Anime

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kidc
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2018 3:23 pm

Re: Anime

#251 Post by kidc » Fri May 18, 2018 2:37 pm

Has Hellstar been officially published in English, or did you read a fansub?

beamish14
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Re: Anime

#252 Post by beamish14 » Fri May 18, 2018 3:09 pm

No, HELLSTAR has never been published in an official English translation

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colinr0380
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Re: Anime

#253 Post by colinr0380 » Fri May 18, 2018 4:26 pm

A fansub of it, here.

EDIT: (By the way if I were ever to make it into a film, I would score the ending image into the credits to this!)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Jun 24, 2018 11:08 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Anime

#254 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jun 01, 2018 2:35 pm

Here's a link to my comments on Season 1 of Attack on Titan

Six episodes into the much shorter Attack on Titan Season 2 (they are continuing to number the episodes from Season 1, so these are episodes 26-37 overall, and there are 12 episodes in this second season compared to the 25 of the first) and despite a bit of a slow start the series has pulled another of those "we are getting this revelation at this early stage? And it is leading into the final big battle that will presumably define the rest of the series already?" moments that was so surprising when the huge battle turned up mid-way through your standard cadet training sequence in Series 1. Here instead of the cadet training getting disrupted it is a search for a presumed breach in of one of the city's walls by the Titans (because that is obviously the only way that they could get in :-k ) and a couple of episode turn into a zombie siege sequence as a number of what have been presumed to have been secondary members of the supporting cast get trapped together inside a tower and have to fight for their lives (in fact that made me think that this is a non-zombie zombie series in some ways, with people fighting against overwhelming odds and characters that we have come to, at least recognise, often getting suddenly dispatched). That is one of the strengths of both seasons of this show so far, that they are adept at juggling action between groups of otherwise isolated characters and because there are a number of groups operating at the same time can pull off a twist like "these were the people you should have been focusing on all along" and make that seem a more organic element of the plot than just being pulled out of nowhere.

The second season has also introduced a flashback element to each episode, where we get current action (usually people in a terrible situation, or about to die), and then a flashback to a quieter moment (sometimes just two hours earlier, as in the tower! But sometimes even further back, such as to the early training in season 1 to emphasise just how long a traitor has been in the midst and the feelings of betrayal that come from that). That initially feels a little gimmicky in the first couple of episodes but once it becomes apparent that this is an actual structural element running through the entire season, and especially once we start getting into more desperate situations where the flashback starts to have current time consequences (such as the "your one mistake was teaching me how to defend myself from your attack!" moment!) it felt well used. I'll spoiler tag the rest:
SpoilerShow
I really like the twist revelation about the identities of the "Armoured" and "Colossal" Titans at the mid-point. We have already been shown that our 'hero' character, Eren, can transform into a Titan back in Season One, and the climax of that first season was an enormous battle with a Female Titan who turns out to have been one of the other members of our group of young trainees. The first season ended with that, and a revelation about Titans actually embedded into the protective walls surrounding the last human cities, which interestingly complicates the purely 'good versus bad' themes of the conflict. At the moment the Titans are pretty much still shown as a bad overwhelming force with almost no free will of their own in the mass, just with an overwhelming desire to eat human beings, but Eren being able to turn, and then turn back (he gets trapped inside the Titan body that organically grows around him when suffering a massive bodily trauma. And we often get shots of him inside the fleshy compartment struggling with 'piloting' his body against overwhelming emotions, a bit like the Eva pilots in Neon Genesis Evangelion) starts to make the humans and Titans equivalent. And this is only compounded by frequent revelations of a number of other characters also being able to transform into Titans as well (so Eren is not particularly 'special' anymore. Except perhaps to the narrative. And to his love interest Mikasa), which really seems to be suggesting a certain human aspect that is being overlooked by the series at the moment in its focus on characters struggling from moment to moment life or death struggles to consider the wider implications.

The series at the moment is mostly about wanting to destroy the inhuman Titans as fully as possible, yet with all of these revelations of having lived with 'traitors' for so long in their midst there is also a building sense of a comment on finding a way to live together. That Titans sent in undercover as saboteurs end up being 'made soft' by interacting with humans and forgetting their acts of terrorism until their hand is (heartbreakingly) forced at the mid point of this season into definitively having to become the 'bad guys'. There is a certain tragic sense of loss to that mid-point twist that is quite upsetting, and weirdly made me feel a lot more sympathetic towards the Armoured and Colossal Titans than the humans banding together to destroy them! Whether any reconcilliation can happen after so many Titans have (graphically) eaten so many people, including Eren's mother, is another question. But I felt a sense of tragedy from Eren not going with those two characters to the Titan homebase, if just to try and understand them better. Instead he transforms into a Titan again himself to have a big battle, that if he succeeds (at this mid-point, we are in the middle of it) will just end up killing the characters who could have offered some sort of bridge, or at least answers, to the situation!

All of this is what makes me think (though this might just be over-analysing it) that this is a big allegory for fears over invasion, terrorism and assimilation. There are undercover conspiracies everywhere; characters are coming into the human enclaves in order to perform terrorist actions; and our main group of characters are members of the only line of defence against the threat, which lends a certain militaristic air to the proceedings. But also there is an interesting generational thing going on too, as our main group of characters are all youngsters being trained up to be soldiers - they are where the hope for the future lies rather than in the older generations (Levi, Erwin etc) who control the state, mentor and order the troops but also are the most horribly dispatched of any characters in the series (as if they are illustrating an older generation skilled in war and the use of blunt force, which results in at best just a stalemate of winning an individual battle, postponing humanity's defeat for one more day, and at worse nothing more than an inevitable horrible death sooner or later down the line). But will the younger generation be able to build a better future or succumb to the need for vengeance? And this younger generation are where you find the 'terrorists' and 'radicals' within the ranks (or at least those who are conflicted about their identities and place in society), as well as those still dealing with raw childhood traumas, and it is quite interesting that one of the main motifs of this second season is that all of our younger characters (at least until the major conflict starts at the mid-point) have been stripped of their uniforms and weapons because of suspicion falling on all of them after a couple of them have literally converted into the enemy!

I have a feeling that this whole narrative is moving towards something about trying to understand what caused the Titans to appear (presumably something environmental, given that the opening sequence for the second season emphasises a glowing life force powering every animal) and how they can be co-existed with, or even assimilated with (because I am presuming at this point that everyone may have a 'Titan form' within them, and vice versa!) rather than being entirely wiped out. Especially because apparently the walls of the city are actually built from the Titans themselves, so they cannot have entirely been aggressors in the distant past!

And at this stage they still have not gotten Eren to that darn locked basement yet, to find out what revelations his father left him! Though granted in the context of the show there have been a number of other things to be concerned about!
I also really like the various opening credits for the series, which are really well done to be bombastic and a little operatic at the same time, trying to emphasise the visceral nature of both the horror but also in some ways the gung-ho militarism as well. They all have an almost Queen-like Bohemian Rhapsody-vibe in their swift musical tonal shifts and emphatic frantic-ness!
SpoilerShow
I also like the obvious in retrospect clue hidden in that second opening that briefly cycles through the entire cast, with the 'hero' characters shown looking right to left and the final three characters (all three of whom turn out to be the 'traitors', though only the final character focused on, Annie, is revealed to be so during that section of the series) completing the move to look left to right, as if in opposition!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Tue Nov 06, 2018 5:32 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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Re: Anime

#255 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 02, 2018 7:24 am

And the last six episodes of that second season of Attack on Titan basically deal with all of the above issues, as the post-battle flight and fight sequence ends up covering the entirety of the second half of the series. It weirdly felt as if it definitively distances the audience from our main characters as Eren, Mikasa and Armin all commit some atrocious, blindly violent acts that almost match those of the Titans themselves during this. The show devotes the majority of attention towards the plucky tenaciousness against all odds of the human characters but in their driven beyond all reason rants (or Armin's rather cruelly relishing in making comments about the other captured traitor character being tortured back inside the city, that momentarily distracts the Titan's from their escape plan), it makes them seem single minded to the point of being insanely blinkered. While the Titan double-agents are tormented by their conflicting loyalties to both sides, knowing that they cannot belong in either place (the character of Ymir moves from fringe supporting character to single most important focal point of the entire season in this sense) and they suffer the most from having had a foot in both camps. I was more moved by their plight in this series than the human one, and hopefully that ambivalence was intentional!
SpoilerShow
Interestingly Eren, despite being the main hero of the narrative, becomes the most irrelevant he has ever been here (never having encountered at that point the seemingly sentient ape Titan, he is reduced to shouting "what are you talking about" in the discussions between Ymir and Reiner), and I find it really interesting that we get really what should be the 'conclusion' of his narrative arc in this series, as suddenly he and Mikasa come face to face with the original Titan who ate his mother (and who then proceeds to eat the older mentor who had originally saved him from death as a child! Another example of the older generation finding that their previous tactics do not work a second time!) and eventually he kills it. So he has gotten vengeance? Nope, he is immediately back to ranting that he will destroy all Titans and make Reiner and Bertholdt pay for their betrayals with their lives. (Reminding me a bit of Memento, in that it raises the question of what happens when you have gotten your vengeance but still have to keep going anyway. How do you keep the fires of anger that drive you burning when you have almost accidentally achieved your main goal in life?)

But he destroyed that Titan by 'somehow' causing all the other Titans to swarm and cannibalise it, zombie-fashion. Which is apparently why Reiner and Bertholdt were wanting to kidnap Eren, because he is the 'co-ordinate', or one person who is able to command all other Titans into doing his bidding, with Reiner understandably despairing about the way that such table-turning power has been put into the hands of the absolute worst possible person to wield it! Hopefully Eren is going to develop some sort of emphathy at some point, but at this stage he even has trouble caring for his best friend and girlfriend's welfare!

That is where the second season leaves off, with the humans having realised Eren's powers and the final revelation (though it was obvious six or seven episodes earlier on) that the human townspeople have not been eaten by the Titans but have actually become them, which (cross-breeding?) is probably why lots of our younger generation of protagonists have 'dual nationalities', that it appears that many were not even aware of before it became a major issue in defining their identities! Whether that complicates the 'kill 'em all before they do the same to us' idea or simply increases calls for an even greater push to wiping all the Titans out, is probably going to be the theme of any future third season. But at this point I am not certain that I need the 'what is the big mystery inside the locked basement of Eren's family home' mystery to be answered any more, since I think that we have already been primed with answers to the most important elements of it!

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Re: Anime

#256 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat Jun 02, 2018 9:17 am

Finally saw Yonebayashi's Mary and the Witch's Flower -- which I found disappointing. Definitely a step down from his 2 Ghibli films Arietty and When Marnie Was There, while (perhaps) paradoxically far more derivative of Miyazaki than his actual Ghibli films. Characterization was pretty blah - and the story was a mess (never read Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick, so don't know if any of this is due to the source or not).

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colinr0380
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Re: Anime

#257 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jul 16, 2018 2:46 pm

By the way, today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Akira into cinemas. The Japan Times has been doing a week of articles dedicated to it.

Its original trailer is fantastic too, and of course inevitably got a fan made re-creation featuring Simpsons characters!

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#258 Post by Boosmahn » Fri Aug 03, 2018 12:15 am

Looks like Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue is getting a Fathom Events screening... from GKIDS! The long-awaited U.S. Blu-ray may finally make its debut!

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Murdoch
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Re: Anime

#259 Post by Murdoch » Fri Aug 03, 2018 2:19 pm

Great news! The US DVD release is pretty awful and desperately in need of an upgrade.

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#260 Post by Boosmahn » Fri Sep 21, 2018 2:38 pm

I've had the (un)fortunate chance to revisit the Flowers of Evil anime recently, and, wow, what a ride. It's quite possibly the most un-anime-like anime out there: scenes are slow and rarely feature music, the opening themes are nothing more than slideshows, and the presented world is anything but escapist. Reactions from anime fans are very polarizing, with some praising it as the best in recent memory, others calling it boring and its rotoscoped animation flawed. I belong to the former group, and believe many other members on this forum would as well.

The plot: a boy returns to his empty classroom to retrieve his copy of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil. Suddenly, he’s presented with the opportunity to steal his crush’s gym uniform; after a moment of hesitation, he succumbs to temptation. Nakamura, the ominously quiet girl who sits behind him in class, witnesses him and they proceed to enter a twisted "contract" together.

I know that this synopsis could very well act as some third-rate porno script, but the sexual content is actually pretty suppressed. The nudity -- whenever it is present -- is far more disturbing than "sexual." It's hard to describe from a secondhand point-of-view.

I implore everyone on here to watch it. Flowers of Evil is the perfect deconstruction of every bubbly teen romance story. The unsettling tone never lets up and each fade to black will only leave you wanting (or dreading) to watch the next episode. There's also the original manga, but you'd be missing out on the soundtrack and uncomfortable sense of angst, although it does take the story in far better places. It's a shame we didn't get a second season.

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#261 Post by Boosmahn » Tue Oct 23, 2018 11:13 pm

This news is a few days old, but for those who don't know, anime streaming giants Crunchyroll and FUNimation have decided to end their partnership.

The separation comes after Sony's acquisition of FUNi, making the collaboration with AT&T-owned Crunchyroll incompatible from a business standpoint.

This partnership has brought countless anime to Blu-ray/DVD, and it's sad to see it be dissolved after only two years. Luckily, the existing/announced home video releases will remain in print, though this leaves the issue of unfinished solicitations (Re:Zero, Black Clover, Ancient Magus' Bride) up in the air.

Calvin
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Re: Anime

#262 Post by Calvin » Thu Oct 25, 2018 8:52 am

In better news, after pestering from fans (including myself) Maiden Japan have made a U-turn on their previously announced SD-Blu-Ray release and will be releasing Yoshiyuki 'Gundam' Tomino's magnum opus Space Runaway Ideon on Blu-Ray.

There's some definite pacing issues with the series, but it's probably the best standalone Tomino series and would be a huge influence on Neon Genesis Evangelion.

LightningP38
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Re: Anime

#263 Post by LightningP38 » Thu Oct 25, 2018 11:51 am

Crunchyroll and Funimation stopped working together? Well, this blows, I hope an alternative appears or we'll all lose ; we anime fans will lose, of course, but both Funimation and Crunchyroll and the companies that own them will fall apart if they don't find any support to replace the one they can't get anymore.
Talk about crap business decisions!

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Re: Anime

#264 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Nov 04, 2018 6:01 pm

I have been quite impressed by the way that Discotek/Eastern Star have raided the vaults for a couple of recent releases. I have long wanted to see the 1984 film directed by Mamoru Oshii (long before he helmed Ghost In The Shell in the mid 90s) Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer since reading the write up of it in Helen McCarthy's Anime Move Guide way back in 1996! This film got a Blu-ray release a few months back and is the second in Urusei Yatsura series following 1983's Only You, also directed by Oshii, that would eventually run to five films plus a TV series, and involves a Groundhog Day-anticipating premise of a town stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of preparing for a school costume party. (Apparently according to McCarthy's write up, this is "bringing the classic Japanese folk tale of Urashima into the present"). I would like to hope that maybe the other films in the series (which get reviewed just as highly in McCarthy's book) might appear at some point, or even the TV series!

And the other classic 80s anime gap in my knowledge has been more than ably filled with the separate Blu-ray releases of both the 1986 Fist of the North Star theatrical feature, but I was more excited about the release of the Fist of the North Star TV series that ran for 152 episodes between 1984 and 1988. Whilst the theatrical film is HD the TV series is a little disappointingly SD material packed onto three Blu-rays. But I guess this was probably for space reasons, with each Blu-ray disc containing at least fifty half-hour episodes! (The run time of the first disc if you 'play all' is over twenty hours! Luckily at least the first disc does not split the episodes into their own sections and instead the whole twenty hours is one long 'film' with hundreds of chapters, which is helpful in being able to select an episode from the menu and just have the disc continue to play the episodes from that point on, rather than what sometimes happens in the authoring of discs where you either have to play a single episode and then go back to the main menu and select another or select 'play all' and then have to jump forward to the episode that you require. It is a small authoring decision, to have choosing an episode continue to play the rest, but it is an extremely valuable quality of life for the viewer idea in this case, especially when I doubt anyone would be able to watch a full disc of episodes in one sitting!) I guess that this extra capacity, making a big single release such as this more financially viable to produce, is another advantage of the Blu-ray format even if the material is not presented in HD!

The series itself is probably where anime wears its debt to Mad Max most visibly (though the much shorter three episode Violence Jack OVA is the much more ultraviolent take on the same premise), with its lone hero tormented by his past wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and a standard structure of each episode involving a gang of roving biker punk thugs terrorising a ramshackle town for resources before Ken walks by and gets caught up in the conflict before unleashing his special martial arts moves of hitting pressure points on an opponent's body in such a way that they belatedly explode from the inside out (usually to allow the thug of the episode to think he's won before his head explodes, or for Ken to tell the opponent that he's already dead as he walks away). There is a kind of overarching grand story of lost love and brotherly betrayal going on beyond this, but such information is parcelled out extremely slowly, and it is probably worth noting here that despite the TV series running for so long it only managed to adapt 210 chapters of the original manga's 245, so I'm preparing myself for the series to end inconclusively! (But if I am still interested by that point I will try to track down the manga for the ending).

But as a relatively undemanding post-apocalyptic fight series, it has been nice to end an evening with an episode or two! As a side note the theatrical feature has never been aired on UK TV (though it may have shown up on Sky satellite channels) but Channel 4 did actually attempt to air the TV series in 2000 in a late night slot in its English language version, which was following Manga Video starting to dub and release the series on VHS (I think they only aired the first twenty or so episodes). It is amusing to see on this new release that the English language dub option for the episodes suddenly stops at episode 36 of 152, which is presumably when Manga Video made the decision to cut their losses and stop releasing the series in the West! The whole series is also in Japanese with subtitles as well, so that makes the English dub interesting more for its historical curiosity sake than anything!

It has also been nice to be reminded of the extremely verbose call and response titles for each of the episodes, as I remember trying to write the first couple of them down on a VHS label back when I was recording those initial television screenings and ended up running out of space on the label even writing as small as I possibly could! So after the first few frustrated attempts at being thorough I just ended up putting "Episode 6" and so on instead! Some of the titles go on longer than the episodes themselves run, but I love the overwrought nature of "Can The Flames of Love Burn In Hell? You Are Already Dead!" (Episode 5), "Nightmarish Full-Scale War! My Fists Pack One Million Volts!" (Episode 20), "Instead, I Shall Reject Love! For I Bear The Cursed Star of Death!" (Episode 37) or "The South Star Waterfoul Fist's Dance of Death! I'll Give My Life For Love!!" (Episode 47), and that is just from the titles on the first disc!

I suppose my main nitpick about Fist of the North Star at the moment though has to be that it has the same issues to the Incredible Hulk, as in every episode Ken gets goaded by the violent punks until he cans takes no more and letting out a Bruce Lee yell his blue jacket and red shirt literally rip from his chest to reveal his muscled, Big Dipper-seven scarred body to his opponent. Then post fight he miraculously has the same clothes back again. Either Ken has a secret warehouse full of exactly the same blue jacket, red shirt combo to change into that miraculously escaped a nuclear war, or it is just something not intended to be noted so closely!

Anyway, presumably one of the reasons for this recent release of the original TV series and film is probably relating to the release of the Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise video game from the makers of the Yakuza series bringing it back into the spotlight. That and the Mad Max resurgence of interest recently probably helps too!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Dec 02, 2018 8:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#265 Post by Boosmahn » Tue Nov 13, 2018 7:24 pm

Right Stuf Anime, a very trustworthy site when it comes to ordering Blu-rays/books/you-name-it, listed a home video release of Perfect Blue earlier today. Theatrical distributor GKIDS had this to say:
Hi, this is sadly not real at this point. We handled the theatrical release but a home video release here remains speculative. We have asked RS to remove the listing.
...A response I don't buy for a second. They pulled a similar stunt when SciFi Japan released the theatrical information ahead of schedule. It's a shame that this film won't be handled by Criterion, but at least we're getting a Blu-ray release of it (which is an assumption on my part, though that tweet seems like total damage control).

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Re: Anime

#266 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Nov 13, 2018 8:08 pm

Hosoda's Mirai no Mirai is getting what appears to be a VERY brief theatrical release in at least some cities -- at the end of December and early December. The Gkids site lists the times and places....

(Hoping I get a chance to see the one subtitled screening being shown -- at various locations around Boston, all at around the same time).

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Re: Anime

#267 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Nov 14, 2018 12:25 pm

All The Anime appear to be handling it in the UK, just as Mirai rather than Mirai of the Future and it does look very cute from its trailer. There is a very nice interview with Mamoru Hosoda in the recent issue of Neo (181, pg 9):
David West in Neo wrote:The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars had screenplays by writer Satoko Okudera. For Wolf Children, Hosoda wrote the story and Okudera contributed to the screenplay, but since then Hosoda has written his scripts alone. "Wolf Children was based on my own experiences," says Hosoda when asked about why he now writes solo. "It's about my mother and how she brought me up, so I actually did speak to Satoko before we started, but the problem was it was kind of awkward to ask somebody else to write about my mother. Satoko had never met my mum, so I thought it might be easier if I did it myself. Anything that is based on my own experience I'd rather do myself, but if I make something based on somebody else's life, or something that's nothing to do with me, I'm happy to work with an outside scriptwriter."

Of all Hosoda's films, Mirai feels the most personal. When asked who he used as inspiration for the character designs, Hosoda brings up a photo on his phone of his own family. Sure enough, there's Kun, little baby Mirai, their mom, grandparents, and even the pet dog. "I actually took my kids to the studio so that Hiroyuki Aoyama the animator could meet my children," says Hosoda. "That's how we built the characters."

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#268 Post by Boosmahn » Tue Nov 27, 2018 9:01 am

Neon Genesis Evangelion has been acquired for streaming rights by Netflix. The TV series and its two sequel films will be put out in spring 2019.

Now, how about those Blu-ray rights? I'm not sure if this streaming agreement spells good or bad news...

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Re: Anime

#269 Post by Big Ben » Tue Nov 27, 2018 9:47 am

Boosmahn wrote:
Tue Nov 27, 2018 9:01 am
Neon Genesis Evangelion has been acquired for streaming rights by Netflix. The TV series and its two sequel films will be put out in spring 2019.

Now, how about those Blu-ray rights? I'm not sure if this streaming agreement spells good or bad news...
I believe it had a Blu-Ray release in Japan but I'm not sure. I can't help but chuckle at all the folks coming into this series without any awareness of how it eventually resolves itself. It makes sense but I doubt many people will accept it the way it is.

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Re: Anime

#270 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Dec 10, 2018 1:04 pm

It is good to know that Neon Genesis Evangelion is getting out there more. Hopefully one day there might be another disc release too. I found the Netflix trailer quite good for the way that they strategically picked out a lot of the strongest images from the key moments of the show. Plus it was nice to see the mascot character Pen Pen the superintelligent penguin briefly flashed up! The music accompanying the trailer was fine but personally speaking it would have been even better (or at least stranger!) if they had used Misato and Pen Pen's jaunty theme tune!

EDIT: I am also slowly but steadily working my way through the Fist of the North Star TV series, although only at episode 20 so far, which is coming up to the conclusion of the first story arc. I have really liked the way that some of the repetitive nature of the show (bad guys abusing locals, Kenshiro on his quest for his abducted lost love Yuria comes into their territory and gets diverted into having to deal with the gang and their tougher leader for an episode or two, before moving on and getting ever closer to "Lord King" Shin's palace) sets up certain expectations. There will be a confrontation in which the main bad guy will get one of his pressure points hit by Ken, the scene will freeze and a voiceover will speak the name of the technique, and then we see the baddie gruesomely explode (although there is no blood presumably because of it being made for television, these moments are still quite visceral even if the characters explode into white light!). I particularly like the Jackal storyline (episodes 11 to 13) mostly because of the Jackal himself turning into an enormous coward, which makes events darkly funny and we suddenly have the perspective twisted around to see Ken from the point of view of the people he is hunting down. Really though most of the deaths of the various generals that Shin and his right hand man, Joker, are trying to put into Ken's path end up being darkly funny and strangely disturbing too for the brutal poetic justice being meeted out.

There are a couple of other interesting episodes after this too: Episode 14 ("A Miserable Age! Good People Die So Young!!") is that classic plot of someone who once was a baddie and who has tried to turn their life around getting blackmailed into doing one last job, in this case a beloved doctor in a town who is called upon by Joker to assassinate Ken whilst his guard is down. That has a quite tragic end.

After episodes 9 and 10 around the villain Patra who is oppressing a village and stealing its food, water and young people, which has shades of Seven Samurai and even a similar ending of the villagers rejoicing whilst Ken and his two child companions look on, knowing they have to leave, episode 16 is very much influenced by Yojimbo, with a village torn between two warring factions (the Scorpions and the Snakes) who get told by Joker to put aside their rivalry and focus on killing Ken instead. The twist on Yojimbo is that really the two factions are duplicitously using the stranger rather than Ken particularly intending on destroying them all (one of the best parts of the show is the way that Ken usually gives a bad guy a chance to leave before killing them. People rarely take him up on that offer, but it is good to know that he is prepared to make it, at least! The young girl travelling with him, Lin, often gets reduced to being the 'conscience pricker' at the start of an episode, staring wide eyed at some horrible thing going on and then tremblingly saying Ken's name as if to goad him into action, though this is often not too aggravating because Ken will have already sprung into action whilst she is doing that anyway!) and then instead of playing games over moving from one faction to another as in Yojimbo, Ken just says that he will kill them all anyway! The ironic death for the two faction leaders here is particularly poetically nasty, as the two men who could not stand each other but were locked in never ending combat get pressure pointed into hugging each other ever tighter until they explode!

And episode 15 is a full out gothic horror homage, as for some reason in the post apocalyptic wasteland there is a village straight out of a Dracula film dominated by a cathedral in which the main villain of the week hypnotises the townsfolk into becoming demonic zombie figures. This is both the most comic and horror themed episode so far (the other child travelling with Ken, Bat, gets a "boi-i-i-ing" zoom in and out complete with sound effect reaction both to an early scene of seeing a skull and to a plate with a meagre portion of food on it!) and whilst watching I was wondering if it influenced Resident Evil 4's hypnotised Spanish villagers at all!

So the show is very enjoyable at this early stage. Whilst the whole 'visit new town, defeat minor villain with new technique' structure might need to be changed up soon as it feels like the programme makers have done almost every variation on it at this stage, I have a feeling that the upcoming end of this initial 22 episode story arc might change the show into something a little bit different (there has already been the recap of previous events with episode 17 in order to prepare the audience for a shift in approach).
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Dec 10, 2018 2:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Timec
Spencer Tracy had it coming
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Re: Anime

#271 Post by Timec » Mon Dec 10, 2018 1:33 pm

I had mixed feelings about the series, but I am anxious to watch End of Evangelion again. Something about it really got under my skin—it still strikes me as one of the most disturbing and despairing films I’ve ever seen.

I know a lot of people in the anime community loathe Shinji for his passiveness, but there was something incredibly sad to me about someone who’s so depressed and hopeless that
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he can barely rouse himself from his stupor enough to evade the soldiers coming to kill him in the beginning of the film.

And then, of course, there’s the entire last half of the movie…

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Anime

#272 Post by knives » Mon Dec 10, 2018 1:36 pm

My understanding was always that Shinji is something of the villain of the movie for his toxic masculinity disguised as being just a nice guy.

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Big Ben
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Re: Anime

#273 Post by Big Ben » Mon Dec 10, 2018 3:21 pm

knives wrote:
Mon Dec 10, 2018 1:36 pm
My understanding was always that Shinji is something of the villain of the movie for his toxic masculinity disguised as being just a nice guy.
He's more of a vessel for creative output I think (Some have stipulated that End of Evangelion is revenge for how Anno was treated.) but I don't necessarily disagree that some of his behavior particularly a certain sequence involving a hospital is nothing short of awful. His depressive episode mimics a type of depression where individuals are mostly stationary. In said cases you can lift their arms and it stays there due to the dissociative state. Shinji is experienced a reality not often portrayed at that level in media.

Again Evangelion's plot can be boiled down ostensibly, at least to a comical level like this:
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Man wants to bring back his dead wife so he initiates the apocalypse by turning a schoolgirl into an omniscient being that harvests consciousness. He does so by making his son fight cosmic horrors in a mecha suit possessed by the soul of his Mother.
I realize that's a rather ostentatious summation of the plot but it's not exactly untrue. I've always felt Evangelion's strength came from it's serious discussion about difficulty with communication and the resulting sadness that goes along with it, particularly with teenagers. I concur with Colin that there's a distinct tonal shift, with later episodes becoming incredibly dark. I'll be interested in seeing how new audiences react to the show.

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#274 Post by Boosmahn » Mon Dec 10, 2018 7:22 pm


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Adam X
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:04 am

Re: Anime

#275 Post by Adam X » Tue Dec 11, 2018 2:12 am

Original SD Version of Feature (Japanese mono Dolby Digital 2.0 with English subtitles)
I wonder what this might mean for the film’s presentation, though... :-k

Anyway, so I just discovered that Star Blazers 2199 exists. Has anyone seen it and have an opinion to offer? I grew up watching cartoons like the original among other Americanised anime, and it sounds interesting if not typically expensive.

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