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Free Anime This Weekend Only

Until midnight Sunday night central time there are some great anime titles streaming for free over at The Anime Network. Some of them give you a choice between Subbed and Dubbed, myself I prefer subbed, so I can hear the original actors emotional inflections. I have had some problems viewing some of these, where an hour and a half film ends 30 minutes into it, but I am not sure that isn’t a problem with my browser, rather than at the server end.

Some of these are recent productions, like Loups=Garous, where the members of J-Rock sweethearts Scandal are both the protagonists and laying down the killer soundtrack, while trying to break free of their imprisoning environment and track down the killer before they all die. Another recent choice is Five Numbers, a rather twisty locked room mystery that they need to solve to escape their fate. Asylum Session, ICE, Coicent, and Coffee Samurai round out the more recent productions, and every one of them is worth watching.

Some of these are classics, such as Appleseed, where the surviving members of humanity are equally divided between cyborgs and meatbags, or RahXephon The Motion Picture, a Giant Mecha Defends Against Alien Invasion story where music is the weapon set. The remaining classics go straight to the heart: Grave of the Fireflies and The Place Promised in Our Early Days are true masterpieces that would have won every award on the planet if they had been live action, and won awards enough for their anime versions.

If there is a single one of these you have missed, this is your limited opportunity to see it for free. If you haven’t seen any of them, you are in for a serious treat, and I recommend nuking the popcorn and settling in for a marathon. I would start with The Place Promised, and then alternate between the new and the classics until you have watched them all. It will be time well spent.

Something to Watch: DVDs

In genre movies we have the Japanese Mutant Girls Squad and the American Evil Dead Inbred Rednecks, but I won’t be recommending either one of those. The only movie I can recommend this time around isn’t genre at all, but a spy based romantic comedy: This Means War.

Top TV selection this time is Sherlock: Season Two, the amazing re-imagining of the Holmes saga in another Steven Moffat project. If you haven’t seen these yet, you are in for a serious treat. The other choices in TV this week includes MTV’s Teen Wolf: The Complete Season One, which is apparently their attempt to pull in some of the money from the Twilight audience. My Babysitter’s a Vampire: The First Season is targeting the children’s fantasy market.

Some folks no doubt think The Secret World of Arrietty is a Disney animation feature film based on The Borrowers. They would be right except for the minor detail that this one is Anime, produced by Studio Ghibli, although it did use Disney as its North American distribution partner. They are using this opportunity to re-release a couple of other Studio Ghibli classics: Whisper of the Heart and Castle in the Sky, both as combo Blue-Ray/DVD sets. If you are missing those titles now is your chance to correct that, and if you haven’t seen them yet I really recommend you do so..

Other new Anime this week includes Planzet, a story about Earth’s battle with Aliens a few decades from now. Humans have raised a defensive shield around the planet, but are trapped behind it; the time has come to drop the shield for an all or nothing counterattack, to try to win their freedom. This one, like Arrietty, is a stand alone story, but at 53 minutes long I don’t think I can actually call it a feature length film. More like a 2 episode OVA.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood releases it’s OVA collection this week, which clocks in right at 60 minutes. Bakuman: Season One Part One brings the Blue Ray formatted first 13 episodes of a story of two young men trying to break into the Manga publishing industry. It has an account of both the good and the bad, as reported by industry insiders.

Tiny’s Star Wars

This is Tiny’s from Second Life doing Star Wars, and it is a mighty impressive presentation. If you know anything about Machinima you will no doubt have recognized the incredible effort that went into this, from the costumes, the set building, the weapons and other props, the characters and their associated animations, the camera work, the editing… Just because it wasn’t filmed in the Real World doesn’t mean that it was some silly game. A lot of the same production hurdles are faced and overcome whichever world you are creating your film in.

Something to Do: Movies

This week it is Battleship on the big screen, and I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it is based on the Hasbro game Battleship, and games turned into movies are rarely any good. On the other hand, it is based on a Hasbro game, and they have already turned a cheap plastic toy from the 70’s into a movie franchise that was quite enjoyable with Transformers, so I am not willing to count this one out without seeing it first.

Something to Watch: DVDs

In movies, the one this week that tells a story worth watching is not genre; Norwegian Wood is an amazing wake-up call straight to the heart, based on the 1987 novel by Haruki Murakami. I can think of a very few movies from the 1960s and 70s that had a touch of this same spirit, like Harold and Maude, King of Hearts, and Butterflies are Free. But the story this one tells is unique, and deserves a place in your awareness. The book has been translated into at least 33 languages so far, the director was nominated for an Academy Award, and the film has won awards at Venice, Toronto, and Dubai.

In genre, Chronicle is the tale of teens with superpowers who fall into the trap you would expect of anyone thinking with their hormones instead of their brains. Descendents tells the story of a virus that turns people into zombies. I don’t see anything here we haven’t already seen done to death many times over, so I will be passing on adding these to the collection. The other title available this time is Dirty Blondes from Beyond, which may at least be silly and sexy, but again shows no promise of anything actually new and interesting.

There is a TV classic becoming available for the very first time: Ghost Story: The Complete Series was William Castle’s attempt to follow his role model Alfred Hitchcock into TV. It only lasted one season, but the actors involved included Sebastian Cabot, Jason Robards, Helen Hayes, Jodie Foster, Angie Dickinson, Geraldine Page, Martin Sheen, Stella Stevens, Karen Black, Rip Torn, Mariette Hartley, and many more. Just as impressive, the writers included Richard Matheson, D.C. Fontana, Robert Bloch and Harlan Ellison. I approve of the fact that this series is being released in a MOD (manufacture on demand ) production model, meaning they don’t burn the disk until you order it. While it may not work in every player or computer (you have to be able to do DVD-R disc format, which most but not all do), it is wonderful to see any RIAA/MPAA organization facing the inevitable and embracing the decades-old changes in the media distribution system. The fact that it also means there is no waste, no warehouse full of discs no one ordered, no pile of money spent on things they can not sell, no resources turned into a finished product that might end up gracing landfills, is nothing but bonus points all the way as far as I can see. Of course, the flip side of that probably means you will be hard pressed to find it on sale anywhere, since there will be no overstocked stores looking to dump it cheap to minimize their loss; but such is the nature of change.

The other TV programs of note this week are much less fictional, but just as entertaining. Mythbusters: Buster’s Biggest Crashes is silly fun for the science/adventure geek from beginning to end, and I probably need to pick up a Buster T-Shirt by now. The Universe: The Complete Season Six is another wonderful History Channel production telling you more about the world you live in, with some high quality simulations to give you visual examples of the various processes driving the stars and galaxies. And the Smithsonian Channel: Air & Space Collection is a DVD version of their online website which I for one want in my permanent collection. If you have any doubts, go to each web site and play the videos; these ARE the Droids you’re looking for!

In Anime, The Book of Bantorra – Collection 1 is about a world where when you die, your soul becomes a book, with all of your secrets there to be read by anyone. It is the job of the Armed Librarians to keep those books out of the hands of evildoers, and they definitely have their work cut out for them. Also new this week, Cat Planet Cuties: Complete Series has sexy alien cat-girl Eris setting up her planet’s embassy in Kio’s house, with various secret agencies and enemy dog-aliens all circling round, looking for an opening. I watched this when it streamed from Japan on Crunchyroll last year and it was silly fun all the way, but see if the dog’s laugh doesn’t remind you of another famous cartoon canine.

Finally, D.Gray-man – The Complete Second Season has been released in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can now pick up all 26 episodes for around $20 or less.