Posts Tagged ‘Anime’

Halloween Horror: Kaiju No. 8 Trailer

Friday, October 13th, 2023

Not sure if this quite qualifies as a Halloween Horror, but it includes monsters, and it struck my fancy.

Basically, it’s an anime series focused on a guy who’s crappy job is to clean up after kaiju attacks.

It’s basically Damage Inc. meets Godzilla. Plus the teaser trailer is giving off a tiny bit of a FLCL vibe.

I don’t subscribe to Crunchy Roll (or any streaming service), but I’d seriously consider buying the DVD set when it eventually comes out.

Ultimate Anime Hero

Monday, November 3rd, 2014

I know several people who will find this amusing…

First spotted on Fox’s Animation Domination High Def, which I’d feel more comfortable recommending if it weren’t currently 85% Axe Cop by volume….

FLCL on Blu-Ray for $18.99

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

We now interrupt this blog for some shameless huxtering: Amazon has the complete 6-episode run of the wonderful and completely insane anime series FLCL on Blu-Ray for $18.99.

This is probably my favorite anime series of all time. It’s weird, funny, and endlessly inventive. You spend 5 episodes thinking “This is great, but it makes absolutely no sense!” And then you watch the sixth episode and go “Wait, it does make sense!” It really rewards re-watching.

It’s about a boy a who has a mysterious woman bump into and then start hitting on him. That is to say, bumps into him with her Vespa at full tilt and starts hitting on his head with her bass guitar. After that, giant robots come out of the resulting bump.

Then it gets weird.

It’s awesome. Trust me.

And if a paying media outlet wants an already completed review of FLCL that Locus Online passed on, please let me know…

The Story of How the GITS:SAC Laughing Man Logo Was Designed

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Those of you who have been reading my Locus Online reviews for a while know that I’m a fan of the Japanese anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. One of the many interesting features of that series is a super-hacker known as “Laughing Man” who is so proficient he’s able to hack streaming video in real time, plastering his logo over the faces of various people in the video:

I’ve always admired the compelling, iconic simplicity of that logo, and how well it fit into the overall arc of the show’s first season. Which is why I found this piece on just how it was designed interesting.

Kirsten Dunst is Turning Japanese

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Something for Dwight’s “Art, Dammit, Art!” watch. Here’s Kirtsen Dunst dressed up as an anime character and signing The Vapor’s “Turning Japanese” in the middle of the Akihabara.

So, you think it’s a publicity stunt or she’s doing an album. But not, even though Dunst is singing and the video is directed by McG, this is actually a performance art piece called “Akihabara Majokko Princess” by Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami.

O….K…..

Anyway, though I think she looks better as a red-(rather than blue-)head, she is quite fetching in that outfit…

{Note: Video includes real shots from the Akihabara, some of which fall into the NSFW category.)

For comparison, here’s the original (embedding disabled, alas).

Updated: The YouTube video was pulled, so I’ve switched to one from eBaum’s World.

J. D. Salinger, RIP

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Reclusive author J. D. Salinger dead at 91. (I don’t usually link to The New York Times, for a variety of reasons, but they’ve got a pretty hefty obit on him.) I started this essay the day he died, but it’s taken me a few days to get down my thoughts.

Salinger was a talented writer who wrote one novel that annoyed the living shit out of me. I hated The Catcher in the Rye, and more specifically, hated Holden Caulfield with a livid and unrestrained passion. Never before has a single fictional character so infuriated me. “Oh woe is me, let me whine about my miserable, privileged, upper class New York City life.” He’s a phony who hates phonies. Got it. Doesn’t mean I want to spend some 180 pages living inside that fucking asshole’s head. True, I read it far too late (mid 20s) to be grabbed by the teen angst angle, but I suspected I would have longed to punch him until he got over himself even in my teens.

So, more than a decade after I read Catcher in the Rye, some of my friends started getting into Anime, one of them being Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which references Salinger out the yin yang, especially the story “The Laughing Man.” (I think that link is to some Hungarian pirate site, if the moral implications of stealing a few pennies from his estate that way rather than by buying a cheap used paperback worries you.) And you know what? That’s a pretty swell story.

Over the next few years, I read all the stories in Nine Stories, and several others are pretty good as well. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is probably the one most people have read, and justifiably so. “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” is a bit obvious, but it works. The protagonist of “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is just as big a phony as Holden Caulfield, but knows he’s a phony, which makes all the difference in the world.

And then you read something like “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” (“I was a nice girl, wasn’t I?” No, no you weren’t.) and you realize that Salinger probably not only hated Holden Caulfield more than I did, but probably more than anyone else ever could.

In a way, his reclusive existence after Catcher is like the Great American Success Story, Misanthrope’s Version: Write the Great American Novel, build an estate way the hell out in the sticks, live off the royalties the remainder of your life and say “Fuck you” to the rest of the world. (I could have done without the Wacky Religion of the Week myself, but hey, it wasn’t my life.) He didn’t owe nobody nuthin’, and didn’t care what anyone else thought. Good for him.

I never got around to reading his other published books, sparse though their number was. Now that he’s dead, I wouldn’t be surprised to see his heirs start raking in the dough for getting all his unpublished and uncollected work into print just as fast as the checks can clear. Maybe he has a novel in that safe that won’t annoy the hell out of me.

And speaking of GitS:SAC, someone posted this nifty animated Laughing Man logo on the Fark thread about Salinger’s death, so I’m going to put it here:

Top Five Anime

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

SF Signal has a Mind Meld up asking people to name their top five choices for anime. I wasn’t asked to participate in this one, but if I had been, my list would probably look like this:

  1. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  2. FLCL
  3. Princess Mononoke
  4. Spirited Away
  5. Voices of a Distant Star

My review of GitS:SAC can be found here. I also have a review of FLCL available, should I be able to find someone who’s willing to pay me for it…