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 saw the first episode of Pumpkin Scissors when it premiered in fall 2006 and found it marginally interesting but not enough to continue to the second episode. Recently I got around to watching the Volume 1 DVD that I had bought during RightStuf’s Xmas sale and I now feel the same way about the second disc: I’m kind of interested in the story but not enough to buy the next volume to find out.
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Wild Arms TV (short for Twilight Venom) is an anime based on the first two installments of the future Western series of video games and aired in 1998. I haven’t played any of those games so I was not familiar with the world nor any characters before I watched the five episodes on the first disc and expecting that it would be decent. It met those expectations.
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When I first saw the trailer for Red Garden, I said that I would be interested in watching it and now that I’ve seen some of it, I see that there is more drama and downer moments than the horror-action-oriented trailer conveyed. I got the first DVD in the mail last week after ordering it from ADV as a part of their 15th Anniversary Sale and also received Wild Arms v.1 as a free gift. The first thing I noticed when I popped in the disc was the larger-than-usual font size on the menus. The video itself has some grain on it when watching on an LCD monitor (similar to what I experienced with Tsubasa v.1) which is kind of sad considering this is a Gonzo title, but it doesn’t show up for the most part on a CRT television.
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This month, I lived up to a “promise” I made back in August 2006 that I would buy Solid State Society when it came out. I managed to get the limited edition for $16 from Best Buy three weeks ago and decided to review all three parts of the package: the feature itself, the extras disc, and the soundtrack CD. I wrote the feature part right after I watched it (and revised it slightly recently) but I somehow managed to misplace the extras disc until a few days ago so this entire thing was delayed until now.
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Now that I am finished with finals, I have no excuse to not trudge through my backlog of unwatched and unread anime and manga. The first of these is Moeyo Ken OVA, released in January 2005 by ADV Films. I bought this DVD in Japantown during the Cherry Blossom Festival in April for 5 bucks from a video store that was selling off previously rented anime. I bought it and figured I would give it a shot. I finally got around to watching it this past week.

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How not to show off an elfgirl poster

I ordered the Genshiken box set in late December as part of RightStuf’s Christmas sale, got it about a month ago, and finished watching it over the weekend. Before I got the anime in the mail, I had already started reading the manga and recently finished volume 2, the plot points of which are covered in episodes 2-7. It was very entertaining for me to watch as I was familiar with the various subcultures of fandom, like cosplaying and figure building, as well as the societal stigmas that such practioners may encounter in public situations.

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Almost five months ago, I picked up the first four volumes of Kaze no Yojimbo for cheap at Big Lots and now I’m slowly making my way through them. The series is based on the 1961 Akira Kurosawa film “Yojimbo” and I might have to see that some time because I’m digging what I’ve seen so far on this first disc. The setup of the anime is as follows: a man named George Kodama enters the small mining town of Kimujuku looking for a man’s house and, in doing so, stokes the fires of a conflict between the town’s two power brokers and their factions. He works as a “bodyguard” to put food in his stomach as he digs into the dark history of what happened fifteen years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the factors I consider in deciding whether to buy a DVD beside the movie itself is what kind of bonus features are packaged in with it. For example, I could have bought only the standard edition and saved ten bucks but I would have not received the talk session, the audio commentaries and portrait cards. The bound-in book had good material in it like interviews and sketches, although the placement of it between the two disc holders doesn’t seem optimal because it might start to fall out over time. That is my only major complaint with the extras as the other bonuses were definitely enjoyable.
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What better way to bring a popular series like Fullmetal Alchemist to a close than with a theatrical feature? “The Conqueror of Shamballa” attempts to resolve the cliffhanger of the TV series successfully and manages to do a pretty good job of that during its 104-minute runtime. I am sorry that the below review was a bit delayed (was busy with schoolwork yesterday) and a little disjointed. I have decided to review the extras and the movie in seperate posts so look for another entry on the two documentaries tomorrow along with those postcard scans I promised. Read the rest of this entry »