I’ve decided to start posting some of the wallpapers I make. They are just for my personal use, but I figure hey why not share! I’ll be sharing them in three standard sizes, but if anyone requests a specific ratio I can probably make it for you without much of a problem.
This is one I’ve had for a very long time, but I’m sharing it because I’m constantly coming back to it in my rotations of wallpapers. Otani is adorable at a mere 156cm tall!
I will begin this convention report with a bit of a confession. I have always felt like a C-Grade celebrity in the general anime community. I have enough of a career to have the equivalent of a decent sized IMDB page but I am never going to attend the anime Oscars expect as a seat filler. So being asked to be a featured panelist at a smaller convention like Genericon might not be the starring role in a blockbuster or an awards bait show. I see it more a juicy role in a strong indy film. You might not get the same acclaim but it still feels very rewarding.
As one can guess with a name like Genericon the subject matters involved is going to be slightly esoteric. While the convention started as a science fiction convention it has expanded to include gaming, anime, comics, and other nerdy hobbies. So that means when you see all the Homestuck, My Little Pony, Adventure Time, and Dr. Who cosplayers they are not out-of-place. Oddly enough they were about as common as you would see at any anime convention. That alone seems like a very telling statement. But with Evan Minto as the convention chair this year there was a bit of an anime bias. But that has been present since I attended two years ago. And one of the guests of honor with year was Tim Maughan so the convention had both an anime related guest and a strong science fiction related guest all in one package. Kyle Hebert did add to the anime related content as well but he is no stranger to doing work with video games as well.
So the convention comes down to a simple question: Is the Generic brand equal to the quality of the commercial brand convention but lower price?
Who wasn’t excited to hear about Mamoru Hosoda’s next movie? At this point, he is the anime film director I have my eye on most. Us New Yorkers have been very lucky to have his films appearing at the New York International Film Festival.
I often feel one of the main problems with success is that it raises people’s expectations for your next work. J. D. Salinger’s famous struggle with the success of The Catcher in the Rye immediately comes to mind. Mamoru Hosoda might not struggle with a pressure to the same degree but I feel fandom watches him with a certain amount of expectations after The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars. I know that Narutaki and I had a decently high level of expectations as our Summer Wars review clearly shows. So the question becomes does he live up those high expectations as one of the few young directors still able to make original anime movies that have a wide range of appeal? Does Wolf Children live up to high bar we set for it based on his previous works?
Wolf Children is a film that I mulled over quite a lot after it and was able to realize a few things about the themes. That’s not to say that my gut reaction was irrelevant, but more that the story has layers that can be peeled away. This movie is told from the mother’s perspective of watching her children grow up, change, and move through life. And it is about accepting their decisions even if they aren’t the ones she’d choose for them.
Honestly, being the selfish twenty-something that I am, it was hard to accept the outcome and some of the choices of the characters in the movie. People don’t always turn out the way you want them to, but that doesn’t make their decisions any less relevant. Acceptance is a big part of this film.
Hana, a college student falls in love with wolf man and has two children with him. When he tragically dies Hana is left to raise Ame and Yuki by herself. As the troubles of being a single parent of two lycanthropes mount while living in the big city Hana moves out to the country in hopes that it will help her children. In a rural environment Ame and Yuki mist choose between embracing their feral natures in the wilderness or integrating into human society.
There is quite a bit to love about the story told in Wolf Children. It is an interesting look at the lives of two children caught between two worlds where they don’t exactly fit into either. But the story is mostly from their mother’s perspective. We see how she raises them and how she deals with the decisions they make. A good deal of the first half of the movie is seeing what tribulations Hana must endure to raise her very unique children. The story then shifts when Ame and Yuki start going to school and Hana moves the background as the narrative focuses on the paths of the two wolf children.
Reverse Thieves 