Goro Miyazaki created an Anime version of Astrid Lindgren’s fantasy novel Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, and Amazon has picked it up for their Amazon Prime streaming service. Gillian Anderson will be narrating the story for them, and as a fan of all things Studio Ghibli I am looking forward to watching it. My only question now is when it will be available; they only finished dubbing the English audio in the last week or two, and searching the US and UK Amazon sites reveals no information.
Two weeks into the new Anime season, and I already have a few favorites, with Izetta: The Last Witch topping the list. It is the early days of WWII Europe in a parallel timeline, with Germany blitzing over the surrounding countries one after another, and the Austrian princess trying desperately to make it to England to sign a mutual defense treaty. The twist is, this universe had a race of magic users, and the lone survivor is a childhood friend of the Princess, and not a fan of the government of those who inflicted that genocide. The first episode grabbed me within the first 5 minutes, the second was better than the first, and while that is no promise that it will keep delivering at that level I like what they have done so far. The Simulcast is on Saturdays at 11:45am EDT, I will be checking it out each weekend. Sadly, the legitimate trailer I found for it is way too short to give you a feel for what they are doing, so you should just go watch the first episode.
Just posted online last week, Yolo is the latest track from BAND-MAID, Japans leading Kawaii Heavy Metal band. OK, that last statement is up for debate, with bands like Baby Metal and Doll$ Boxx in the running for that title. Yolo is also the name of their second single, in this case a single with four songs, which will be released in November. They are doing their Brand New MAID Release Tour right now, tonight playing in Mexico, with stops in London and Germany later this week. The second track is The Non-fiction Days from last April, the third is Before Yesterday from June. Those last two are from their third mini-album Brand New MAID, and I am sure they will be doing all eight songs from it tonight, along with a lot of others.
The new song from The Pretty Reckless is called Take Me Down, and equates signing a deal with the devil to signing a deal with a record company. What makes it particularly ironic is this is a tightly produced commercial grade tune, without the rawness of her earlier recordings. I am not sure if that is a good thing, but it is quite a tasty song. The album it is on, Who You Selling For, comes out October 21st.
The CG Society selected 2015’s Allegro’s Legendy Polskie Film SMOK (The Dragon) as one of the 10 best CGI films of the year. I have to agree that this is an amazing little film, and while it uses the visual medium to tell the majority of its story I was grateful for the limited number of English subtitles it needed to get the dialog across.
From February of 2015, the band Rose Windows doing the christening of the new live studio at listener supported KEXP in Seattle. I think they broke up about 6 months after this recording, but they left three very interesting albums as their legacy.