Archive for the “Specials” Category

Once again I refer to an anime I began watching in anime club for my eleventh anime-related thing I’ll remember from 2007 but then again it’s been that kind of a year for me with regards to watching stuff. The loose reimagining of Romeo and Juliet by Gonzo is better in some parts than the original and worse in others but it has been entertaining to watch so far for the first eight episodes, something that might not last long considering it’s Gonzo.
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This is actually the Pangya panel that was before mine at Fanime

I couldn’t think of something not personal for what was supposed to be the tenth thing for yesterday’s intended “12 Days of Xmas” post so I conceded to write about the experience of putting on a panel at Fanime, the steps I had to go through, and why I am reluctant to devise holding another one at any convention unless I have a really great and structured idea.
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Okay, the ninth anime-related thing that interested me in 2007 is something that actually hasn’t been revealed that much: Akira Kogami’s life before Lucky Channel. The basic fact we find out about Minoru’s co-host is that she was a former idol but not much else. I was interested in the mystery so I rewatched Lucky Channel segments and took note of all the references Akira made to earlier in her career in an attempt to construct a short back story for her.
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In yet another “12 Days of Xmas” look at a show currently running in anime club, the eighth anime-related “highlight” for me this year has been the awkward moments that turned into laughs in Bokura Ga Ita. Yes, I know that the two main characters suffer from “missing eye syndrome” (as exhibited above), the music is average, and Nana Takahashi is dumb as a brick. But her naivety and dimness paired with Yano’s latent sex drive and childish aloofness make for some funny moments and save the anime from being brought down by the emotional flashbacks about Yano’s previous (and now deceased) girlfriend Nana, who annoyingly looks like she was Takahashi’s older sister. Srsly, guys.

Anyway, I went and made a bunch of clips (15 in total) from the first third of the series and embedded them below.
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I didn’t make a post yesterday because I had a long day and fell asleep a lot earlier than normal so I’ll make for it up today as well as doing the regular-scheduled “8th day” post later today. What I had intended to talk about yesterday was an interview I did with German manga-ka Nina Brandner in August inside a Mayersche in Cologne.
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I’m only half done and I’m already tired…

The sixth day of this series of twelve things from 2007 that affected my anime-related life brings me to discuss another website, but this one is in English: MyAnimeList. I previously mentioned MAL as part of a multi-topic post I wrote in April and since then, I’ve used it almost exclusively to track my progress in various series. The last site I had used to keep track of what I’d watched was AnimeDB and I still have an account on that site but I don’t update it anymore likely because it’s too tedious a task for me to remember which fansubbing groups released the particular episodes I watched. It’s just easier to push the plus sign to add 1 to your episode total.
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The fifth thing from 2007 that had an impact on me as a fan of anime was creating an account on Nico Nico Douga. I had first heard of Nico Nico Douga in bits and places before May but I got my first true dose of Nico during the Damn You Internets panel at Fanime. Thus on June 1st I signed up for an account on Nico so I could see a swath of random Japanese videos with a bunch of comments streaming across them, some of them cleverly timed to flood over the actual video. At first I was able to watch videos from 1900-0200 JST (2-9am PST) since I was member 1,213,569 and the cutoff point for all-the-time access was 888,888. A couple weeks later, that line was expanded to about 1,100,000 and then a month or so after that, I had no time-of-day viewing restrictions.

The stuff I’ve been watching over the past six months has been mainly MADs and anime openings/endings, although I did find a TV episode of baseball bloopers split into three parts and earlier this month I watched a couple men with paper masks play their way through Wii Fit’s different mini games. The next step will be to begin watching the “raw” anime episodes that are on the service (especially the older ones like Lupin III), which now that I think about might be an interesting way to checking out series without downloading a couple episodes or, if licensed, buying the first disc or the first couple episodes digitally.

And remember, you can turn the comments off and just watch the original video if they become too overwhelming.

Nummer vier in my series of anime/manga things that affected me in ‘07 is my first visit to Yaoi-Con. I hadn’t gone the three previous years because I either didn’t feel compelled to go (not anything against the content, I was just lazy) or didn’t plan ahead with the other DAC people who are annual attendees. This year, however, I decided to go for it and see what it was about. Unfortunately I forgot to put my memory stick back in my camera after copying photos off from the Ubisoft event I went to the night before so I have no personal pictures to supplement my “late report” of the convention.

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The going-to-break animation looks like “24″.

Third in the series of profiled moments or events from the past year is Zombie-Loan. More specifically, the anime’s dual fanservice and its comedy. For the past couple months, the anime club has been enjoying this Peach-Pit series and it’s become kind of like how Sukisho was seen last year, as a lighthearted comedy, except this one has more plot and a bunch more action to it.
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For the second in a series of twelve anime things I’ll remember from 2007, I’m going to discuss Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, a film I saw back in July that took me on an emotional journey. It started out with mundaneity, expanded with childlike optimism, and then gradually decayed into gloominess and desperation until it reached an acceptance of life’s unforgiving realities. All of those were projected by a combination of great looking visuals, framing, and voice acting.

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