Blu-Ray

As I mentioned in the second Anime Autobiography post, serial experiments lain is, by far, my favourite anime, and the show that really made me into an anime fan. So, when Funimation finally, two years after licensing it, released it on glorious blu-ray I felt obligated to pre-order it.

Now, I’ll focus on this specific release rather than the series itself for this post, but I will say that what I love about lain is the show’s ambition. Writer Konaka Chiaki and his co-creators really packed a lot of ideas into this show, and the result is a series dense with information. There’s a good deal of exposition and a few infodumps, and though the generally slow pacing keeps this from getting totally out of hand, it is fair to use one of the episode titles, “infornography,” to describe this show’s approach to storytelling. If you want to know a little more about the show itself, I’d recommend reading Lawrence Eng’s short review (his site, “thought experiments lain,” is also a great resource for information on the show’s many allusions and plot points).

Just today, I finished rewatching the second season of Fate/Zero on the recently-release blu-ray box set. Since I’ve reviewed the full series as well as the first box set, I’ll go ahead and give my thoughts on this second set as well. Most of what I said about the first set will also apply to the second, so I’ll focus on the things that are different, including a few disappointments.

Once again, the video and audio is very well done. In the first set the studio, ufotable, added some material - a few shots in the episode where Rider and Waver find Caster’s hiedout, and several minutes to the episode “Discussing the Grail” (the episode which formed the basis of this post). Here, as far as I can tell, there is no new material; I assume there’s been some touch-up work, but if anything extra was added I didn’t notice.

As one of the brave ones willing to shell out $370 for shiny discs, yesterday I finished rewatching Fate/Zero on glorious blu-ray. Since it’s a limited edition I don’t know how much longer it’ll be available, or if it is even now. For those curious, though, I figured I’d share my thoughts on how it turned out. I won’t say much about the content of the show, except, “Go watch it.” It’s an excellent series, and I’m looking forward to the second season, which starts in a couple weeks.

Yesterday, I watched Jurassic Park for the first time in a solid twelve years or so. It was a favourite film of mine as a child, and also one of my family’s the most memorable theatre moments, at least for my parents. Little five-year-old me was apparently so terrified I almost crawled over the back of the seat, but I still got my parents to take me to see it multiple times after that (they’d learned their lesson, though, and we sat in the back row on future visits). On VHS, I watched the film constantly, bought lots of the toys, and overall it was a defining film for my childhood.