Makoto Shinkai made a return to London yesterday for a screening of his latest work, Children who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below (or Children who Chase Long Titles, as I like to refer to it, or Hoshi o Ou Kodomo as I’d call it if I was serious about shortening the name) as part of this years London Film Festival. Since I clearly haven’t spent way too much time in cinemas recently, and certainly not far too long on trains travelling between them, I made the trip down to see it.
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From the movie Oblivion Island (Haruka and the Magic Mirror), near the beginning. Thanks to Don for the screen cap – it’s kind of hard to take one in a theatrical context without being accused to film piracy ^^;

After The Princess and the Pilot (To Aru Hikuushi e no Tsuioku) had to be pulled from this years Scotland Loves Anime event due to undisclosed reasons just before tickets went on sale, it was replaced by the enigmatic Mystery Film (or as I like to refer to it, the FUSHIGI MIIiii~STRIIiii~ movie, not that anyone will remember that reference). They got a pretty great turn-out considering it was a movie that most people would have had no idea of the identity of prior to booking tickets.
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Well, that’s another weekend of heavy-duty cartoon watching done with, and while I’m, at time of writing, enduring a 4-5 hour train ride into London to see Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below (which I keep wanting to type as Children Who Chase Deep Voices from Lost Below, which makes marginally less sense), I’m not all that inclined to give you the tl;dr version of events even if it would be a handy time-killer. So, I’m going to mostly be bullet-pointing this, because bullet points are the best kinds of points.
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I was most disappointed after it failed to appear in the first episode of the Persona 4 anime, but the second episode provided the goods! Sure, it doesn’t actually say “Mikan”, but given prior evidence I’m going to claim it.

(As a vaguely related side-note, it’s kind of disappointing that, for a film set in a region where Mandarins are farmed, and featuring an number of Mandarin farmers, A Letter For Momo doesn’t have a single obvious Mikan Box in it. I think I might have spotted one at one point, but it’s going to be a loooooooong wait to check).

Hey, folks, the PS3 iDOLM@STER2 trial version is out for those of you with Japanese PSN accounts. I figure that, since a lot of people (and not necessarily those planning on picking up the full game) will probably be giving it a try, I’d just quickly run through what the demo gives you to play around with.

Actually, from the details they released yesterday, they kind of suggested that they’ve be covering the first six weeks of the game (basically, all the tutorial stuff – if you play the game, it actually makes a lot of sense that they’d leave things there). As it turns out, they’re only presenting you one week of game, and week five rather strangely. This does mean that I’m now sitting on a really rather long tutorial post for the game that I guess I’ll be sitting on for a couple of weeks.
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