (Wu Xia) finally becomes available for the take home market, and if you are looking for some martial arts action it is a good choice. If you are in the market for something with a bit more substance to it, how about a set of films that helped change the worldview of an entire generation from that part of the planet? Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against The System is a collection of four movies by this amazing filmmaker that also becomes available this week: The Thick-Walled Room, I Will Buy You, Black River, and The Inheritance. This is a Criterion Collection release, but it isn’t pricy compared to some single films they have put on the shelves in the past. After surviving WWII in the Japanese military Masaki started making movies that fomented social change in the 1950s and 1960s in Japan, and is probably best known for his 3 part epic The Human Condition. This four film collection includes some of his most important work of that era. Finally, the 1978 classic Message From Space is being re-released in the US, if you haven’t seen this film yet now is your chance.

In TV, Flash Gordon: The Complete Series is the release of the 2007 program, not the earlier works. It is yet another Syfi Channel TV show that no longer has an actual home page, but it was good silly fun and did the original radio drama series based on the comic strip proud. The other show this week is Spies of Warsaw, which is quite well done. Why am I including this non-genre show? Because it is probably the closest anyone will ever come to letting David Tennant play James Bond.

For western animation, A Monster in Paris is quite tasty. Also out Iron Man: Rise of the Technovore. Both of these are feature length films in two completely different styles. If you are looking for quality silly fun I would definitely go with Monster.

In Anime, A Certain Scientific Railgun Season 1 is being released in 2 parts rather than a single box set. This clever series is a good blend of science and psychic powers, and is followed by others, starting with A Certain Magical Index. I really enjoy this series, from the premise to the cast of characters, and can recommend it to anyone looking for a good story. Hiiro no Kakera: Season 1 is about a girl who suddenly learns she is an enchanted princess when she is attacked by creatures she thought mythical while on her way to attend her first day at a new school. The boy who rescues her is both a fellow classmate and a demon, and things just get stranger from there.