Another month, another anime film festival…. would be something that would be great to be able say. Alas, I doubt any of us are that fortunate (and, frankly, even I have a limit of how frequently I can see the same movies over and over), but we in the UK have been pretty well off this year, and after visiting Edinburgh for Scotland Loves Anime last month, this time I headed down to Leeds for Leeds International Film Festival Fanomenon Anime Day.

Of course, there are only so many anime movies to go around, with just over half of the movies being shown in Leeds being titles that I’d seen previously either at the BFI back in May or in Edinburgh last month, and there’s only really so much which could be said about those movies. I mean, I can’t really think of another way to say that One Piece Strong World is a touch too long for it’s own good, nor do I feel like harping on about how the Evangelion 2.0 screening was less than ideal (for those who were there, I was the obnoxious fellow who piped up to ask them to turn the volume back up during the ending credits prior to the post-credit content).
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From the second episode. It’s not exactly the kind of bright and breezy show from which I’d normally expect to be striking Orange gold, but rest assured, the owner of this particular Mikan Box was brutally beaten and hospitalized shortly before it appeared. Off-screen, of course – it’s not like he was female.

Yeah, Mnemosyne certainly earns the 18 certificate the BBFC gave it like nothing else in recent memory. It’s actually incredibly nostalgic in a certain sense – it harkens back to the days where seeing the Manga Video logo on the cover generally suggested that you’d be getting tits, violence and inordinate amounts of swearing. I don’t know about the later since I watch it subbed, but it certainly provided plenty of the former two.
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Scotland Loves Animation organised a couple of weekends full of anime movie screenings recently, at first Glasgow, and then at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh this weekend gone. Glasgow, unfortunately, is a pretty hellish trip for me – not as bad as it would be if I was travelling from the bottom of England, of course, but it’d be far more stressful and time consuming than a trip down to London (that is to say, it’s a good four or five hours).

Edinburgh, on the other hand, is a pretty hassle-free experience. Just as well, given that there was a fairly significant movie receiving its European premier there which wasn’t being screened at Glasgow. As such, I spent most of this last weekend sat in a cinema in Scotlands capital.
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I almost thought I was cheating with this one for a while, mainly because it took me a while to fathom what the 有田 part of the equation was. My dictionary was mostly throwing out pottery, which didn’t seem quite right.

Of course, that’s mostly because I have a habit of forgetting that Japanese tends to be read right-to-left when written vertically, and as such it’s actually “Arita Mikan”, Arita referring to the local in which the mikan in question were farmed. I should really bare in mind that dictionaries don’t generally list place names, but frankly, at this point I should really know better.
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I started along the path of an odd thought process the other day. It started when someone brought up Trava – Fist Planet in the context of being a same universe relative of the spectacular looking new movie REDLINE. This, obviously, got me thinking somewhat about Trava – Fist Planet.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing anything about Trava for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s kind of old at this point. Well, old in anime terms, which in reality means it was made in 2003, which was before much of the internet was particularly interested in looking for anything quite as offbeat as the Madhouse production was. More than the age, though, the way it was distributed no doubt hampered its following. Trava was originally serialised as part of Grasshoppa!, a DVD magazine almost like an audio-visual Faust, featuring live action and animated shorts both serialised and one-off. The best known content that debuted on Grasshoppa! is probably Studio 4°C’s Sweat Punch shorts, including End of the World and Comedy, that were later released under the name Deep Imagination.

The sad thing is that, when I finally decided that I’d kind of like to see the Grasshoppa! disks, they were extremely out-of-print, doubly so the DVD which collected the Trava episodes which had been spread throughout into one convenient package. Ultimately, of the four volumes of the series released, I ended up with only the third, and let me tell you, for something as thoroughly peculiar as Trava, the third instalment really isn’t a good place to start. It was kind of impenetrable, infact.

This is, of course, all a massive digression, as Trava, from REDLINE staffers Takeshi Koike and Katsuhito Ishii, has nothing to do with Hideaki Anno. Further along the path this line of thought had taken me, however, was the remembrance that the third instalment of Grasshoppa! also included things which weren’t related to Fists or Planets. Things like Ryusei Kacho, by a certain guest director recognisable to many a fan merely from his favoured choice of typeface.
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