Nigorimasen! Blog

Funimation announced their license of Ookiku Furikabutte today but they changed the name to ‘Big Windup!’ WHAT!?! I can understand changing an anime’s name to make it more accessible to American audiences as ADV did with The Ugly and Beautiful World (Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai) and even Rumbling Hearts (instead of The Eternity You Desire/Wish For) is something fans would be able to get used to over time. But renaming can also make things confusing, like what I thought happened with Shattered Angels (instead of Kyoshiro and the Eternal Sky), which actually isn’t as bad as I first thought. I credit part of my frustration to being a baseball fan and when I see ‘Big Windup!’, I think of an announcer saying the title of a baseball video game marketed toward kids that could have broader appeal (e.g. MLB Power Pros, very good game but not so good announcer) or a in-game powerup that also sounds cheesy when spoken. I am NOT looking for the trailer Funimation puts together whenever this gets released in late 2009 (self-speculation) but am sort of anticipating its actual release.

In the meantime, I will be watching fansubs of the show to see if it’s good. (I saw the first episode a few weeks back and, though it was slow, I saw some potential in it so, like a minor league scout, I’m going to give it a chance and hope it improves.)

*sigh* OK, I did find it clever that they parodied the MLB logo to make the series’ logo but I’m still not pleased about the name. I would have been fine with Pitch Like You Mean It! or a less cheesy name I can’t think of right now.

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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I found this news report on Nico and want to say two things about it:

1) It’s odd but a bit nice that the synthesized-voiced reporter felt the Gurren Lagann/Sci-Fi Monday deal was important enough to pass along to the NicoNico audience (about 700 views worth). Here’s the related story from Anime! Anime!.

2) That was one of the driest news reports I’ve ever seen, but it does get the information across in a straightforward way.

For those who don’t know, Weiß Schwarz is a 2 player trading card game like Project Revolution where you try to beat your opponent by using characters from various series. In the case of the advertised TCG, the series currently involved include Zero no Tsukaima, Little Busters!, Disagea, and Persona 3. [Akibahara Channel]

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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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.

Lucky Star Vol. 1 regular edition cover (Japanese Vol. 2 LE cover)

Anime on DVD spotted new listings on Right Stuf for Lucky Star Volume 1 (episodes 1-4) with the release date currently scheduled for May 6th. It looks like Kadokawa Pictures USA is going down the same release path that they did with Haruhi by releasing a $29.98 standard edition and a $64.98 limited edition plus box. The extras in the limited edition aren’t known right now - the pics on TRSI only show the outside of the box - but I’m guessing there will probably be some pack-in items. LE pics after the jump.
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