Archive for August, 2008
August 3, 2008 – 10:05 pm
Bandai and Production IG have release GitS SAC, 2nd GIG, and Solid State Society in one Blu Ray pack that includes English subtitles, for ¥28,000. This is great news. EXCEPT, I bought SAC and 2nd GIG less than a year ago for like ¥65,000, under the (mistaken) impression it has English subs. Dude, I am feeling somewhat screwed.
Well, so I have 2 expensive paperweights on my bookshelf, and now I just placed an order for the Blu Ray pack. Happy, joy. Bah. Ugh, this media upgrading shit is killing now. Now that all my favourite anime are finally coming out on remastered DVD box sets, I have to worry about whether they will rerelease on Blu Ray in a couple years?!?! WTF?!!
*sigh* It’s a good thing, but not a happy thing, know what I mean?
EDIT: Oh, sorry, my bad, even more screw. It’s not the whole thing, it’s just the recompiled versions of Laughing Man and Individual Eleven. Okay, total piss off. At least I don’t feel bad for having fansubs of these. Duh. Bah, humbug.
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August 3, 2008 – 8:18 pm
Wow.
All I can say is, wow. Words fail me in conveying the awe I feel upon watching this episode. My first taste of this new Bones series conjures up images of Miyazaki’s Nausicaa mixed with Simoun. An unfair comparison, perhaps, but just the combination to leave me giddily happy. This is the sort of anime I live for.
Bones has always been on my radar, for they do good series fantasy/sci-fi anime, and they do them with strong female characters. I confess I haven’t watched much, but I do love their original (just before leaving Sunrise) Escaflowne, and Kurau. Looks like they have another potential winner with Xam’d. I dunno what it’s about, but the first episode introduced an fine cast of intriguing characters and an imaginative world, which is good enough to hook me. On the technical side, I love the feel of the art and the character designs, which yes harken to Ghibli, but feel terribly refreshing in this action packed scenario.
My favourite so far is the motley crew of the ship in the opening, especially the captain who wins me over with her unorthodox character design and willful attitude. The strange girl who pilot their one-man craft is a close second, because hey, she’s just a reborn Nausicaa on a bigger Mehve :D Well, shades of Miyazaki aside, hints of weird technology and war tension have wet my appetite considerably.
On a another note, I find the BGM impressive and atmospheric. It’s mid-eastern and tribal in nature, especially in the “modern” setting part of the story, which only enhances the deliberate “like our world, but not quite” feel. The OP and ED are catchy, and surprisingly not out of place despite the fact that the OP is by BOOM BOOM SATELLITES, heh. Well, the OP definitely left an impression on me, since “slice of life” scenes shown contrasted so much with the “Nausicaa” portion before. Another plus to Bones for creating this sort of smart dichotomy.
At only one ep, it’s hard to say if Zam’d is bust or boom. Certainly it’s a very ambitious undertaking, judging by the complexity of the world and the large cast of characters; there’s plenty of rope with which Bones could hang themselves by. If they pull it off though, with a coherent story and sufficient attention to key characters, this could well be a strong contender for top anime of the year.
Its times like this when I am reminded to be incredibly grateful to be an anime fan. God, I love anime.
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August 2, 2008 – 10:38 pm
After the disappointment of Mnemosyne, it’s been a rather slow month as I rummage through the new season for something that will satisfy my craving for cool, strong female characters in a dark violent setting. Yeah, I know that sounds so wrong, but that’s what floats my boat. I love well-made anime such as Mushishi and Seirei no Moribito and Patlabor and Escaflowne etc etc, but I will always crave straightforward kickass female noir action.
With Kara no Kyoukai ep 3, it seems that I have found my new pick. I saw ep 1 about a month ago, and it was okay. I was more impressed with ep 2, which features Shiki’s back story (part of it anyway) and sets out the series as a mix of “monster of the week” coupled with non-linear plot advancement. Well, not so much plot, as the telling of the story of Shiki and Kokutou.
The only problem with ep 2 was that I still wasn’t terribly interested in Shiki nor her relationship with Kokotou. It appears that Shiki is a split personality and one of them is a killer who harbours a sort of affection, as far as a sociopath can, for Kokutou. We don’t know why Shiki kills, or who Shiki is, really, but the ep ends with Shiki about to stab Kokutou.
Ep 3, the one which I found the best of the lot, is set between ep 2 and ep 1. Now we see the connections lining up, and Shiki and Kokutou both start feeling more real, less 2-dimensional. The focus of this episode is a girl named Fujino who has been killing members of a gang. Shiki immediately identifies her as “of the same cloth” as herself, ie a killer with an unstable mind, and is quite vehement in her hatred of the girl as Fujino appears to be an indiscriminate murderer; as Touko says, Shiki herself still holds on to certain codes of morality.
This fleshing out of Shiki’s personality makes her more intriguing to me, and the revelation of how she got the puppet arm in ep 1 is also a nice tidbit that I eagerly devoured, as was the nature of her psychic abilities. However, perhaps the best part of this story is Fujino herself, who is a very interesting victim. Her actions are murder, and Kokutou, ever the idealist, still considers it wrong, but he adds that he feels nothing for the men she murdered. Fujino could have been a flat character acting out her brand of insanity, but we are made to feel both sympathy, in that her pain is caused by something out of her control, as well as condemnation, for she is a murderer who denies her own guilt. My favourite part was the very end, when she cries that she wants to live, a sequence which suddenly restores to her a modicum of humanity. Although there seems little chance, for me the ultimate fanservice would be Fujino appearing in later eps to seriously massively kick some bad guy ass, heh.
I liked this part also because I liked the character design for Fujino, and I was very very drawn to her voice. At the end, I noted with pleasant surprise that her VA was Noto Mamiko. That’s just ridiculously good casting :) And again, I had forgotten that Shiki was played by Sakamoto Maaya. Yes, she’s that good.
All in all, I’m very happy with this series, and hope the remaining parts will be as good or better. As long as there’s no romance between Shiki and Kokutou, I think I’ll be well satisfied.
Posted in ANIME, Kara no Kyoukai | No Comments »
