Yesterday, Fate/Zero came to its conclusion. I’m sad to see it end, too, because I can’t remember the last time an anime had me this excited. I can even put a price tag on this one, $700 - $370 for the first season (reviewed here) and $330 for the second.
Fate/Zero is a series that does almost everything right. Taking the animation, for instance, very few TV productions look this good.
<– Uncle Walt-a-thon: Snow White
So, after a brief delay the Uncle Walt-a-thon continues, this time with Pinocchio. Like Snow White, it’s a technically impressive film with the art, animation, and music. The character art, in particular, improved noticeably. In the older film, characters sometimes stood out against the background due to a simpler colour palette and less texture, like they were obviously animated separately from the environment they were in.
While I was still at university, I bought the second season of Rozen Maiden, based on the comic series by Peach-Pit, called Rozen Maiden Träumend. I liked the comic, and figured I would find the first season at some point. I did find that first season four years later, when Netflix finally got it back in stock, so I recently got to make use of my ancient purchase.
I’ll start with just a few words about the first season, because S1 was a simply mediocre affair.
Dark Horse just released Ueda Hajime’s comic adaptation of FLCL in omnibus form, and though I already own Tokyopop’s old two-volume release I went ahead and double-dipped on this. The comic holds some nostalgic value for me, since I actually read it long before I saw Gainax’s original anime version. Dark Horse did include some extras to make it worthwhile, and it’s a unique enough comic that it’s well worth the purchase.
This past weekend, I started an Uncle Walt-a-thon. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be watching every major animated Walt Disney film. First up was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Overall, it was quite good, primarily as an animation showpiece. The background art was done with a soft colour palette, similar to water colours, which gives it a childlike, storybook feel. It reminds me somewhat of last year’s Wandering Son.
In his mostly autobiographical comic Disappearance Diary, Azuma Hideo notes that in order to maintain an optimistic outlook on life, he’d removed as much realism as possible from his book. Azuma’s dry humour and cartoony art style make what should be a depressing story about a man running away from his responsibilities and living homeless seem rather light-hearted and funny.
Author Takimoto Tatsuhiko, in the afterword to his novel Welcome to the NHK, notes that his book also has a fair amount of autobiography.
Okay, “sucks” may be a bit strong, but Fujishima Kosuke’s Oh, My Goddess! volume 41… it’s still not very good. Neither were the last couple volumes.
I hate saying that, too, because I’ve really loved this franchise since I started reading in 2009. Nowhere near its 1994 American debut, but still longer than any other comic I follow (a couple webcomics excepted). The series' basic premise, a young man living with a beautiful goddess, is pretty blatant wish-fulfillment fiction, but the characters are likable enough that I can forgive it that.
While browsing around Amazon the other day, I saw a recommendation for Akira Club, which I hadn’t heard of before. Since I like the Akira film and loved the comic, though, I figured I’d check it out.
The book collects Otomo Katsuhiro’s preliminary sketches, promotional art, title pages, and other odds and ends from the Akira comic, along with a couple things for the film adaptation, with many short comments from Otomo.
Code Geass took me a while to get through, partly because Crunchyroll has the first season but not the second, but I finished it. This turned out to be one of those shows that I should’ve watched sooner, because, despite a few problems, it had a lot of things I enjoy - a grand scale, a battle of wits, moral ambiguity, a mix of angst and humour, pizza, and a little sister character, among other things.
Tadano Nobuaki’s 7 Billion Needles starts off right, with an extremely introverted girl walking by the sea and noticing what at first looks like a shooting star, but which then turns towards her and incinerates her.
Awesome.
She gets better, though, and also gets drafted into helping to hunt down an extraterrestrial menace which threatens all life on Earth.
Clearly, Tadano’s story, based on Hal Clement’s Needle, jumps right into the action.