Anime A to Z Project: Akira

Recently I decided to alphabetize my anime collection.  That’s one of the extremely odd things I do for fun, organize things.  Alphabetical organization is nice and easy, I don’t have to worry about trying to fit anime into just one category whether it be genre, animation studio or region 1 distributor.  Weird, I know.  I would do the same to my manga, but there’s just too many volumes to be able to do that in one day.  I probably couldn’t even manage it in one weekend.

Basically, if you’re wondering what the basis of my Anime A to Z Project, that’s it.  I re-organized my anime collection in a fit of OCD.  I also decided that’s how I’m going to watch my collection, until in a fit of pique, I change my mind.  That, or simply decide I feel like watching something out of order.

The subject for today’s post is Akira.  I’m in a weird middle ground of anime fans where I’m too young to remember Akira showing in movie theaters or the initial dub for it, but I’m just old enough to have heard of Akira, and received a copy of the newer dub for Christmas while I was still in high school, I think.

Having just watched it again, I think Akira is still pretty relevant.  Sure, it doesn’t have the prettiest looking characters ever, but that’s not the point and would actually detract from the movie.  The main characters are a group of punks that run around on their motorcycles at night.

Personally, the biggest draw in the movie for me is Kaneda.  He’s something different than your current typical shonen hero: he’s COMPLETELY normal.  There’s no superpowers, and no latent abilities whatsoever.  The only thing that sets Kaneda apart from everyone is that he’s the leader of his gang and his awesome bike.  For the rest of the movie, he has no idea what’s going on, and he’s just doing the best he can to try and save the guy that he’s used to protecting.  As long as I can get behind at least one character in a movie/series, I will watch the entire thing, and I am completely behind Kaneda.  He’s thrust into a complex situation with absolutely no preparation for it.

So go watch Akira.  It’s considered a classic for good reason.  Also, it’s now on blu-ray, so it’s easily available.

Gurren Lagann: Childhood’s End & Misc News

My week’s been hectic.  I’m gearing up for my wedding this weekend, and I’ve had not a lot of time for reading manga, watching anime, or playing video games.  Of course this means that I REALLY want to do all 3.  After this weekend……

Yesterday, I came home to find the first Gurren Lagann movie on the table waiting for me, which was a pleasant surprise because I forgot that I had ordered it.  There was some accidental good timing on Bandai’s part, because I read about the movies being available through their website right after I had finished watching the series, and full of the warm glow the series had left me with, I ordered both movies.  I found out somewhat later that they’re just recaps of the series, but I figured that could be good too.

So I decided to watch it when I went to bed, which was probably not the best of ideas because I tend to drift off to sleep pretty quick once I’m cozy and watching pretty much anything on my television, boring or not.  Needless to say, the movie kinda dragged.  I did enjoy taking the trip back into the series and reliving all of Kamina’s awesome one-liners, but after a while even the novelty of that left me.

I am very much in favor of the awesome Yoko/Adiane fight scene however.  That was cool, and the fanservice didn’t bother me a bit.  I actually think it was pretty cleverly done, and ended up more toward the badass end of the spectrum rather than sleazy.

Other than that, I was a little disappointed in the movie.  I watched it with an eye toward introducing new viewers to Gurren Lagann, but I don’t think the movie would be better for that than the series itself.  The beginning is fairly strong, introducing Simon, Kamina, Yoko, and the others, but the middle was too random and just jumped around too much to draw in someone who hadn’t already seen all the footage being covered.  As you may know I’m currently “mentoring” a number of newbie anime fans, so I like to keep an eye out for anything that’s easily accessible to them.

I still like the movie generally though.  It’s good to pop in if I don’t feel like shuffling discs, and there is that great fight scene.  I’m really looking forward to getting the second movie.

I’ve been doing some manga reading, picking up first volumes of various series, mostly because I found them for cheap at the local Hastings when I go to visit my mom.  Recently I’ve read Crying Freeman, vol. 1, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, vol. 1, My Heavenly Hockey Club, vol. 1, and in keeping with my recent habits, Butterflies, Flowers, vol. 3, Black Butler, vol. 2, and Deadman Wonderland, vol. 2.  Pretty good variety.  I’ve had to scale back my spending some, but that really just means that I keep up on around 4 titles, and just put the rest on hold until I can afford to binge-spend, or I start looking up cheap volumes.  My personal favorite of all those is Butterflies, Flowers which is a mature josei (ladies’) title, with surprising amounts of twisted humor.  I literally laughed out loud a few times, and I generally never laugh out loud when I’m reading anything.

I’m trying to clear a few titles off of my “currently watching” list on MAL.  At the moment, I’m in the middle of around 25 anime, which is just too many.  I’ll make exceptions for One Piece and Bleach, since they’re long and not yet ended, but pretty much everything else had an ending, and I need to get to it.  I just finished Ippatsu Kikimusume, and the next series I finish will be Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and Spice and Wolf.  I just borrowed both seasons of Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex from a coworker, so I’m trying to clear a few series before I start on those.

Like I mentioned in the beginning of the post, I’m getting married this weekend.  It’s pretty exciting, but I’m currently of the opinion that the ceremony is definitely not worth it.  As much as I LOVE getting to see my mom, dad, and brother all at the same time, plus aunts, uncles, and other friends and coworkers that I haven’t seen in a while all in one place, the logistics of being “in charge” of an event where people are constantly telling me what I should do is very irritating.  What’s also irritating is people telling me it’s my event and that I should just do what I want.  Try telling that to the people telling me what to do, thanks.  End rant.  I’m really very excited, and the most exciting bit for me is that I designed (with help) my own dress.

I used a pattern of course, and I also got help sewing the top, since that’s a little advanced for my newbie/beginner skills, but I did most of the work on the skirt, and the color scheme and everything else was my idea.  So at least I’m doing exactly what I want with the dress, which really is fine by me.   I’ll try and post a picture sometime next week for you guys.

Cat Soup’d or This Cannot End Well…

I have a mischievous streak.  I’m also extremely shy, so that streak usually stays hidden unless I’ve known a person for years, or if I become instantly comfortable with that person.  The way this streak manifests among people that I’m cultivating to become otaku is that I “make” them watch Cat Soup at some point.

If you haven’t seen Cat Soup, I’d recommend it with a warning: unless you have an idea what’s going on, you won’t know what’s going on.  Heck, even if you know what’s going on, it still won’t make sense.  It’s a very random movie.

Cat Soup could be summed up in the following way: it’s the journey of two kittens to retrieve the girl kitten’s soul from Death.  Alternatively it could be summed up as two kittens journeying to the grocery store to buy bean curd for Mama cat.

Basically I trick people into watching Cat Soup by giving them the technically correct summary.  Then I sit back and watch their head explode.  I do try to be somewhat nice about it by only really showing it to people once I think they’d be ready for it.  I don’t want to scare them away from anime forever.

My latest victim was a coworker who’s been chatting me up about anime and manga.  I’d lent him Cat Soup a month or two ago and he’s just now gotten around to watching it.  Every week, he’d tell me he was going to watch it, and I’d nod and think to myself, “yeah I’ll *know* when you watch it, hehehe.”

He claims that he has something worse than Cat Soup, that he’s going to dig out for me to watch.  I guess I’ll be waiting for that to see what happens.  I think I have a trump card already for that though.  My next act may just be to convince him to watch the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie.  Oh hohohoho!

Dragonball Evolution is the greatest movie ever

No, I don’t actually believe that.  I’d really be in trouble or have some terrible taste if I did believe it.

Honestly, it’s one part sarcasm, and one part stubbornness.  The stubbornness springs from the fact that I regularly converse with a person who’s only seen approximately 20 minutes of Dragonball Evolution, but swears that it’s the worst movie ever made.  Which is in fact, untrue.  Don’t get me wrong, Dragonball Evolution is a BAD movie, but I’ve seen worse.  This attitude is just annoying me enough that I will now attempt to annoy that person by defending the movie every time he badmouths it.

It’s weird, but that’s the way I am.  It really annoys me to read/hear people’s opinions when they don’t even bother to watch/listen/read whatever they have the opinion about.  What’s worse is when a person accepts another person’s opinion as their own.  That’s just lazy.  Why bother having an opinion about something you never plan to watch then?  I really don’t get it.

In non-ranting updates, I’ve finally finished watching Gurren Lagann, and I have to admit that the ending had some tears coming to my eyes.  It’s been a little while since I really enjoyed what I was watching as much as Gurren Lagann, and I’m glad that the ending was…..an ending.  Honestly, I really liked the ending.

Since I finished Gurren Lagann out of my personal collection, I’ve moved on to Vandread which is not as good as I remembered it being.  I have the sinking feeling that this is going to be the trend for a lot of the anime I watched when I first became a fan, unfortunately.  It has a great premise: battle of the sexes in space.  Unfortunately, it really just turns into space harem with combining robots and one hell of a bitchy lead.  He is completely unlikable, but I still like a few of the side characters, such as the elderly captain of the female pilots, and the merchant guy who operates their ship naked.  Poor guy.  I’m just going to try and get through both seasons as quick as I can and move on to the next title in my collection.  If I ever finish, I will definitely be thinning it out.  I own some terrible anime.

I caught up with Fullmetal Alchemist:Brotherhood on hulu, so I started watching Spice and Wolf since it expires the soonest (May 14).  I’ll admit that a lot of the subject matter is pretty dry, and it’s definitely not for the average viewer, but I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve been enjoying watching it.  There’s an excellent chance I’ll end up buying it.  It’s a nice contrast to a lot of the other anime I watch, with it’s calmer pacing and excellent music.  I think that the music helps to draw me in even when my attention starts to wander away from the screen.

It’s shocking that I’ve posted twice in the same week now.  If you know Missouri weather, it’s been back and forth between summery warm and wintery chilly for the past month, and it really messes with me.  I spent most of last week simply working and sleeping, since I was pretty run down.  I’m feeling better so far this week though, so hopefully that stays true.  I hope all you guys are doing well too.

Inappropriate Voices: Zero Kiryuu

Viz finally announced some of the dub voice cast for Vampire Knight a while back, and in their announcement Vic Mignogna was listed as the voice for Zero.  Which I personally find disappointing, because Zero is the ONLY reason I read/watch Vampire Knight, and I just think Vic won’t fit.  I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  I can’t really judge without actually hearing the dub, right?

So to give myself some amusement, I decided to think of voice actors that would be even MORE inappropriate for the role of Zero.  Here’s my list so far, feel free to add any you think of in the comments.

• Steve Blum
• Crispin Freeman
• Spike Spencer
• Greg Ayres
• Mr. T

Successful test!

Anime is available in more forms now than when I first became a fan, back when I was in high school.  As great as streaming is, I do remember the bad old days of taking an obscenely long amount of time to watch a low resolution, 2 minute video.  So I tend toward skepticism every time some new bit of technology is proclaimed as the greatest thing to ever happen.  Mostly because there are always bugs, and the lowest common denominator is hardly ever taken into consideration.

What the heck am I talking about?  Today, I’m talking about my tower.  It’s very slow, and not terribly reliable, although I haven’t had any problems with it lately.  I wasn’t even sure streaming would work well until I tested that out this past weekend, watching anime on Hulu and Crunchyroll.  To my surprise, both worked without a hitch.  Both sites ran 99% perfectly, which is great, because that means I can chip away at my 700-episode queue on Hulu, and watch some more current stuff on Crunchyroll.

What did I watch?  I’m currently trying to catch up on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, but I don’t actually see that happening any time soon.  It really depends on my mood when I get home from work.  On Crunchyroll, I gave Durarara! a try – both because I finished Baccano! recently and liked it, and because Durarara! had been recommended to me.  I’ve watched 3 episodes and I like it so far.  It’s very intriguing and I actually like that the pace seems more laid back than Baccano!.  I just hope the ending doesn’t annoy me as much as the ending to Baccano! did.

So what would you suggest I watch on either site?  Or, what are you all currently watching?  I’m curious, and questions are a good way to end this relatively short and sweet post.

Seel! Wait, I mean Ciel!

If you follow me on twitter, you might remember that I complained quite a bit last weekend about sitting next to a guy wearing a skirt.  If you don’t follow me on twitter, that’s cool because I’m going to relate the entire story anyway.

This past weekend was Naka-Kon, a Kansas City anime convention running for its sixth year at the Hyatt Regency Crown Center.  I had applied to be staff this year, and I could be found at the Volunteer desk.  Whenever my director was away from the desk for a while there was usually another staff member sitting there with me.  One happened to be a guy cosplaying Riku Harada from D.N. Angel.  His costume was nice, it was just too bad that he completely acted like a guy.  Wearing a dress.  He would sit in his chair with his legs wide open, and then turn toward me to stare at what I was writing.  It was terribly awkward for me, mostly because I couldn’t leave, and I didn’t want to speak to him.  He’d already tried talking to me, but just quit after I didn’t show any signs of being impressed by what he was saying.

The funny thing is he’d talked to my roommate the day before.  Unfortunately that bit of conversation formed my initial not-exactly-positive image of him.

Him: Hey, you’re Rikku!

Roomie: …..yep.

Him: I’m Riku too!

Roomie: …..that’s cool. (shifty eyes)

Him: We should get a Riku from Kingdom Hearts, and (something I don’t remember), and make a whole group of just Rikus!!

Roomie: …uh….yeah.

Then we took our leave of him. Quickly.

I was happy to see a pretty complete cosplay group for Kuroshitsuji at Naka-kon.  I was surprised too, since the anime is (to me) pretty new, and not licensed (as far as I know).  I had personally just started watching Kuroshitsuji a couple weeks before Naka-kon, so I was especially tickled to see the cosplay group, and since I was working, sent the roomie off with my camera to get pictures of them.

Which brings me to my main-ish subject of this post: Ciel Phantomhive.  Starting Kuroshitsuji, I really didn’t like Ciel all that much.  He just seemed to me to be your fairly typical young, educated/smart, aristocratic, expressionless male.  In short, he’s better than everyone, and lets them know that they bore him.  It’s really overdone, so I’ll admit that I wrote him off.

Then I saw the episode of the anime where Ciel had to be disguised as a girl, wearing one pink and frilly dress.  That’s cause for chuckles normally, but it actually got me to like him.  The reason I started liking Ciel with his whole cross-dressing fiasco is that he was visibly uncomfortable with his situation.  His stance and expression showed his discomfort and the fact that he definitely did not want to be doing that.  Having to avoid his fiancee helped with the humor/discomfort.  For me, that made Ciel relatable.  He didn’t do the “cool guy” thing of showing absolutely no change in expression, and that’s why I now like him, at least more than I did.

A Sound Soul…

I’ve been taking advantage of Funimation’s streaming site to watch Soul Eater.  They’d been releasing episodes on a pretty regular schedule, so I’ve been able to watch the entire show subtitled, and hopefully help the American industry by doing just that.

Soul Eater is based on manga by Atsushi Okubo, which is being serialized in America by Yen Press.  The animation was done by Bones, and it premiered in Japan in April of 2008.  Currently as you might have guessed or known, the North American license is held by Funimation, who will be releasing the first box set of the anime next month.

From this point on, my review may contain some spoilers.  I promise it’s nothing major.

The basic premise of Soul Eater rests on the DWMA, a school for meisters and weapons.  They study and train to keep the big bad from returning to the world and wreaking havoc.  The secondary goal for some meisters is to make their weapons into a “Death Scythe,” or a weapon that Lord Death himself would use, by taking the souls of 99 Afreets (think evil demons) and 1 witch.

In the beginning of Soul Eater, you’re introduced to 3 teams.  Maka Albarn is a scythe meister, and Soul Eater Evans is her weapon.  They begin the series with their 99 Afreet souls, and are after a witch named Blair.  However, when they take Blair’s soul, they find that she wasn’t a witch and that all the work they’d done up to that point is now nullified.  The next team consists of Black*Star, a meister who’s training to be an assassin, and his weapon, Tsubaki, who has multiple forms.  They had a chance to get their Afreet and witch souls all in one go, but Black*Star passes his chance to instantly make Tsubaki into a Death Scythe.  The last team consists of Lord Death’s son, Death the Kid, and his weapons, Liz and Patty Thompson, who transform into guns.  Death the Kid’s purpose is to create his own weapons rather than let them be created for him, as Lord Death’s successor.

As Soul Eater will be a new release next month, I won’t be going much more into plot.  After some accidental research on wikipedia, I am aware that the anime takes a pretty drastic right-turn from the manga.  I’ve only read the first volume of the manga as it’s been available here, so I don’t have much of a frame of reference beyond that right now.

I personally found Soul Eater to be entertaining with a good cast of characters, and some eye-catching character and world designs.  It’s rather simple, but that also makes it easy to follow which is a plus for me, because I’m usually just looking for something entertaining when I watch anything.  It can be thought of as shonen anime with it’s themes of friendship and fighting.  I’ve been working to spread it around to some friends also, which means that I’ve watched some of the earliest episodes as many as five times, which means that I find it easily rewatchable.  That’s always good in my book.

My favorite part of Soul Eater is definitely the characters.  I think that Maka is one of the best female characters that I’ve come upon on anime recently.  She’s capable, smart, and fights beyond her own fear.  The boys in her class treat her as an equal rather than someone who constantly needs to be rescued.  Unfortunately she also falls into that tired anime trope – where are her parents?  Her father, Spirit is currently Death Scythe and stays by Lord Death’s side as his personal weapon, and her mother is completely absent.  There’s nothing said about the whereabouts of Maka’s mother until nearly the end of the series when Maka receives a post card from her.  I did think that the fact that Maka’s mother and father are going through a rather messy divorce while Maka lives on her own with Soul was weird.  Maka’s father is a deadbeat dad who’s going through a divorce because he can’t stop going to men’s clubs and flirting with pretty much any woman he sees, but he shouts his devotion for Maka every chance he gets.  Having a father that consistently threatened to embarass me in public does give me some sympathy for Maka and her plight, at least as far as her father goes.  Maka’s weapon, Soul Eater is obsessed with being “cool.”  There really isn’t much more to him than that.  Later on you’ll see Soul’s inner struggles in the form of a demon with a giant head and tiny body.  This gets to be pretty integral to the plot.

My favorite character is Black*Star, who manages to be the complete opposite of what he should be.  He trains to be an assassin but his ego demands that he shout his presence to the world, especially when it’s detrimental to his mission.  Later in the series, he’s aware of this, but it does him no good, he usually thinks about it after he’s already shouted.  Black*Star is the “man who will transcend God,” and allows nothing to obstruct his path to greatness.  He has some great development over the course of the series.  One of the best things the writers did was to hand Black*Star a taste of defeat and the opportunity to overcome that.  His weapon is Tsubaki, who takes the form of multiple ninja tools, but mostly she’s a chain scythe.  She’s quiet and exceedingly polite, and the only person who can put up with Black*Star for any amount of time.  She offers him absolute support, constantly.  I don’t remember any point in the series where she doubts him verbally, although it doesn’t keep her from flat telling him when she thinks he’s done something wrong and needs to fix it.

Death the Kid is very nearly topples Black*Star from being my favorite character.  His obsession with symmetry is his major trait.  This obsession is so strong that it gets in the way of his battles, causing Kid to abandon his weapons, Liz and Patty in the middle of fights to go check that his toilet paper looks nice, or to make sure that painting in the foyer is lined up just right.  Good thing Liz and Patty are capable of fighting on their own, and some of the scenes where they switch between being the gun and being the wielder of the gun are some of the best action scenes.

I’m not going to go into the rest of the characters, because that would make this a ridiculously long post, and it’s pretty long already.  I did have some problems with this anime.  There’s obviously a structure for a large overarching plot, but the episodes themselves felt choppy to me, and didn’t really have much connection from one episode to the next.  You can pick up the series at nearly any point without missing out on much, which is both a strength and a weakness.  It’s a strength because that does make it more accessible to more viewers.  It’s a weakness because that takes away any kind of reason to watch all the episodes.  The first dozen or so episodes felt very disjointed to me, and that bothered me some while I was watching.  I did like the three seperate introduction episodes for the three main teams.  That was a good way to introduce the world, and the main players, and it didn’t take away from their particular character development by trying to mash the introduction in with the ongoing plot.

Once the plot got really rolling, it was good.  The pacing was nice, not speedy, but quick enough to keep me intrigued.  In the second half, though, there’s a lot of new characters introduced and lost in the shuffle of the greater plot.  There’s a big lack of character development that is understandable if you think of the episode limit, but it’s still a shame.  I would loved to have seen more of the other DWMA students, or the members of the opposing factions.

Personally, I would have liked to seen more character development overall.  I thought the characters were the best part of Soul Eater and some of my biggest problems with the anime stem from how characters were handled.  In particular, I didn’t much like most of Dr. Stein’s story – who I realize I have not mentioned up until this point.  I think this review is long enough already, so maybe I’ll go more into that in a seperate post.

I also would have loved more of the world.  There were tons of questions I had that I would love to have seen answered, like how does someone determine if they’re a meister or a weapon?  Is it hereditary?  Does it happen randomly, or can it be obtained with training?  What makes someone a witch?  Etc etc.  I imagine these questions may be answered in the manga, so I might keep up with it to see if that’s the case.

Overall, I enjoyed Soul Eater.  I’d recommend it to pretty much anybody.  I know that I showed it to some friends that haven’t watched much anime at all and they got a kick out of it, and the husband later thanked me for showing his wife an anime that had a good female character in it.

Claymore – Final Thoughts

I finished watching Claymore a few weeks ago.  I haven’t read the manga at all, but I did already know that there was some raging over the ending.  The impression I got is that the anime closed a door that the manga left open, and I can see how that would be irritating.

I found the ending irritating without even having read the manga.  I’m not going to spoil much of anything, because I think Claymore is still fairly new, and if you wanted to spoil it, you could go look it up elsewhere.  I will completely admit to being lazy.

As you may know from earlier posts, I initially did not like Claymore much, but I kept watching it anyway.  As the series went on, I found myself gradually drawn into the story.  By episode 8, I was fully invested in the series.  I’ll readily admit that I still find the supporting cast more interesting than Claire, the main character.

The ending seemed rushed though.  There was no real resolution, and the big bad just shrugged and walked away.

Also, a petition for a second season of Claymore has been started by enterprising fans.  I went ahead and signed, figuring, hey it could be alright.  I’m not exactly sure where Claymore could go from it’s end, but it was an open ending.  The big bad could easily be the main villain again, and chaos can ensue.  I haven’t read the manga, and honestly I doubt I’ll get to it any time soon as I have plenty of manga I’m keeping up with already, and I tend to read shoujo slice of life drama/romance over action manga.

In conclusion, if you’d like to see a good action anime with women that kick ass, watch Claymore.  There’s plenty of action there, and pretty decent story to go along with it.  The ending is pretty meh though.

Pac-Man the Eater of Souls

Funimation has been streaming a show on its website that I have really taken to. It’s a long overdue reimagined adaptation of the classic 80’s video game Pac-man, when translated into English is “Eater of Souls”, or more commonly known as, “Soul Eater”.

It follows the adventure of our favorite yellow circle as his girlfriend, Ms Pac-Man (no relation as far as I can tell) is kidnapped and taken into the “Society of Souls”, or “Soul Society” for short. There he evades capture from the spirits, or “ghosts” as they are sometimes called, all while trying to collect all the “Pac-dots” he can eat, and perhaps any fruit or pretzels that might come his way.

At one point he collects one of the four coveted “Power Pellet” and is then able to take on the main four Ghost/Souls, Shadow the Blinky, Bashful the Inky, Pokey the Clyde, and finally the leader, and toughest of the four ghosts, Speedy the Pinky. The problem is this power is limited and he goes back to being the one chased. Fortunately he has three more that he can get that will once again restore him back to being able to take them down.

Now mind you I may have dozed off during a good chunk of the series so I might have a few details wrong. In fact, I might be confusing this whole thing and might not have remembered any of it correctly. Hmm, maybe I should go back and rewatch it while awake.