Nigorimasen! Blog

The moment I read the news that Viz would be releasing the Shonen Jump-based series Hunter X Hunter in season box sets beginning in Q4 2008, a huge grin appeared on my face. At last, this awesomeness will be brought to America! The manga by Yoshihiro Togashi is already on volume 19 (Vol. 20 comes out May 6th) and for those of you who have never heard of HxH, shame on you! (For a good introduction to the plot, read this Animefringe feature from September 2005.)

To get some perspective of how long it has taken for this anime to hit US shores, the anime was created in 2000 and it has since been dubbed into French, Spanish, Italian, Portugeuse, Tagalog, and even Arabic. Viz pitched HxH and Monster to television broadcasters at this year’s NATPE and they have DVD rights for both so the next logical step would be to get Monster on DVD and perhaps TV. (Adult Swim, you know you want a psychological thriller/drama to replace InuYasha…) Failing that, just Hunter x Hunter getting onto Toonami would be fantastic.

P.S. Did you know Viz is a part-owner of a future 150-seat movie theater to be the main attraction of the yet-to-be built J-Pop Center in Japantown?

I got the pulp copy of RightStuf’s Spring 2008 catalog in the mail today and found an odd coincidence: two different manga with homophonic names: Gacha Gacha and Gatcha Gacha. The former is a shonen title dealing with a girl’s multiple personalities with an ecchi bent (the story arc shown above, “Next Revolution”, involves a boy who swaps gender whenever he sneezes due to a VR game malfunction!) while the latter is a shoujo romantic comedy with a love square and hints of shoujo-ai. Thankfully the Wikipedia pages for both series offer links to the other (shonen to shoujo and vice-versa) in case you were off by a letter. Still hard to discern between the two if you only hear the titles, though.

The deadline for nominating “web logs” in any of the Anime Blog Awards’ fifteen categories is next Tuesday, April 22nd, and I figured I’d write a post about it to remind any stragglers to submit their suggestions for the short lists. I’m also writing this under the situation that I haven’t been nominated once so far in any category. I’m not trying to be egotistical but come on, NOT ONE?!? *coughs* Perhaps I should chide myself a little for not making frequent posts or for not developing a substantial gimmick or personality with which I could market my blog. I would certainly agree I haven’t done anything particularly spectacular to warrant internet recognition through a group of my peers.
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Like many people, I am usually skeptical about live action film adaptations of anime and comic books so when I read that DreamWorks got the rights to make a “3-D live-action feature” based on Ghost in the Shell [via ANN], my worried geek alarm went off. The notion that the relatively unknown Jamie Moss was chosen to script the film isn’t reassuring.

But this will apparently be one of those kick-ass, fancy movies that are in crisp 3-D and will not require audiences to wear cheap red-and-blue cardboard glasses to enjoy them. Steven Spielberg, who called the GitS franchise one of his “favorite stories”, and fellow blockbuster director James Cameron (director of the summer 2009 Battle Angel) have both been working toward equipping movie theaters with special 3D projectors to truly take movie-viewing into the 21th century.

DreamWorks production chief Adam Goodman said that GitS “epitomizes 3-D live-action motion picture possibilities” so that gives me some confidence that they really want to do this right. There is still no planned release date nor a director attached to the project as this has just been announced but I really wish that this gets off the ground and is cast, written, and directed well. It at least seems to be on a better track than the supposedly “still in production” Weta-ADV Evangelion project.

I recently watched the premiere episodes of The Tower of DRUAGA -the aegis of URUK- and BLASSREITER on BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube to compare the visual quality and the placement of subtitles and also to see if they were shows worth following after the first two episodes. I decided to formulate two separate posts for each series so the next one will be about Blassreiter and will likely have the same technical results. (Links: BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube.)

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From top to bottom: Japanese, German, English

When I was in Germany last August, I bought the first volume of Honey and Clover and wrote about how Tokyopop GmbH was releasing titles noticably ahead of US licensors. Now that Viz’s English version has hit shelves, I bought one of those and looked for differences and similarities between the German and American adaptations. What follows is a comparison of many features between the two in attempt to determine which is the better visual adaptation.
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