Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Angel Heart – episode 17

“Encounter in a Dream”

What could this be? An episode set in a dream that reveals long illusive details of the relationship between Kaori and … Makimura?

I’m there! I just wish they had allocated more of the budget to this episode, which deals quite explicitly with these characters. I finally get Ikura Kazue with a major speaking role and, her updated character design aside, she doesn’t look like Kaori.

On top of that we get several things that don’t gel with City Hunter continuity, but that’s par for the course at this point.

Continue reading Angel Heart – episode 17…

Utawarerumono – episode 11

“The Eternal Promise”

I know that this episode was a deal breaker for some, but to me it was as a restoration of interest in Utawarerumono. Raising the stakes and throwing out revelations for mysteries are a prime method for continuing narrative support.

I’ll get the best quote ever out of the way here, though: “If this can be solved by vomiting, then vomit all you want.”

Spoilers Inside

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Nana – episode 11

Hachi finds herself right out of luck, but anonymous kindness finds her. It’s the right sort of episode for sweetness and triumph of something.

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Ouran High School Host Club – episode 12

“Honey-senpai’s not so sweet three days”

An incredibly funny episode let down only by the insanity of its moral. Not every episode needs a moral to be cool, and the one espoused in this episode is somewhat creepy.

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Rose of Versailles – episodes 25-39

Wow, the French Revolution sucked. Not only for the nobility, but for the commoners. Bad times all around.

As for Rose of Versailles as a whole: it features some of the best build up episodes I’ve seen, preparing the audience for the conclusion with skill and finesse, abandoning specific historical figures to focus on hypothetical people of the period. With all of this build up, the Revolution is a sort of anti-climax.
That part, of course, is entirely historically accurate.

Series’ conclusion given inside

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Spirited Away with Youmi

On July 6, Eminence held an event at Sydney’s Town Hall in honour of the Tanabata Festival. “Spirited Away with Youmi” showcased the work of Kimura Youmi, who is best known in the world of anime fans for her song “Always With Me” (Itsumo Nando Demo) from Spirited Away.

For just shy of two hours, Kimura took the stage with her lyre and performed not only “Always With Me”, but several other songs from Ghibli films, including “Princess Mononoke”, “My Neighbour Totoro” and “Sanpo” (the opening song of My Neighbour Totoro). Most interesting of the Ghibli songs was a performance of “Name of Life” (Inochi no Namae) a song written for Spirited Away that was featured in the movie as a purely instrumental piece: a piece that I would list as the defining part of the score, for the defining parts of the film.

Accompanying the Ghibli songs was footage from the movies that they came from, which acted to take me out of myself as an anime fan. For two hours I didn’t care about what other people thought of what I watched: I thought about what the Ghibli films mean to me, about how perfect films like Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro really are. I have Ghibli fever lately, and this was a natural extension of that. This is somewhat more logical than the effect that Superman Returns had (it made me want to watch Laputa).

All the same, it was strange to hear these songs played simply with a lyre, particularly as “Sanpo” had a “big band” feel in its original form, “My Neighbour Totoro” a very “produced” feel and “Princess Mononoke” was actually originally sung by a man. I was surprised too when I found out, but a man can produce notes that high.

Kimura performed several other songs that were her own, as well as several traditional Japanese songs that sounded frustratingly familiar to my ear. A highlight of these songs was her performance of the gospel song “I Believe” which, due to David Lodge’s Therapy, I can never take seriously. Words aside, when Kimura got off the lyre to play the piano, she sounded as if she sincerely shared the sentiments expressed in the lyrics for one of the more impassioned performances of the night.

While there was an obvious anime fan appeal to the night, the presence of Kimura Youmi allowed the event to rise above the normal “nerdishness” espoused by Eminence (honestly, most of their events are for playing the music of the Final Fantasy games, and by far their biggest coup was having Uematsu Nobu come out to perform a few years back). Town Hall was not packed to capacity, but there were several Japanese families in attendance who would have been able to appreciate the more “cultured” aspect of the evening.

Kimura Youmi herself is a charismatic woman. She studied music at California State University and was thus more than adequately equipped to compere the event herself, even being so kind as to explain the meanings of several of the songs before singing them. One of her songs, “Silver Drops”, was actually performed in a mixture of Japanese and English. The English lyrics seemed banal until I listened closer to the Japanese part of the song and realised that it was just a literal translation. Japanese actions are naturally more onomatopeoically pleasing than those in English, and so the poetry of the song was lost in the singing.

The end of the concert was met with a four song encore, which concluded with “Always With Me” being performed with the accompaniment of piano, two violins and a cello … and with an English translation. The way that the song is sung, it sounded almost exactly the same as it does in Japanese. The lyrics worked, but the performance of a song with choruses that amount to nothing more than “la la la la la la/ la la la la/ la la la la/ lu lu lu lu lu lu/ la la/ lu lu/ la la/ lo” isn’t in quite the right register for English performance. I prefer the song with just a lyre, because Kimura’s voice is what really carries the song and makes it transcendent, and allows Spirited Away some of the best ending credits an anime movie ever had the honour of posessing.

All in all, “Spirited Away with Youmi” was a worthwhile night: a showcase of a charismatic and talented woman with just the right level of cross-demographic appeal.

Gettin’ old fast

I finished Dragon Quest, but my G4 died for the second time this year and my internet connection decided to quit. As I haven’t been able to get onto my ISP yet, I have not only not been able to get, say, the final episode of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, I don’t even know how it was received. I don’t feel that bad about missing Honey and Clover II because apparently the first episode was a mere recap, which seems kind of counter-intuitive, particularly for a show with such a large fanbase: a fanbase doesn’t need to be told what happens, they just know.

Hopefully I’ll be back online this weekend with the backlog of stuff I’ve written, but I’ve still got a billion episodes of other stuff to power through. I’d say that I’m free of the clutches of Dragon Quest after 88:45 play time, but there’s an extra quest of some extent as a * file. You know how it is.

Update: Internet is back. Kicking things will commence soon.

Aim for the top!? Licencing strikes twice!

Nothing says “licencing” quite like an orange box full of abandoned cat girls.

Licences have been remarkably thin on the ground these past two years, but at Anime Expo the licensors have decided that it’s time to bring new titles to the market. The notable titles, that I am even vaguely qualified to comment on, are as follows:

Gunbuster, Bandai Visual: After years in licence hell, Gunbuster finally is going to get the wide English language release that it deserves. Gunbuster is one of my favourite shows and, despite its rough start, it offers quite possibly the single greatest ending to any medium ever. I know I was on the verge of tears. I know that my friend, who has no emotion ever, was also on the edge.
Possibly because of the expert application of physics present in the series, but the principle remains the same: Gunbuster is excellence, no matter which way you slice it. It’s also notable for a cameo by Totoro, and I can’t wait for it to break into the world.
Last year, when I attended a convention panel for Madman Entertainment at Manifest, I asked president Tim Anderson if Gunbuster was a series the company was interested in, or if the licencing issues made it untouchable. Tim said that it was one of their dream series, so I’m looking forward to seeing if Gunbuster will bust loose on Australia and fulfill all of our hyper space relativity dreams.

(By the way, if you loved the themes in Gunbuster, read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. It is a similarly stirring exploration of many of the same concepts.)

Black Lagoon, Geneon: So this one isn’t a surprise at all: Geneon sponsored the show and they’re in the credits. I think that this has “blockbuster” written all over it, and I hope that the audience will realise fast enough that they should patronise the program and recognise it for what it is: taut action with fun characters and virtually no cause for complaint. Something can be entertaining without its intellectual fibre being called into question.

Paradise Kiss, Geneon: All of the shows of the past two years, and they choose this one. I understand the appeal of the title, based on the success of the manga in the US, but Paradise Kiss as an anime has the effect of making me want to stab my brain out for having to deal with such idiotic characters who have few endearing qualities.
For all of his faults, Kobayashi Osamu’s Beck is a much more entertaining and compelling program, but that’s the subject of another article that I chose not to publish a month back. For Paradise Kiss, I pity Geneon and I pity those who will buy it in the expectation of it being quality.

And still more licencing announcements to come! Well, at least one. Time was I was always excited by licences. That’s the sad thing about the current state of the industry: licencing sure has died down. Buy more anime, people!

Digimon Savers – episode 7

“Touma’s Day Off! Exploding BomberNanimon!”

I almost forgot that this episode required a fight with a rogue Digimon. It wasn’t until eight and a half minutes in, after the cold opening and the OP, that I saw a Digimon name in the title and remembered that this show is about Digimon liberation; having discovered its sense of humour and the general idea of “heart”, the series barely concerns itself with what is not yet an overarcing story.

Episode complexes: Mothercon, sistercon, maidcon.

Continue reading Digimon Savers – episode 7…