Time of Eve

The studio then released that on DVD/Blu-Ray in Japan, and even plopped it on the US iTunes store in late 2011. As the studio puts it:

“We thought the iTunes Store release of the movie would suffice…But, we keep getting requests from fans around the world asking for the movie on Blu-ray. Folks, this is an indie film, we’re not a big Hollywood blockbuster production. Is there really support out for the movie on Blu-ray outside of Japan…?”

So they’ve launched a Kickstarter. Back it at the US$55 level, and you get the Blu-Ray plus extras.

Here’s the impressive thing: they’ve raised $13,000 in one day.

This is a perfect case for soliciting money from anime fans: Time of Eve has a small, dedicated fanbase of thoughtful fans. These are the people willing to spend money, not 14-year-old fans of Naruto. Risks are low–the movie already exists–and nobody needs to fear that the cash will go purely to line anyone’s pockets.

More like this, please.

Kingyo Used Books, volume 1

This is a manga about the appreciation of manga. That should explain the extent of its potential appeal.

While readers from other cultures can certainly grasp the concept, Kingyo Used Books relies on the uniquely Japanese experience of growing up surrounded by manga. In America, many kids read comics, but they generally aren’t exposed to the breadth of subject matter available to kids in Japan.

This first volume of Kingyo tells several disconnected short stories about people reconnecting with their childhood love of manga. This works because each person has a favorite manga in a particular genre. A sports manga series will teach different lessons than a shoujo story.

Kingyo Used Books centers on a manga bookstore (of the same name as the title) that also hides a secret that is appropriately improbable: beneath the store lies a massive manga library. Kingyo Used Books‘ employees all love manga and, just like the titular character in Bartender recommending drinks that resolve customers’ problems, they recommend manga titles to customers that suffer from emotional crises.

On the one hand, the overall thrust of the manga feels pretty heavy-handed at times: manga is wonderful, and can help you solve life’s problems! On the other hand, manga could use the defense in a world that sees comics as temporary, disposable pop culture.

The art is clean and easy to parse, avoiding lots of close-ups or odd viewing angles. There are enough backgrounds to ground you in a location, but long dialogue scenes omit backgrounds where they’re unnecessary (avoiding the strong sense of reality in, say, Akira or Ghost in the Shell).

Those looking for a complex, long-form narrative or incredibly complex characters should look elsewhere. Kingyo uses manga as a crystal to reflect a rainbow of stories and emotions evoked by an idiosyncratic medium.

Kingyo Used Books volumes 1–4 are currently in stock at U.S. retailers like Amazon and RightStuf.

A guilty pleasure is defined in this thread as ”a particular series, [even though you know] it´s considered bad or sub-par by the vast majority of the community.” That’s a helpful starting point.

This starts with my mystification with terms like “bad” and ”good” when they’re applied to a work of art. The larger artistic world has long since abandoned those terms as subjective at best and meaningless at worst. Who decides what’s “good?” The community? The community’s been wrong before.

“Sub-par” means that most people think that the work is unworthy of the effort. It’s below expectations. Well, many great works of art have been under-appreciated by most people at different times. Citizen Kane languished in relative obscurity for years.

Why don’t we just take pleasure in anime? Whatever it is, we can enjoy it. We can enjoy it for what it is. We should certainly be aware of how much time we’re spending on anime, and seek balance. But if you’re going to watch anime, watch it with joy.

This is an in-depth look at the packaging of U.S. anime DVD and Blu-Ray releases. This episode covers:

1. The Secret World of Arrietty (a.k.a. The Borrower Arrietty) released by Disney/Buena Vista
2. Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 released by Maiden Japan
3. Digimon season 02 released by Flatiron Film Company

Here’s what they look like:

Chocolate Chip Peanut Cookies

And here’s the video:

The latest anime and manga news, courtesy of http://www.animenewsnetwork.com and Secret Weapon Vincent.

Join us every Saturday evening at 8:00pm Eastern Time / midnight GMT / 4:00pm Pacific Time at http://ustream.tv/channel/otaku-news-live

Way too many stories to link here; just head over to http://www.animenewsnetwork.com for all the news.

Animation by Bahi JD, via http://bahijd.tumblr.com

Would you like to know more about the actual job of animation in Japan?

There’s an amazing Community on Google+ called Japanese animation from the inside. Several of its members (like Bahi JD and Eddie Mehong) are animators who are working on current anime series or have worked on recent anime projects (Basquash, Kids on the Slope, Macross Frontier, The Woman Called Fujiko Mine). They answer questions about their experiences working in the anime industry.

A few interesting revelations:

Most animators are freelancers working from home. As such, meetings are often the only time you get a chance to actually see your co-workers, so folks like Shoji Kawamori often use meetings more as chances to chat with friends than anything else.

Animators usually follow directors or projects, rather than studios. Some are more tied to a favorite studio, but if you want to work on a Shinichiro Watanabe show, you can find a way to work at whatever studio he’s working for on that show.

Your reputation quickly establishes which kinds of shots for which you’re most suitable. Shots aren’t assigned from on high as much as they’re collaboratively distributed according to skill. (This is a textbook Japanese business approach, incidentally.)

Beginners typically work 12–16 hours a day to learn the ropes. Established animators work 8–12 hours a day. Because all animators are freelancers, you can choose your hours, but you compete with many animators producing high quantity and high quality animation.

A 13- to 26-episode TV series will be animated in 6 to 9 months.

The industry is small enough that you’ll usually see animators you worked with on past projects in future ones. It’s a pretty chummy industry in that way.

Overall, the animators actually working in the industry write quite positively about their experiences. It sounds similar to Silicon Valley tech companies or movie making: you may put in a lot of hours, but if it’s your passion, you’ll enjoy yourself.

Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger

Japan has a long tradition of ”sentai” shows, which we in America got a taste of with the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.

What’s important to remember is that Japanese viewers remember sentai shows with the same fondness we reserve for the shows of our youth.

Enter Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger, in which the same studio that makes those shows produces a parody of them.

And boy, what a parody.

A taste: the heroes are otaku hired by a mysterious organization, who transform with the aid of a cute girl figurine–that transforms into a gun–and by shouting “Grand Delusion!” They then enter a delusional world where they fight as suited rangers…but in the real world, they’re standing in the middle of a sidewalk, miming all the jumps and attacks while amused crowds watch. One villain wants to spread host clubs throughout the otaku-focused Akihabara, at which point the hero shouts proudly, “Akihabara is a place for those with no romantic skills!”

The show also throws a lot of anime jokes at the audience: there are at least two Gundam references, and one villain is trying to ”rid Akihabara of the infestation of moe.” Every side character and even trivial characters like security guards are played by famous voice actors or sentai actors.

Even better, since this is produced by Toei, it’s got all the martial arts and special effects of a full-scale sentai show. (They even parody their lack of effects outside of this, but I won’t spoil that.)

However postmodern or however much of a parody you can imagine a show being, Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger is more postmodern than that. Wow. Much of the show’s joy comes from experiencing the parody within the plot twists, so I won’t spoil them. Suffice to say they stunned me, and I frequently had to pause the video because I was laughing so hard I couldn’t pay attention.

I’ve seen only bits and pieces of sentai shows, besides a few episodes of Power Rangers, so the fact that the show blew me away, and I finished watching it in under a week, is impressive enough.

The first season is available via torrents (note that the final episode is a clip show, and yes, that’s a parody as well), and the second season is coming soon.

This is a monthly show looking back at the anime and manga released and licensed in North America in March 2013.

All license and release news courtesy of http://www.animenewsnetwork.com and Secret Weapon Vincent.

The Rough Guide to Anime by Simon Richmond

Many books purport to explain the world of anime to readers. Many of those get lost in the weeds of fandom or fly so high in the clouds they’re no more useful than anime’s Wikipedia entry.

Simon Richmond’s The Rough Guide to Anime blew me away with its breadth, depth, and clarity.

Its first chapter, the 30-page “Anime Chronicles,” leads the reader on an in-depth journey through anime’s history, from the experimental cartoons of the early 1900′s to today’s world of Mamoru Hosoda‘s films and multimedia franchies like .hack (this edition was published in 2009). I learned quite a bit about anime during its formative years in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Richmond’s style sings here, as he packs clear information into relatively few pages.

The second chapter is the longest, consuming nearly half of the book, and lists “The Canon” of the ”50 greatest anime.” Much as I cringe at this attempt to canonize works of art, as well as the existence of yet another “top X list,” the author chose legitimately revolutionary, hugely popular, or otherwise remarkable works.

The third chapter returns to history and describes various anime studios and creators chronologically, dividing them into “waves.” The first wave consists of early studios like Toei, Tatsunoko, Studio Pierrot, and Tezuka Productions. The second and third waves (oddly, both combined into one section) are made up of studios spawned by the first wave: Sunrise, Madhouse, Studio Ghibli, and Gainax. The fourth wave contains more modern studios like Gonzo, Production I.G., and Studio 4°C (I’m surprised that he neglects Kyoto Animation). We’re then treated to three more lists: influential directors and their works, including lesser-known names like Gisaburou Sugii and Osamu Dezaki, major Japanese voice actors, and composers (which only has two major entries: Joe Hisaishi and Yoko Kanno).

The first half of this chapter focuses on studio history that is likely uninteresting to all but dedicated otaku. Meanwhile, the latter half isn’t as useful to hardcore fans; we know most of the major names in anime. That’s part of the nature of a rough guide, though; it’s a mixed bag that offers information for a wide variety of readers.

We move on to ”The Manga Connection,” which describes manga’s history in brief but satisfying detail, and describes the difficulties of translating manga to anime. And then we get another list: manga-ka whose work has been tapped deeply for anime (Rumiko Takahashi, Masamune Shirow, etc.).

“Decoding Anime” attempts to explain some of the peculiarly Japanese aspects of anime, from Shinto to Japanese folk tales. Unfortunately, while sidebars helpfully explain terms and influences, this chapter devolves into a list of titles categorized by genre, so it’s more useful if you’re looking for shows that match a particular genre.

The final two chapters describe some of the global events and groups inspired by anime, and point to further anime resources (web-based and otherwise). The former is most useful in showing to a skeptical parent to prove that anime’s cultured, and the latter is most useful to those who aren’t yet completely plugged into anime fandom. That’s a bit harsh: I’d never heard of several of the sites listed.

Overall, The Rough Guide to Anime serves a rich buffet with a variety of flavors; at least something is bound to satisfy.