Mamoru Hosoda’s latest film, Mirai will be in theaters for a limited engagement beginning November 29th courtesy of GKIDS. They have just released another trailer for it, and I wanted to share it here. If the creators name sounds familiar but you’re not sure why, some of his previous works included The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, and Summer Wars.
Radwimp has done the music for another feature film, the Live Action Legend of the Demon Cat, and it looks amazing; the title of the theme song is Mountain Top. The movie was made by major Japanese film company Kadakawa, includes a substantial Japanese cast, and is based on a Japanese novel by Yoneyama Mineo. Which is a bit unusual for a film that takes place in China. I am definitely looking forward to seeing this one.
The winner this week has to be The Shape of Water, a story by Guillermo del Toro that seems to be an evolution of one of the characters from his Hellboy films. I am looking forward to seeing this one on the big screen.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is the epic fantasy option in Western film releases this week, and I didn’t find anything genre-like in Anime. This might be a good weekend to start watching something new on a streaming service; I think I’ll begin Restaurant to Another World.
War for the Planet of the Apes continues the new series, mapping out how we got to the place Charleston Heston found himself in way back in the original film. I like this reboot-prequel series better than any of the previous iterations, and I liked all of them. It is not the only option this week though, as Disney is rolling out Jagga Jasoos, a delightful little fantasy about a teenage detective and his female associate on a mission to find his father.
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.