The Anime Almanac

You know, I never review new-from-Japan anime series on this blog because everyone and their mother blogs about the newest anime episodes as soon as they hit the bittorrents. But Ed Sizmore of Comics Worth Reading requested to hear my impressions of one of my favorite series this season, Chu-Bra. Ed watched the first episode last night and was absolutely appalled by what he saw.

Ed’s main hangup on the series is with its over-sexualization of adolescent children. The characters are portrayed as just beginning Japanese middle school, which would place them as 7th graders, or 12-year-olds, at the start of the story. However, I think that Ed and most viewers are completely misunderstanding what type of appeal the series is intending to go for. And because they can’t see past this misconception, they’re missing out one of the better anime series to have come out in recent years.

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Figure.fm posted a series of YouTube videos showing a very interesting cosplay documentary put together by an English-language Singaporean news channel. The biggest thing I learned from this documentary was just where did the word “cosplay” actually come from. In fact, they interviewed the guy who coined the word himself!

I was also amazed to see just how similar the cosplay culture was in Japan compared to what we have here in America. I’ve always held Japanese cosplayers in higher regard to our local talent because I thought they took the art a lot more seriously. But really, these Japanese girls sound just like all the female American cosplayers you’ll come across at any domestic convention.

Also, the “professional cosplayer” they feature in the documentary, Ms. Yunmao Ayakawa (pictured above), will be a guest at Katsucon this weekend. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be doing a one-on-one interview with her on cosplaying and maid cafes for a future Anime Almanac article.

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FUNimation’s convention guy Adam Sheehan has been teasing on Twitter about some big promotional video they filmed in the FUNimation office yesterday. The project was originally going to involve Sheehan going onto the roof of the office building, but weather conditions forced them to move the filming indoors. He supplied this photo of their state-of-the-art camera system earlier today, and says more details on the secret project will be revealed earlier next week.

What exactly will the video be about? Well, following the release of their hilarious trailer for the series, FUNimation began writing a series of posts about the Strike Witches “winning the war on pants” on their blog. FUNi Brand Manager Charlene Ingram made a connection to the series by tweeting some pants-related jokes towards Sheehan and his secret project.

Sheehan has indicated that the company would be promoting the upcoming release of Strike Witches at next week’s Katsucon convention, and there is a “FUNimation Promotions” panel scheduled the Saturday evening of the convention. So I’m going to bet that this secret project will somehow involve Katsucon and pants… or the lack of them.

As a strong advocate of the War On Pants movement, you can expect The Anime Almanac to provide round-the-clock coverage of all events next week both prior to and during Katsucon weekend.

Give ‘em hell, ladies!

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Yamila Abraham of Yaoi Press elaborated on a quote she made to About.com this week regarding her yaoi manga being recently rejected by Apple. It turns out that she had enlisted a third party app developer to reformat a 13+ yaoi comic of hers to fit better into the format of the iPhone. They even edited some questionable content in order to ensure it would pass through Apple’s screening process. Even with the changes, Apple rejected the app and cited no reasons for doing so.

The App store has a “mature” rating in place to designate programs rated for users 17 and above, but has a strict “no pornography” policy. I imagine this was the reason for the rejection. While the definition of what could be considered pornographic is strictly up for debate, it is completely understandable why Apple would have to scrutinize any boy’s love content that tries to make its way onto the platform. Yaoi certainly raises some red flags for most normal people.

I don’t condone Apple’s choice of censorship as to what it allows on the iPhone. If I had my druthers, I would allow any mature application onto the platform, especially pornography. But the App Store is what the App Store is.

We’re not talking about some form of media protected by freedom of speech. We’re talking about a gated community that is closely monitor by a major American corporation. And unfortunately, major American corporations are not ready to take on hot guy-on-guy action yet. In fact, most of America isn’t ready for that. So Apple’s call to deny the yaoi app is simply for the sake of protecting its own branding.

And frankly, you can’t blame them for that. Strict policies like that make the iPhone the best consumer device on the market today.

On a separate note, Abraham did bring up a good point in her post that I never thought of before. Amazon actually has an iPhone app that allows you to read Kindle books on that platform. As it currently stands, this app is useless for all the manga available in the Kindle store because the picture is so damn tiny on that small screen. But when that app gets ported to work on the larger iPad, it’s going to be the perfect size for manga viewing.

I imagine that Apple might not like that, as this will be in direct competition with their new e-book initiative, iBooks. I think we will be seeing that Kindle app go away sometime in the near future.

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Scott Pilgrim artist Bryan Lee O’Malley is auctioning off an original Pilgrim art piece on eBay. O’Malley will be donating all proceeds of the auction to Giant Robot, a long running independent Asian American Pop Culture magazine that has facing serious financial struggles lately. The signed sketch is drawn in ink and was used in the fifth volume of the series and on promotional items.

An awesome art piece from an awesome comic going to a cause I think we otaku can fully support. While Giant Robot may not necessarily be all about anime and manga, it most certainly celebrates our sub-culture. Bidding for the 24-hour auction ends at 9:56 EST (6:56 PST) Thursday morning, so act quickly. You can also donate directly to Giant Robot by visiting this site.

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