This is the trailer for NYC ACM SIGGRAPH’s annual college computer animation festival, MetroCAF. This year it happens on Friday, September 25, 2015 at 7:00PM at the New York Institute of Technology’s Auditorium On Broadway. It looks like they have quite a few tasty animations to show this time around, so if you are close enough to make the presentation I recommend you do your best to attend.
I didn’t spot any new genre movies this week, but TV brings us both Arrow: The Complete 3rd Season and The Flash: The Complete 1st Season, just in time to binge watch them before they both kick into their next seasons on October 6th and 7th. And if you want a feature length film, the documentary The Great Museum tells the story of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, which is one of the most important art repositories on the planet. If your tastes are a bit different, perhaps Rammstein In Amerika will suit you better, also coming out this week.
In Anime, Sword Art Online II has another small, overpriced segment hitting the shelves, but as much as I love the series I won’t be picking it up. I will be waiting for a complete season, or better yet series, at a realistic price. Space Dandy Season 2 continues the strange adventures of the most sharply dressed alien hunter going. It is great to see the creative team that brought us Cowboy Bebop reassembled for another unique project like this. Speaking of strange, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Season 1 has Jonathan Joestar fighting for his life and his sanity against the vampire his adopted brother has become.
Selector Infected WIXOSS: The Complete Series is a combat card game that has some special cards that can take you to a dark plane of existence. If you win, your hearts desire is granted; but if you lose, things could get very dark indeed. Even though this says it is the complete series, in Japan a series is a season, and there is a second season to follow. Also dark this week is Tokyo Ghoul: Complete Season, about a book worm who finds himself turned into a monster by a Ghoul attack. Now he must learn everything he can about his new powers before they overwhelm him.
Hamatora the Animation is about a detective agency in a Yokohama Cafe tat is staffed by people who each have unique powers and abilities. Now someone is systematically killing people with powers, and it is up to Hamatora to solve the murders and stop the perpetrators before those with powers become extinct. Finally, Sabagebu!: Survival Game Club! may not quite be genre (although having an attack platypus argues that it may be), but it is definitely silly fun. I particularly like the way the narrator breaks the fourth wall with his commentary pretty much non-stop.
Season 4 of Arrow kicks off on Wednesday, October 7th, the day after The Flash has its season opener, and both shows look like they are up-leveling their game. That makes sense, since they have cranked up the tension each season from the beginning, and since they are building towards next year’s Legends Of Tomorrow. Both with these series and with the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad movies, it looks like DC is finally going to give Marvel a serious fight for the hearts and minds of the audience. I for one hope the competition stays intense for many years to come, if it causes both teams to keep cranking out quality science fiction of this caliber.
In movies we have Cinderella, a new live action take by Disney on the classic story. If you are looking for something a bit sillier you might want to check out Lego Star Wars: The New Yoda Chronicles Complete Collection. TV has Sleepy Hollow: The Complete Second Season, and Fox actually signed off on season 3. And I suppose I should also mention The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Eighth Season, even though I don’t personally watch it.
In Anime the The Irregular at Magic High School: Nine Schools Competition Arc siblings Tatsuya and Miyuki Shiba are at two different levels, Practitioner and Engineer, but the lowly engineer is changing the way the science of Magic is applied, and overturning the way everyone from the Military to the Yakuza thought the world worked. This show is following a rather unusual release pattern in that they are not putting it out by season, but by story arc. Since it ran for two seasons but was made up of 3 separate story arcs of different lengths that can become a little confusing, and it doesn’t help any that this set is priced around twice as much per episode as the usual initial release run. I will be waiting for a better deal and the complete series in a single box before I pick this up. If I feel the need to watch it again before that time comes I will stream it. Also out this week is The Comic Artist & His Assistants, which isn’t exactly genre, but rather a recursive story about creating one of the media formats the stories are told in.
The summer Anime season is winding to an end, and three clear winners have caught my attention. Gate remains my favorite, with the action and international espionage in the Special Zone and Japan torquing up with every episode. I really hope they are planning a second season of that one, there is a lot of story yet to tell in that universe. Charlotte kicked into high gear in episode 9, when the introduction of a new power completely changed the nature of the story. And while it still reminds me a lot of Attack On Titan, God Eater is very definitely its own story, and quite an exciting one. At this point those are the shows I am watching as soon as they become available, often checking several times during the day to see if they are ready yet.
The Hallways trailer for American Horror Story: Hotel is slick, and they just announced adding Lady Gaga to the cast (or at least I just heard about it). It hits the small screen on FX on Wednesday, October 7th.