Love Live! (School Idol Project) is the new idol show from Sunrise, specifically Sunrise Studio 8. I gather that these two facts put it entirely within the wheelhouse of things I’m supposed to post about here.

Which is pretty much the main reason why I’m posting about it – honestly, I’m kind of luke-warm on the show as of the first episode. There’s a lot of things I appreciate about it – I think the music is pretty catchy, and whilst I don’t think the writing is particularly sharp, I do think there’s at least a degree of intelligent direction going on. There’s some degree cleverness to the way some sequences cut together at the very least. I’ll probably end up watching the whole show anyway, though, mostly because there’s precious little else that’s caught my attention thus far this season. Infact, there’s been a few shows I’ve not even managed to survive half an episode of.

Anyway, just a few quick thoughts about the shows first episode…

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The Mystical Laws is an anime movie which is currently playing in London, three times a day for one week only. Just let that sink in for a minute – how many anime movies actually have what can be constituted as being a theatrical run, even if it’s just a week in a single cinema, in Blighty these days? Most anime movies are lucky to get a single screening at events like Scotland Loves Anime in more recent times, and even the days of the likes of Pokemon opening theatrically are long gone. That says something about this movie.

That said, it is running in one of the most ghetto cinemas I’ve had the pleasure of attending, despite being part of a well known chain. It was a small screen with no allocated seating, the air conditioning was clearly audible when the movies score wasn’t blasting on all channels, and the lavatories were actually situated just to the left of the screen – had I not been sat in the front row, I’d have had to suffer having an illuminated “Gents” sign in my peripheral vision for the movies two hour running time. This probably also says something about the movie in question.
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There’s a few different ways you could probably attempt to translate the name “Nerawareta Gakuen”. A previous live-action adaptation of the original novel was released in English in some territories as “The Aimed School”, which someone with a slightly better grasp of English may well have rendered as “School Under Target”. “School In Peril” is another alternative title that has been proposed at one point, though it would seem that Sunrise have gone for the rather more straightforward, whilst not a translation at all, “Psychic School Wars” as their moniker of choice for the Japanese-impared.
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The name Katsuyuki Motohiro may not mean much to most anime fans at the moment, as the fact that Psycho-Pass keeps getting referred to as that “new Butch Gen thing” perhaps attests to. Yet, Motohiro’s most recent live action effot, Bayside Shakedown The Final (the latest, and presumably last, spin-off from an earlier TV detective procedural show on which he worked) topped the Japanese box office a couple of weeks ago, and the fact that he’s attached to Psycho-Pass as the shows chief director is bring the series attention from outside of the regular anime fan circles. Which is exactly what the point of Noitamina was supposed to be.

Back in 2000, Motohiro made a movie called Space Travelers. This was back in the day when I seemed to have far more free time and far less to watch, and I liked to buy boatloads of cheap HK releases of goofy Japanese and Korean movies to watch. I picked up and enjoyed Space Travelers back then, but never bother to revisit it. With Motohiro’s name popping back up thanks to Psycho-Pass, and having a three hour train ride into London to kill, I figured this weekend was as good a time as any to revisit it.
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It’s a little difficult to figure out where to start talking about Tiger & Bunny: The Beginning. It’s not exactly a rehash movie, which is typical for Sunrise productions – the straight rehash movies are coming to DVD and Blu-Ray directly before the end of the year in Japan – rather it’s something of a retelling of the first two episodes of the TV show with a great whacking new bit, set between the end of the shows second episode and the beginning of it’s third, stapled onto it’s end.

For what it’s worth, it’s a pretty decent retelling of those first two episodes – they compress the two episodes into about forty, maybe forty-five minutes, which may not sound to compressed until you realise that they added around six or seven minutes of additional footage (not including the all new OP sequence, added to make sure you notice where they’ve added new or changed the sponsors on our heroes costumes). I’m a little divided on some of the new material they added (more on that after I’ve given some spoiler-free impressions), but the stuff they removed was mostly sensible.
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