If Miyazaki Films Were Like Other Anime is the name of this hysterical video, made by the folks over at College Humor, a site I tend to visit pretty much every week to see what new silliness they are up to this time. Of course, Hayao Miyazaki never made an ordinary anime in his life. Each work he crafted was amazing, and are some of the best animations in the world.
We get The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on the big screen this week, with all that excellent spidey action and banter we have come to expect. He gets a couple of super villains to defeat this time around, and begins to suspect they have something in common. This 5th venture into the Spiderman franchise looks like it is going to be quite the fun ride. Bad Johnson is a comedic fantasy in which a mans penis leaves his body and takes on human form. As you might expect, that one is in limited release. In even more limited release is Protector 2, original title Tom Yum Goong 2, another elephant training martial arts series from Thailand. Thai martial arts are a bit different than the Chinese and Japanese forms we are all familiar with, and this film stars Tony Jaa of Ong-Bak fame. His parents are elephant trainers, which explains why the animals are in so many of his films.
In movies, the 2010 live action version of Space Battleship Yamato is finally coming to the US. The original Anime series, begun in 1973, changed Japanese science fiction profoundly, bringing a more complex and serious storyline than had yet been seen. It influenced and inspired many anime series to come after it, including Neon Genesis Evangelion. There have been many sequels and some animated feature films over the years, but this is the first live action version they have ever done, and I can’t wait to finally see it. Probably the strangest selection this week, Escape from Tomorrow is a comedy/horror film that takes place in a famous theme park owned by a media conglomerate. The most recent interpretation of The Legend of Hercules will also be on the shelves this time around. It is noticeably closer to the original story than the TV show was, but I really enjoyed the Keven Sarbo version. I also have to mention the Gamera Legacy Collection 1965-1999, with 11 films compiled into a single 4 disc set. I know these have all been released before, but I don’t believe you could get the majority of them in a single box. They only seem to be missing the 2006 reboot, Gamera: The Brave, which is a shame, because that would be the completest collection. The same group, Mill Creek, is also releasing them remastered in Blue Ray, breaking the set apart into a couple of boxes for that version.
In TV, Star Trek Enterprise: The Complete Series is finally being released in a Blue Ray version. It has been available since 2005 in SD, and you could get the individual seasons on Blue Ray, except for season 4, which is also coming out this week. The other show is Godzilla: The Complete Animated Series, the 1998 show meant to continue the story from the Mathew Broderick movie version. Like Enterprise and Gamera, it was previously released, just not all in one box set.
In Anime, Amazing Nuts! is a 4 tale anthology, each done in a different animation style, and each featuring a different contemporary musical artist setting up the audio track. Yes, that does mean it is essentially a collection of animated music videos. This one has been available as an import for years, but this is the first North American release I am aware of. The pieces average 15 minutes each, so it isn’t very long, but this project is a great sampler of what Studio 4C is capable of. If the name sounds familiar, perhaps you have seen some of their other projects, like the Animatrix, Tekkonkinkreet, Steamboy, or Memories, to name a few. Cuticle Detective Inaba is an artificially created half-wolf private investigator (a former werewolf police dog) out to stop the criminal segment of the half-human portion of the population of his city. Expect to laugh your ass off and enjoy the adventure, but don’t be surprised if you are groaning a bit as well, since this show is a high-density pun environment.
There are two shows being released in a S.A.V.E. edition this time around, allowing you to add them to your collection for about $20 each or less. Cat Planet Cuties has a bevy of alien Cat Girls descend on Kio’s house to use it as an embassy, quickly followed by a large assortment of female secret agents and cultists of various types. I particularly liked the tip-of-the-hat of the dog planet bad guy’s laugh, being an exact duplicate of another famous bad-guy animated dog; see if you can name the dog it came from, or at least the show he was on. Shangri-la is a story of poverty and desperation vs. wealth and technology (medical and otherwise), made even worse by the destruction of the environment. Kuniko isn’t going to stop fighting until she gets all of her people to safety in whatever way she can, and the orbital city looks like her best option.
DreamWorks Animation just posted the first five minutes of How To Train Your Dragon 2, so I figured I would share it here. Enjoy.
There are two choices that could be fun this weekend; The Machine is about two engineers working to create an autonomous AI to help mankind (and specifically one scientist’s daughter). That lasts until the Ministry of Defense steps in, takes the AI operated robot over, and teaches it to kill. As you know, this is not the thing to do if you hope to survive the rise of our evil robot overlords. The other film worth noting is Brick Mansions, about a cop and an ex-con trying to keep Detroit from being destroyed by the criminal gangs running wild behind the containment walls erected to keep them imprisoned. If this Luc Besson film plot line sounds familiar, it is because he is remaking his own 2004 movie Banlieue 13 (District B13), but not in French and not in Paris this time. For those thinking this is not genre, this is the future we do not want to live in, somewhere between Escape From New York and Mad Max. The original movie introduced the world to parkour, something most folks had never even heard of at that time.
Not much in movies this time except for re-releases. In TV we have Doctor Who: The Web of Fear, a Patrick Troughton era tale that has not been seen as a complete story since it first aired. They managed to find most of the episodes recently, and have used an original audio recording and some animation to fill in the last missing bit, episode 3. This is the story where we first meet Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, later known as the Brigadier, and it sets up the Doctor’s ongoing relationship with UNIT. In western animation we have the Spectacular Spider-Man seasons 1 and 2 in a single box set.
In anime, also, most things are re-releases, but there are a few genre sets coming out. In Nekomonogatari (Black) the protagonist has survived a vampire attack with the help of his beautiful friend. He then learns she was able to help him because of the power given her by being possessed by the Curse Cat, and he must try to free her if he can. In Little Busters! – Collection 2 they are receiving cryptic messages delivered by cats and seeking a friend’s lost shadow. And then things started getting really strange.