Nigorimasen! Blog

The surprise seemingly-out-of-nowhere news of the week is ADV’s license of AIR the anime and its subsequent 87-minute movie. The company has set the release date for the first of four volumes as August 14 and stated a new DVD will come out each month - this means that all of AIR will have been brought to the R1 market by the end of November. That’s like Viz releasing three volumes of the Naruto manga a month from September to December, except with video discs.

I think it’s worth noting out that it was last Friday that ADV announced at Anime Boston that the first volume of Innocent Venus will come out on August 21. In that particular press release, you can read rep David Williams describing the anime as “combin[ing] the sci-fi noir of Logan’s Run with the fast-paced action of Gantz”.

P.S. I am not lying about the title of this post. I actually did finish downloading AIR the TV series (but not the movie) last night and was - and still am - planning to watch it this weekend, although I’m going to be occupied with yard work part of Saturday and I have a paper due Thursday…

Yesterday’s Diesel Sweeties comic has a great line that reflects the attitude of many people in the anime/manga community as well as those of us who enjoy foreign films that have yet to see domestic release. This joins a collection of interesting one-liners from this quirky webcomic including:

• “Johnny Cash is a gangsta.”
• “The only good ideas are the ones I can take credit for.”
• “Bacon is a vegetable.”

By the way, the context of the quote was that the pictured character got a bootleg version of Spiderman 3, specifically the Japanese version. SP3 will be released in Japan on May 1 during Golden Week, three days before the US release.

Feel free to use the image in your scanlations/torrent/etc. arguments and here is the related blog post (by the artist) from which I downloaded the above image.

There has been a surprising disparity of love and hate for the first two episodes of Lucky Star within in the blogging community, the “drama” of which I am certain will be a topic in my panel at Fanime next month. After watching the first couple myself, I have to say that I fall in the middle of the pack. For me, the anime so far hasn’t been laugh out loud funny nor has it been so lacking in humor that it was painful to watch. I’ll still watch it for the comedy and framing but, barring anything super spectacular, it won’t be residing in my favorites and I won’t be blogging it on a regular basis. Read the rest of this entry »

An post on Japan Probe mentions that the tax office of Oharu in Hokkaido has put up for sale rare figures owned by a toy retailer who didn’t pay his taxes. The unopened figures included characters from Sentimental Graffiti among other ’90s love simulation games. The department uses online auctions site like Yahoo! to sell other seized items like cars and paintings and back in February, over 100 bids were made for four figures with the highest bid at 7,250 yen. Another ten sets are currently being hocked and bids will be accepted until May 1. Don’t ask me where, though - if you’re interested, you should be motivated enough to search for them yourself. Let this be a warning to all you collectors out there, especially if you’re running a business.

Today I watched Pale Cocoon and found it very interesting albeit slow for something that has a duration of 23 minutes. The setup is that it’s the 2600s and a man named Ura works in the Excavation Department, inspecting and restoring visual media from the time when the Earth’s surface was still green. His co-workers, including the somewhat aloof Riko, have grown disinterested in working to preserve and categorize images of things that don’t exist anymore and consider it a waste of time. That is, until an unknown video surfaces in Ura’s workload.
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I can’t believe that it took reading about Bandai Visual’s rather high pricing of the Gunbuster and fans’ reaction to it at SakuraCon last weekend to get me to write a post after a ten-day absence. My explanation is that I was distracted by a bunch of things including classes, chores, laundry, compiling my radio playlist, spending Easter day with my family, anime club, and watching the first season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on DVD. In that span of time, I start writing a couple of entries but I wasn’t able to finish them to my liking so I just moved on. In case you want to know, the first one would have been posted on Easter about religion in anime and would have focused on Scrapped Princess, FMA, and Chrono Crusade while the second was an informational post about MyAnimeList. Anyway, I apologize in advance if this is a relatively long post but I have a lot of stuff I want to discuss.

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I had these three on my anticipated list and decided to watch the raws because I want to get a feel for the new anime without all those pesky colored words getting in the way. At least for these first episodes. I’ll also try to post my reactions to other anime that are premiering that I also happen to download raw. Then I’ll run to back to my translated-for me-so-I-don’t-have-to-infer format of watching anime until the next batch comes along.

Hitohira:

The first episode of this romantic school comedy was pretty entertaining considering that I couldn’t understand much of the dialogue and thus missed some jokes. But I could follow the faces and get what was going on. Anyway, nervous girl Mugi Asai and her good friend enter high school and within a couple days, Mugi and a black-haired male classmate are coerced into joining a drama club by the president Nono and her officers. A blond-haired, energetic girl sees another drama club’s performance of “Prima Donna” at the entering festival and decides to join that one. Nono, the leader of the former, is quick to make a distinction between the two and it looks they’ll confront each other in episode 2. I’m definitely gonna have to watch this again when the subs come out so I can get more of the finer details, like what the two clubs are actually named.
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