Posts Tagged ‘Kara no Kyoukai’
March 25, 2011
The last episode Gundam Unicorn left us with not so much a cliff hanger as a short pause before the crescendo that is the battle that opens up The Ghost of Laplace. While we get some conversation and character moments this episode is mostly a series of battles. Thankfully these battles are story relevant as opposed to lovely but time-wasting mecha porn filler. The battles are as engaging as they have been in the past although we don’t get much action out of Full Frontal. He mainly seems to be doing the Char the Manipulator not Char the Action Rival shtick this episode. We learn quite a bit about Marida Cruz and how she ties into previous Gundam material. We also get some mandatory Newtype nudity and trippyness as is a UC Gundam tradition. I did realize at the end of the episode that my Snarky Reductionist Theater title for the show would be Mobile Suit Gundam: National Treasure. It seems the main plot shall be Banagher Links pretending to be a calm version of Nicolas Cage as he goes around the historical sites of the Gundam universe solving puzzles that will unlock Laplace’s Box as he is chased by agents of various secret societies. The end of this episode will seem VERY familiar to anyone who has seen a good deal of Universal Century Gundam but it continues the tradition of getting the audience excited for the next episode of Unicorn which is important in an OVA series like this.
I watched the short animation Out of Sight from Taiwan by recommendation from Twitter. It features a little girl whose bag is stolen, her dog then chases down the thief leaving the girl on her own searching the city for him. This is a brilliant piece of work incorporating all five senses in order bring the world to life. The design is stand-out while the little girl wanders the city as it comes in and out of focus. Beautiful, sweet, excellent.
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Posted in Anime, Cartoons, Ongoing Investigations | Tagged detective, Garden of Sinners, Gundam, Kara no Kyoukai, Majin Tantei Nogami Neuro, Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, Neuro: Supernatural Detective, Out of Sight, Princess Tutu, robots, Switch, Type-Moon | 1 Comment »
November 22, 2010
A common complaint I hear about series is that the main characters are bland but the side characters are far more interesting and nuanced. It seems almost epidemic in shonen fighting. In fact Shonen Jump just started a spin-off magazine whose whole purpose is to put the spot light on some of the more popular minor characters in their magazine. The announcement of Super Strong Jump was just the catalyst we needed to bring out one of our post ideas from the back burner about our favorite side characters who would do just as good if not better in their own feature title. Remember that Gunsmith Cats’ Rally Vincent is a spin-off from the original Riding Bean series and look how far she has come.
This post has been brewing for a while, and is by no means a complete listing. But before it got totally out of hand, we had to think of which characters could really use their own stories beyond the fact that we just like them a hell of a lot. This is mere sampling of some of the great side characters that we’re pretty sure could hold their own in a series. Eventhough the title of this post mentions L, he already has a spin-off albeit a bad one, so we’ve come up with a list of other great spin-off options! Oh, yeah, 1/3 of our picks are still detectives though!
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Posted in Anime, Character Studies, Editorials | Tagged detective, Detective Conan, Future Diary, Garden of Sinners, Hayate the Combat Butler, Kara no Kyoukai, Macross Frontier, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, Oblivion Island, robots, Slayers, Type-Moon | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2010
I’m not going to lie to you. This post is mostly an easy post we are doing to recover from the madness and non stop posts that came from our Otakon 2010 coverage. But just because it is easy post doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining. These are all series that we feel have the ability to do really well if they were licensed and translated into English but for one reason or another have not been picked up for the U.S. There might be licensing issues behinds the scenes, the price might be insanely high, there might be a bidding war going on, or dozens of other reasons that are keeping these shows from being picked up. But the #1 cure to such problems is enough customer demand. So what do you think? Are we being delusional about the series we picked? Did we leave anything out that you think is a sure fire success?
Honestly, I find it fun to speculate what would make a good license and why going beyond my own personal desire for a series. There are about a million shows and books that I’d like to own for myself in English but a lot of that is wishful thinking (Legend of the Galactic Heroes will surely be picked up, right? RIGHT?) but with this post it is more about a business stand point or atleast the thinking that these series would do well enough to earn a little bit for the companies releasing them. That being said, I don’t work in the anime and manga business and I only have a vague knowledge of certain aspects of it.
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Posted in Anime, Editorials, Films, Industry, Manga, TV Series | Tagged Kara no Kyoukai, Liar Game, Pretty Cure, Type-Moon, Vinland Saga, Yankee-kun to Megane-chan | 18 Comments »
January 22, 2010
Ah, Tachikoma, how I longed to have you for my own for so long. Okay, so he is a little far from having the real deal, but I’ll take what I can get. He is die-cast metal, I was a bit worried there would be a balance issue what with that huge back end, but no problem! The articulation in his legs is good and his feet and hands are fully poseable. As you can see his crouching position is quite nice. However, his arms don’t fair as well. If I try to give him a sort of excited yatta Tachi pose, they don’t really reach high enough and tend to pop off. But overall he is a good size and detailed making him one of the best I’ve seen avaliable. He also comes with software that allows his to say phrases and light-up and move a little. Though the CD is for Japanese PC only (which of course you can get around).
I recently got a copy of Stolen Hearts by Miku Sakamoto from CMX. Shinobu Okuma is a super short girl who accidentally spills milk all over an expensive kimono that the frightening Koguma brought to school with him. He shames her into working at his grandmother’s kimono shop where she slowly sees that he’s a sensitive guy and not the wannabe Yakuza everyone thinks he is. It is a cute story. I was a bit surprised that by the end of the first chapter Shinobu and Koguma are a couple. Part of me wonders if this was supposed to just be a one shot story that was popular enough to get turned into a series. The first chapter could so easily be self-contained. The characters are solid and entertaining. Everything works really well when Shinobu and Koguma are interacting. My main problem is the story tends to lean on shojo tropes too much and whenever it does so it is at its weakest. The story really shines when its characters are doing something a little outside the mold. It’s a fun read but it is not going to win over any new fans to the genre. I did find the teen rating on the back quite curious. This manga is super chaste. Maybe it gets racier down the line but so far the most anyone does is some hand holding. The only fan service is traditional Japanese clothing service.
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Posted in Anime, Manga, Merchandise, Ongoing Investigations, Toys/Figures, Video Games | Tagged detective, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Kara no Kyoukai, Stolen Hearts, The World I Create, Yotsuba&! | Leave a Comment »
