No, I’m not bidding farewell to the character Katyusha, who appears in the most recent episode of this seasons not-so-secret best show Girls und Panzer, but rather the Russian wartime song of the same name, sang by the character who shares it’s name in the same episode of the same show.

Or maybe not, depending how and when you watched it. You see, not just the song, but the entire scene in question was removed between it’s initial Japanese TV broadcast earlier in the week, and it’s streaming on Crunchyroll this morning – the episode up on Crunchy at the time of writing is in the region of fifty seconds shorter than the average anime episode. Which is kind of annoying for those of us who wait to watch things the entirely-above-board way, particularly when it’s the one scene that everyone else had been highlighting as, well, the highlight of the episode. Ho-hum.
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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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Spotted at this weekends MCM Expo in London, much to my astonishment, an actual, In Real Life Mikan Box. Yes, such things actually exist in the physical, 3D space. I was almost tempted to ask them if they’d sell me the thing, but aside from the fact that I’d have to lug it half-way back across the country, they’d ruined it by taping notices onto it by the time I passed the stand again.

As for MCM Expo, well, it was certainly a MCM Expo. I guess the main things this year were the video game content (both Nintendo and Microsoft had a fair presence, alongside the more nerdy companies which usually show) and the fact that the BBC also showed for pretty much the first time with a big Doctor Who presence (indeed, Matt Smith was there Friday, though I was not). Of course, this just meant that, combined with the cold outside weather pushing those who usually lurk around the front of the ExCel into the main hall, horrific, traffic halting queues broke out in all directions. It was exasperated by some bad, or at least confusing, floor planning which resulted in people who thought they were heading towards an exit were walking towards a wall. Crowded as heck, basically, despite the fact that they had the biggest overall floorspace I can remember.

Generally speaking, though, if you don’t know a bunch of people heading to Expo, aren’t going with a specific shopping agenda (and hopefully know how to spot bootlegs!) or aren’t London-local enough to write the entry off against what you’ll be saving in shipping/product costs, it’s really kind of hard to justify the expense of hitting Expo for the anime crowd. There isn’t really enough anime-related programming going on, and it’s kind of exasperated with annoying scheduling like putting the anime industry panel opposite Hiroshi Maruyama from CyberConnect2 demonstrating the new Naruto game.

Yet I’ll probably be back again in May. Ho-hum!

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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Or at least it seems that the first half is in the wild now – shipping notices received and all that. I assume that those few in the US to whom this is of any interest will have probably gotten it already, though obviously being outside of the territory it takes somewhat longer for me to receive such things.

Anyway, this was mainly just a public service announcement more than anything, given I’ve written far too much on the subject of Xenoglossia in the past – probably more than I’ve written about the rather spectacular “proper” iM@S adaptation of recent times, whose staff were showered with awards at the Newtype Awards this weekend gone. This Xenoglossia release is pretty interesting because it’s likely to be the best English translation of the show that has been available, and perhaps more importantly, looks to be the only time that certain supplementary material is going to be available in English.

Of course, I’m not sure when I’m actually going to get to watch my copy – Scotland Loves Anime looms this weekend, and even if it turns up before I head off to Glasgow, I’m not lugging a device with a DVD player up to Scotland with me ^^;