The New York Asian Film Festival is in town this month, and for the first time ever, this blogger is taking the train into the city and catching some of the action for himself. For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting up some reviews and features from the events taking place at the IFC Center and Japan Society through out June and July.
For my first weekend, I decided to catch two movies based on Japanese manga, but are quite possibly as different as two live-action adaptations can be. The first is the Korean take on the boys’ love manga Antique Bakery, and the second is the Japanese remake of the classic anime / manga series Be a Man! Samurai School.
When FUNimation ran their “Sneak Preview” panel at AnimeNEXT weeks ago, their centerpiece was a new title from studio Gonzo called Romeo x Juliet (pronounced “Romeo and Juliet”). In this Youtube clip, FUNi rep Adam Sheehan describes the unique dub that they did for this series:
An English dub consisting of actual lines of Shakespeare and next episode previews written in iambic pentameter? That sounded interesting.
And so he showed off two clips from the show, and sure enough, the dub did appear quite impressive. Many people in the audience left the panel eager to see more of this show and its unique dub.
So now that I’ve had a chance to watch the series, does it live up to the hype surrounding it?
Well, yes, but not in the ways that I thought it would.
CMX’s newest release, Ballad of a Shinigami by Asuka Izumi, is the manga adaptation of the light novel by K-Ske Hasegawa. It follows Momo, the cutest little shinigami (a “God of Death” or grim reaper) that you’ve ever seen. Along with her animal familiar Daniel, Momo watches in the shadows as the human drama plays out in front of her in the world of the living.
Ballad is not so much of a serialized series as it is a collection of short stories that Momo watches from the sidelines. Volume one includes a short prelude and three stories.
Each story generally centers around a person who has recently suffered the loss of someone close to them, so they become all too aware of the cute death god watching over them. They become too preoccupied in contemplating their own mortality to realize all the love and life that still exists around them.
Man, who would have thought that shojo could be this gloomy and depressing! (o_o)
So like I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been receiving quite a lot of review material from FUNimation lately. While I’m never going to have the time to get to watch all these new releases and re-releases, it does give me a chance to scope out the current new offering in the R1 market.
But being able to see all these new releases has made me realize that lately the packaging from FUNimation has been a real crapshoot as far as quality goes. This comes from the company trying to cut costs in a dying DVD market and from trying to ship out the massive amount of new catalog they acquired from Geneon and ADV. The result seems to be that no two packages are alike. They’re all made up of different sizes, cases, structures, and designs.
But one such package I received from them recently was so incredibly bad that I simply could not do it justice describing it on Twitter. So please allow me to take you through a photo tour on what must be the worst anime packaging ever.
You know, for being called The Anime Almanac, I sure haven’t been showcasing a lot of anime as of late. The last anime review I did was of the first Lucky Star DVD from over a year ago. The last time I even directly talked about any anime show in particular was my analysis of Haré + Guu. Since then, I’ve been either writing editorials or con reports, or I’ve been reviewing manga and video games.
That’s why I am so glad that FUNimation stepped in and answered my call for anime review material. And boy, did they ever! They literally sent over more anime my way then I’ll ever have time to go over! So for my first of many weekly anime reviews, I selected the 13-episode horror/action series, Venus Versus Virus, a rescue title from ADV.
