The heir to Studio Ghibli is Studio Ponoc, and they are about to roll out Mary and The Witch’s Flower, their first feature film. It is good to know this kind of quality animation will continue to be created.
When aliens invaded Edo era Japan, built skyscrapers, introduced motorized vehicles and pizza delivery, and told the Samurai they could not use their swords, many were not happy. Chief among them was Gintama, a Ronin desperate to make a name for himself. The new trailer for the live action feature film from this manga/anime franchise looks just cheesy enough to be good campy fun on the big screen. The release is on July 7th in Japan, maybe by Christmas in North America if we get lucky.
The videos of KYARY PAMYU PAMYU’s music have always been some of the most surreal footage coming out of Japan, but her latest seems to be somewhere between the Wizard of Oz and Plan 9 From Outer Space, with a cast of munchkins played by Easter eggs. The track is, appropriately, called Easta, which is Japanese for Good, and I can’t help but feel there is a bit of a second language pun going on there. The new single (which has 5 tracks on it, but tow of them are just instrumental versions of two of the others) is her 14th, and was released this past week on the 5th. At the same time, she also released her KPP 5 Years Monster World Tour 2016 DVD, filmed at the final performance of the tour at Budokan. Here’s the bit I find really interesting; folks picking up the limited edition version of the disc get a VR headset included with it, so they can get the full 360 degree immersive effect of the concert. That’s right, they filmed a VR version of the show, and put it on disc.
The Irregular at Magic High School anime series has a Feature Film coming out in Japan on June 17th, and it just got its first trailer. The original voice cast is here, but both the director and the anime studio have changed since the original TV series came out in 2014. I have no idea how much those changes might change the dynamic of the story-line, but it was solid as a light novel, solid as a TV series, and I expect it will be solid as a movie. Thanks to the folks at Otaku USA for the heads up on this one.
Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei Movie PV by pKjd
Hello Sleepwalkers has a new mini-album that came out this week, and the first track is the song Sundown from that release. After that is Rollin and New World, also both from the new release. They have another recent mini-album called Unplugged Demos full of acoustic tracks, but I couldn’t find any of them that had permission set to stream in North America.
Tessa Violet gives us her take on gaining skill sets that have a serious learning curve, in this case the Japanese language. The bottom line is recognizing when your performance at a given task isn’t the performance at all, but just the practice you need to graduate to the next learning plateau. After that, a cover of one of the songs by the band she is currently being the warm up act for on her first tour of England.