The winner this week has to be Marvel’s Doctor Strange, a real powerhouse of a movie, and one of my favorites for 2016. In Anime, every title listed this time is the complete series, so you won’t be missing anything with any of these. Actually, I Am is about a boy who can’t keep a secret, so he confesses his love to a girl… who tells him a secret about herself: she’s a Vampire. If he leaks this secret to anyone, she will be forced to leave school, but it seems everyone at that school has a secret, and he begins to learn them all. In Amagi Brilliant Park there are scantily clad fairies, giant mice and sniper-trained sheep occupying a run down amusement park that really is a magic kingdom in need of rescuing. The Betrayal Knows My Name is a story of love, reincarnation, and constantly mounting danger, with a twist. There are two titles this week that I thought were already both released, but I can’t find evidence to prove it. Red Data Girl is being released in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can pick up the entire series for under $20. The classic Scrapped Princess is also coming out on disc as a complete series; I thought it had done that a decade ago, but all the references I can find are for single volumes with 4 episodes each, no collection.
This week we get Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio, a delightfully twisted look at comic book superheroes that may be my favorite Doctor Who Christmas Special. We also get the 2014 remake of the 1946 French classic La Belle Et La Bete or Beauty And The Beast, which one reviewer tagged as 50 Shades of Fur.
In Anime Noragami Season Two: Aragoto minor god Yato is still broke, still shrineless, and now fighting for his life as major war goddess Bishamon hunts him down. Even more life threatening, Assassination Classroom Season Two: Part One brings the next 13 episodes of this entertaining series. While I really like Asterisk War: The Academy City on the Water, the release of Blu Ray 3 puts 5 episodes on a disc and charges the price of a complete series for them, so I will stick to the streaming service version. Ultimate Otaku Teacher: Season One, Part Two brings the next dozen episodes of this humorous and offbeat slice-of-life for the socially inept home. Re-releases in more affordable bundles this week include Freezing Vibration: The Complete Second Season in an Anime Classics edition (generally around or just under $30), and Unbreakable Machine-Doll in a S.A.V.E. edition (generally right around $20). Machine Doll is the complete series plus the 6 OVAs, which make it a very good deal.
In western releases, Arrival looks like the most interesting genre offering, with Alien spaceships touching down around the globe. It has been nominated in at least a couple of categories for every major film award going, with a total of 8 Academy Awards nominations alone. As near as I can tell The Crash is genre only by virtue of the line “set in the near future” in its advertising because its hackers are not nerds, but I suppose I should mention it comes out this week as well. The non-genre film worth mentioning is London Town, about growing up in the 1970’s London Punk scene. Check that that is the topic when you see it on the shelves, or you might end up watching another movie with the same name about a washed up comic trying to make a comeback in Vaudeville.
Anime brings us Busou Shinki: Armored War Goddess, A story about a gamer and his four 6-inch-tall combat androids, and yes, it is a comedy. Comet Lucifer is also a comedy of surreal proportions with the fate of the world ultimately at stake. Persona 5 the Animation -The Day Breakers- is a single 24 minute episode running just under $40, so I will not be recommending it. Particularly because I don’t know what it is about, and haven’t found it streaming on any of the North American services, nor on Daisuki, a Japanese anime consortium who stream directly to the US. We do get One Piece: Collection 18 this time around, though.
I want to make special mention of The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, where real works of literature combine with a supernatural world to create the backdrop for a series of interesting mysteries, whodunit style. The series came out in 2011, but first streamed to North America last year, and it looks like this will be its first disc release for the US and Canada. Finally, in Nobunagun our protagonist’s school trip is interrupted by a monster attack! A clandestine government agency arrives to battles the army of monsters, using possessed weapons. The spirits possessing those weapons belong to famous historical military figures, mostly generals, warlords, and shoguns. This one is coming out now in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you should be able to pick it up for under $20 if you shop around.
Marvel’s Iron Fist comes to Netflix on March 17th, the final member they need to launch The Defenders. The trailer looks quite tasty, I can’t wait to see how this one plays out.
Marvel’s Runaways is being made for TV, specifically Hulu, and will probably be ready to watch at the end of this year or the beginning of next. The story is simple (at least for a Marvel comic series); a group of teenagers who get together once a year at their parent’s annual party discover one year their parents are actually running a massive criminal organization. They all run away together, vowing to bring that organization down. I love that James Marsters gets to play Victor Stein, the mad scientist (or a scientist who gets really mad sometimes, at least). So they have now announced the cast members playing the Runnaways: Rhenzy Feliz, Lyrica Okano, Virginia Gardner, Ariela Barer, Gregg Sulkin and Allegra Acosta. And the latest announcement (at the initial link) gives us The Pride, the parental bad guys of the series: Brigid Brannagh, Ever Carradine, Brittany Ishibashi, James Marsters, Angel Parker, Kip Pardue, Ryan Sands, Annie Wersching, Kevin Weisman, and James Yaegashi. I can’t wait to see this one come to the small screen!
Correction: Justice League Dark and Dreamwork’s Trolls both come out this week rather than last. Anime has Young Black Jack: Complete Collection and the truly absurd (to the point I count it as a fantasy and therefore genre) Nichijou: My Ordinary Life Complete Collection coming out this week. In addition, the complete collections of both D-Frag! and Danganronpa are coming out in S.A.V.E editions.