Whoops, it would appear that it has been over a week since my last update. I can’t really say that there’s been too much going on that has struck me as being worth writing about. I mean, there’s obviously been the whole, sad Satoshi Kon situation, but once the professional publications started chiming in on the matter, there wasn’t much else to say, at least as far as tackling the matter straight on. I have just re-watched Tokyo Godfathers, thinking I might have somehow gotten a Mikan Watch post out of it, but no such luck on that count. Honestly kind of surprised about that.

Which leaves me trying to think of amusing personal anecdotes relating to his works, but the problem there is that I’m really far too boring a person to be the amusing anecdote type. My overwhelming memory of Perfect Blue was taking one of my rare trips to the nearest indie cinema to see the dub – that’s the cinema that’s built right on-top of a busy underground station, which isn’t entirely productive to the movie viewing experience (the screening of The Cat Returns I saw there years later was, mercifully, on the slightly less distracting upstairs screen). That was probably the first theatrical anime screening I went to. Same day as I saw the original Matrix movie, come to think of it… That was certainly a mind-bending day.

As far as the others go, Millennium Actress I’ve yet to watch (that’s for tomorrow, methinks). Tokyo Godfathers I remember ending up with two copies of, one of which I ended up sending to Bluwacky, mostly as a result of feeling guilty about him selling me his copy of Suikoden 2 for a far too reasonable price (although I still feel guilty about having never actually finished the game). Paprika I actually fell asleep trying to watch – less to do with the movie, more to do with having sat up far too late into the night before sticking it on. I guess that falling in and out of consciousness whilst the movie was playing tuned into it’s dream-related themes a little too heavily, providing what was far too surreal a situation when I’d sporadically wake up part-way through something very strange happening. I really need to sit down and watch that movie properly, but I ended up reading the novel shortly afterwards, and I’ve been waiting for both of them to be suitably flushed from my memory before sitting back down to it.

I suppose, all in all, I’m a bad Satoshi Kon fan, so I really wouldn’t have anything to write about him anyway.

That Kara no Kyoukai Blu-ray set that Aniplex just announced isn’t actually too excessively priced, at least comparatively. Given reactions to the price tag, I figured I’d misread it and was missing a zero somewhere – 50,000 may be a lot of yen to be throwing down in one go, but it’s not horrifically priced in comparison to the DVD releases. Sure, it’s more expensive than the standard releases of the KnK movies, but it would work out cheaper than the LE’s were (not that you get the wonderful OSTs with the BR set). Subtitles make it very tempting, though. The price per minute ratio works out well in comparison to most R2 anime releases as well…

That I can justify Japanese media prices as reasonable to myself probably means I’m in a scary place mentally more than it actually being a good price, though. Sensible money is on the likelihood of the subtitles being on these disks meaning that Aniplex will make it directly available in the US at some point in the future, although the fact they’ve screened at least one of the movies outside Japan previously does point to the fact they may have just been producing subtitle scripts anyway. I do hope this bodes well for the Japanese release of Welcome to the Space Show having subtitles when it’s released.

Speaking of Type-Moon, the Unlimited Blade Works movie is out on home media this month. I wasn’t particularly excited about that movie until I saw the shakey-cam footage of the Comiket trailer. I’m sure the story isn’t going to be the most coherent of things (doing any Fate path as a movie seems crazy), but damn it looks pretty…

Otherwise, I’ve been working on Things which I’m not yet ready to talk about just yet – which probably means I’ll never be talking about it once it ultimately ends up abandoned incomplete. It’s been kind of time consuming thus far, though, which I guess is the real reason I’ve not found something worth posting about…

Yes it does – it’s a good piece of art, and the card with which it has been assembled has a nice texture to it. Makes a change from all those shiny chipboard boxes. Of course, it helps that I like the art from the show, though it’s tough for me to put my finger on an exact reason why. I think it’s mostly down to the animation staffs attempts to mimic the style of Takes character designs for the series – they’re deceptively complicated whilst looking tremendously clean. They animate well, though things like the absence of whites in some characters eyes does have the side effect of making it look at little lazy.

And, yes, I realise I’m running about five months behind the rest of the internet here, but I’m behind on pretty much anything which isn’t Occult Academy. Truthfully, I wasn’t really sure how I’d like the show between mixed reactions to the early episodes and less-than-great reports about (admittedly the later volumes of) the novels, but I’ve taken pretty well to it now that I’ve broken down and started. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I simply like meta-humour way more than most – my favourite episode of Macross Frontier would have to have been the one that essentially consisted of a barrage of series in-jokes and trolls. So, basically, when many are complaining about Katanagatari being far too talky, I’m perfectly happy to sit through half an episode of Togame complaining about the undeniably true fact that Shichika is far too dull to stand out against the flamboyant villains they find themselves up against. I kind of thought the setting may have prevented Nisioisin from being able to veer too far in that direction, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
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Not-ADV have pulled their usual trick of not announcing they’ve grabbed a show until they’ve actually solicited it for release, and have just revealed that they’ll be putting out Taishou Baseball Girls (Mandatory link?) and the 2004 subversive magical-girl show Uta-Kata at some point this November.

Taishou is, if not exactly the most interesting of the two, certainly the more eyebrow raising. There’s now a long-established US market tradition of sports-related anime not selling in the slightest, with Funimation having certainly made it abundantly clear that Big Wind-up did absolutely terrible for them. I suppose Not-ADV would be the only R1 label with past experience of releasing shows about plucky girls taking on the establishment by playing baseball, having released Princess Nine, but that was a long, long time ago, and market conditions are very, very different to what they were back then. You’ll have to forgive me for not really thinking that cute girls are quite enough to counteract the consumer-kryptonite that is the baseball part of the equation, regardless of what element takes precedence in the show.

Which just really makes it a shame that Sentai tends not to say a whole lot about anything these days – regardless of whether or not it does terribly or astonishing well, we’ll probably never get any reliable indication of it. Ho-hum.

…Sure has small subtitles on DVD – on the average R1 release we’d probably be seeing this level of text filling the whole bottom line of the screen rather than just half of it. This is, I think, a Good Thing. Admittedly, I’m watching this off a decent, moderately sized TV where the limitations things like resolution (or lack there-of) are not an issue, but given the hoops required to be jumped through for anyone outside Japan to obtain this release on disk, I’m hardly expecting anyone to be watching this on their old SD CRTs.

Which I suppose gives the R1 a get-out clause for not following suit, as viewing conditions are less guaranteed. I really wish there’d be more options on R1 DVDs, though – this proves that less obtrusive subtitles are possible even within the limits of the DVD specification, and it’s be nice to be given the choice to use such things for those who find them perfectly readable.

So, yeah, Black Rock Shooter was certainly an OAV. I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say too much about it, for I neither really found it particularly fantastic nor particularly terrible. It did rather try too hard to be cute with it’s structure, with it’s alternating between the “real” world and the “other” world content. It didn’t exactly entirely make sense – the opening sequence with BRS battling Black Gold Saw was not only entirely extraneous to the rest of the OAV, but doesn’t really fit in with what can be established with regards to the Other world material. Whilst it’s clear that the remainder of the Other world material takes place after the Real world storyline, BRS is lacking the scars in that opening sequence she has in all others (including the one where she merges with Mato). This throws out the easily establishable logic of BRS being the alternate incarnation of Mato out the window, despite the fact that the introduction of STR in Other is presented simultaneously to Yuu within Real.

Which just begs to question precisely what all that was about. Well, beyond being a convenient way to disguise the fact that by jumping days, weeks and even months between scenes within Real would make matters a touch disorientating without them being broken up. It’s just a shame that by essentially using them as transitional sequences to clearly delineate the Real world sequences, they rather ruin what would, if strung together sequentially, be a fairly coherent and rather awesome action sequence.

Honestly, and whilst this probably flies a little against others logic, I do think the whole OAV is rather on the too long side – not necessarily for the content being presented, but at least for the way that they chose to present it. If nothing else, I really don’t think we needed the Super Happy Lets Be Friends Montage padding the whole production out by a few minutes. Black Rock Shooter was hamstrung by the limitations of it being an OAV, really. More time to expand the Real world sequences beyond what feels like a too-long episode-recap-like short-hand format would have done things wonders, but without it I can’t help but feel they’d have been better off skimming over it far more quickly.

But, hey, on the positive side, the Other world material really is super-neat – huke’s particular brand of techno-gothic design combined with the high-contrast colour scheme looks great, and whilst I don’t think the animation is quite as slick as some others have suggested, the battle sequences are certainly well executed. It’s just a shame that by stretching matters out with the over-long, err, “ambient” sequences, the ratio of content drops below what I, personally, would have considered to be more ideal.

All this sounds like I’m being far more terribly negative than I’d like, but as I started out by saying, rather than being particularly good or bad, it’s all really just kind of there.

The second episode of the Sodapop Journal podcast discusses print magazines covering enthusiast media. It’s relevant to the interests of this blog thanks to the fact that all three of the participants are former Newtype USA staffers, and whilst I’m pretty sure Chris Johnston and Kevin Gifford have talked about some of this previously on CJ’s own Player One Podcast, there’s at least a few amusing anecdotes about working on the magazine I’d not previously heard on there. There are no earth-shattering revelations of anything, but it’s worth a listen for those interested in the whole ADV implosion.

(Sidenote: So, errr, yeah, I’m finding myself completely without anything worthwhile to write about, at least at length. Maybe I should just start a Twitter and be done with it ^^;)