Nigorimasen! Blog

The news that Inuyasha (the manga) will at last conclude when its 558th chapter is published in next week’s Shonen Sunday should be a welcome relief for fans of the series. They will hopefully get a definite conclusion unlike the TV series, whose ending made Anime Insider’s list of 10 worst anime endings last October. (Scan after the jump.)

This announcement also means that Viz Media will have at least two more years of business from the franchise - the 34th volume is due to come out July 8th. If the current pace of one volume every three months continues, Volume 56 would come out in January 2014 (assuming they don’t speed its release, like they did with Naruto last year). That would be five years after the projected January 2009 release of volume 56 in Japan. With such a long wait ahead for US fans, I hope scanlations don’t hurt sales of the printed versions too much.
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No anime-equivalent pictures this time, just real life photos.

I just happened to be browsing the Twitter site Summize when I saw Tokyo was a “trending topic” and quickly found out there was a stabbing in the Akihabara district. The incident occurred around lunchtime in central Tokyo when 25-year-old Tomohiro Kato drove a 2-ton rented truck into a crowd of pedestrians, running over three people. He then got out of the vehicle and began to stabbing passersby with a survival knife. Initial reports described Kato as a gang member but those were later found not to be true.

[Coverage: BBC News | NY Times (via AP) | Reuters | CNN | Mainichi (English) | Akibablog (photos) | ize.ne.jp (w/ slideshow) | ANN (w/ updates)]

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Two Funimation related news bits came out today: the first is that two Ouran dub roles have been revealed and the second that Funimation will launch a video podcast on Monday the 9th. Carrie Savage (Karen Ichijo in School Rumble) will voice Momoka Kuragano and Eric Vale (Yuki Sohma in Fruits Basket) has been cast as Toru Suzushima. These are definitely minor characters since Momoka first appears in episode 21 while Toru has a part of the second episode but doesn’t show up again until the school festival episode (#25). Looking at the show’s website, it seems that two more minor voices will unveiled every Friday until their one-hour panel at Anime Expo, where I would expect the main cast to be unveiled. I suck at guessing silhouettes so I’m not going to speculate on one-shot characters.

Regarding Funimation’s new podcast, it is called “The Funimation Update” and will feature original programming hosted by Todd Haberkorn. Todd is a voice actor and ADR director who seems to be doing informal PR work for the company as well, having attended Anime Boston and SakuraCon and planning to hit Anime Vegas as well. The first one will supposedly focus the adaptation of One Piece and Shin-chan as well as the general localization process. I’ll give it a shot when it comes out but I may be distracted by the WWDC keynote announcements that morning.

A Moon Phase comment has said that an anime adaption of the light novel series To Aru Majutsu no Index (A Certain Magical Index) was confirmed in the 16th volume’s promo sleeve, according to ANN. (Moetron’s post about this news has a picture of an in-store display and a link to a MAD opening.)

The basic plot involves Touma Kajimou, a high school boy who possesses a large psychic power called “Imagine Breaker” that can cancel magic but also causes him horrible luck. He finds a Church of England nun, Index, hanging over his railing whose memories have been forcibly replaced by over 100,000 forbidden magic texts of the Church. Look for TAMnI (tam-ni?) to hit Japanese TV screens this October as yet another light novel-to-anime adaptation - spring 2008 anime Spice and Wolf and Wagaya no Oinari-sama originated as light novels.
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AnimeOnDVD recently posted a report written by Jason Yeh of a Gurren Lagann focus panel that held at Fanime and within it, there was this interesting portion involving producer Yasuhiro Takeda:

Someone commented that Kamina is an over-the-top character and asked if he was initially designed that way. Takeda answered yes and stated the staff had to also be careful not to have Kamina overshadow Simon, the main character. He let out a slight spoiler while talking about the matter, which resulted in an audience member yelling out “spoiler”. Takeda stated he didn’t care if the show was out of not in the US [sic] and would answer questions if people asked them. He pointed out the 40 or so Gainax employees sitting in the back of the room, who were waiting for him to slip up and say something he shouldn’t. Takeda asked the employees to stand up and the audience applauded in response.

Thanks, oversensitive audience guy. Takeda comes from an industry where many, if not most, fans keep up with the series they watch as they air (just as some dedicated people in the western otaku blogocube do) so it should come as no surprise that he feels no mercy for “spoiler” criers a year after Gurren Lagann began airing. His opinion is further confirmed from a comment by Gainax president Hiroyuki Yamaga at last year’s TTGL Fanime panel where he admitted he didn’t care if people downloaded fansubs to see how the series continued.

On another note, I found it funny that there were about forty other Gainax employees at the panel but then I read in the previously 2007 panel report that Yamaga promised to make all efforts to bring more staff members to 2008’s panel. The company sure brought enough this time around.

In this week’s Anime Corner Store newsletter, Robert divulged a small update on the Geneon situation, namely, that they have been “in serious talks with a major US home entertainment distributor” (Paramount?) to get some of their series back on store shelves. He can’t reveal any specifics at the risk of ruining his firm’s relationship but he did say the company is new to the anime space, that they will likely pick and choose which titles are included in the deal.

I would expect an announcement to occur in the next couple months if a deal indeed gets made. You can read the unedited section from this week’s newsletter yourself after the jump and begin to speculate on your own.
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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?

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.

For months, various industry commentators have said Japanese publishers had to change their strategies to combat wide fansub profileration and GDH has stepped up to the plate by announcing that two GONZO titles, The Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter, will be put on three different streaming video sites (Crunchyroll, YouTube, and BOST TV) at the same time as their premieres next month. In my 2008 predictions post, I posited that a Japanese studio would release English-subbed episodes near simultaneously with its original airing  - a statement I qualified at the time as a possible “crazy failure” but I’ll take wins however I can get ‘em.

The question now is how this will be implemented on each service. The highest free quality out of the three websites would seem to come from BOST but YouTube has a boatload more traffic and reach than the other two, mainly due to its embedding option. Crunchyroll is buddy-buddy with select publishers but pretty much everyone else hates them. I’m pretty sure the subtitle text will be the same across the uploads and hopefully someone fluent in Japanese (i.e. not me) will critique its accuracy compared to fansubbed efforts. I will likely check out episodes on each service when this rolls out in a couple weeks but you can react to this right now in my first poll in a while. Anyway, this is a great step in trying to get more official eyeballs that will hopefully convert into sales and I hope that it succeeds so other studios will do something similar.

Original pic courtesy of Lelouch’s Myspace blog

Lucky Star’s first US volume got dated about three weeks ago and now we find out about the extras that limited edition purchasers expect to find inside the pretty art box come May 6th. The $35 ”upgrade” will yield you pack-ins in the vein of the Haruhi LEs but tweaked a bit: the opening theme and Konata character single CDs, a T-shirt version of Ryou-ou Gakuen’s winter girl’s school uniform that frankly looks kinda lame, and a chocolate cornet screen wipe that actually might be useful. The regular edition will still feature liner notes so you can understand the more obscure references as well as “The Adventures of Minoru Shiraishi” which may or may involve footage from the fan events he hosted.

Considering the Haruhi CD singles are individually priced at $10 each and T-shirts sell for about, you’re getting a bit of a deal. One question: will all the tees be the same size, e.g. large? If so, that may cause trouble for some buyers. I remember the FLCL Ultimate Collection included a postcard to send in for your free shirt but it took over a year and a month to finally get it in the mail so there’s definitely a tradeoff between speed and getting the right size.