Dude.
They are cute girls who walk around with no pants on.
… and oh yeah, they have animal ears and fluffy tails when they go flying. Some of them are even cat girls!
Do I really need to say any more about it?
* * *
The Good: Everything.
The Bad: Nothing.
Final Verdict: Strike Witches is the best show ever made.
Review copy provided by FUNimation Entertainment.
In order to relieve her recently divorced mother of tuition cost, the young Souka decides to transfer from a private high school to the local vocational school. However, when she shows up to her first day of classes, she is shocked to find out that she is the only girl enrolled there!
There’s a reason why all the girls had dropped out of this tech school. The boys are very tough and fights often break out between the different classes. But amid all this chaos, there is one unwritten law that all the boys abide by, and that is the role of the bancho, or gang leader. Simply put, there is one bancho who rules over the entire student body, and in order to dethrone the leader and take his place at the top of this pecking order, you must knock the crap out of him in a fight.
Needless to say, the poor innocent Souka wants nothing to do with the feuding between the classes or power struggle of the bancho. However, because she is the only girl in school, all of the boys go out of their way to make her feel warm and welcomed. So she decides to stick around the school and eventually becomes friends with the cool Katou-kun. But one day, she accidentally knocks out the school’s current bancho, which means that she takes over as the new gang leader. Can the sweet girl actually rule over this student body of thugs and riffraffs?
My Darling, Miss Bancho is the first (and so far only) comic by shojo artist Mayu Fujikata. While her inexperience is evident on every page of this volume, it ultimately ends up being her greatest strength as CMX Manga releases another winner in this shojo title.
So after a huge mix-up regarding my coverage of the NYICFF this year, I was finally able to catch a screening of the highly anticipated new film from Mamoru Hosoda, Summer Wars, last weekend. Well, pretty much everyone and their mother has seen the film and have written a review of it, and for the most part, the film has been unanimously praised by everyone.
However, I wasn’t quite as wooed over by the film as everyone else was, and when I tweeted this out, I got some peeps asking me to do a review on it. Well, I wasn’t really planning on doing this, so here’s my brief review of Summer Wars using as little spoilers as possible.
Summer Wars is a good movie, it might even be a great movie. But is it as amazing as the hype makes it out to be?
Far from it.
Man, the loli wars just keep on coming. Maybe I need to rename this column “Today in Lolicon” from now on. That’s pretty much all the news that’s worth talking about this week.
Today’s big news is over a proposed bill in Tokyo to ban “virtual” child pornography. The new law would ban the sexual or sexually provocative drawings of children who appear to be under the age of 18 regardless of actual age described in the story. The bill will be voted in committee on the 19th, then it would move up to assembly on the 30th. If it passes assembly, the law will go into effect this October.
This would normally be the point in the post when I would joke about “saving the virtual children” and maybe even providing a quote from a fictional loli girl in order to mock the ridiculousness of this law, but GodLen has already done that. So I’ll just take this one seriously this time.
So the big bombshell that was dropped last Friday when FUNimation began its simulcast of Dance in the Vampire Bund was that the American distributor would be censoring scenes in both the online streaming version and DVD release. Although they would not specify what was being cut out, the scenes were obviously centered around the story’s main character, a female vampire in the body of a little child, and her knack for walking around topless with only a black thong on.
[...] after viewing the unedited as well as the Japanese broadcast edit of the series “Dance in the Vampire Bund,” we have determined the series contains controversial elements which, when taken out of context, could be objectionable to some audiences.
With this in mind and with approval of the licensor, we will edit select scenes from the series in streaming and home entertainment release. These are scenes which are inappropriate for U.S. viewing and are not essential to the storyline.
And the whole internet went ape over this.
“How dare they censor our anime!”
“What’s the big deal? The manga was far worse!”
“What about artistic expression?”
“What about freedom of speech?”
“I’m going to boycott this release and any other series FUNimation releases from now on!”
“At first they went for the lolicon, and I said nothing…”
Well, now let me say something.
I have been quite vocal on this blog through out the years against the idea of censorship. In fact, the second post I ever wrote for the Anime Almanac was a long rant in 2005 against VIZ Media for censoring one panel in the comic series I’’s. On top of this, I have been a strong advocate against the criminalization of lolicon images in America, since I feel that no work of fiction should be made illegal no matter how vile or disgusting it might be.
But despite this type of background and years of advocating against such things, when this huge news came to light last Friday, I immediately understood why FUNimation had started doing this kind of censorship on their products.
And in fact, I completely support them in doing it.
So why is that? Why do I feel that FUNi censoring images in 2010 is justified while VIZ censoring manga in 2005 was complete bullshit? Am I just being biased towards the one company and not the other?
No, it’s because of the Handley case, people. The Handley case changed everything.
