The Anime Almanac

So as I looked at the stack of new releases from FUNimation for this week, I reached a dilemma. I only have time to watch one series, and neither one of these selections particularly caught my interests. So I posed the question to my Tweet Peeps, the people who follow me on Twitter, “What should I review?”

“What’s Kaze no Stigma?”

“Hmm.. Kaze no Stigma sounds interesting.”

“Why don’t you check out Kaze?”

The consensus was pretty clear. I have never watched Kaze no Stigma or have even heard about it up until now. But then again, it looked like neither had most of my Tweet Peeps. So I popped in the series completely blind about what it was or what to expect.

And unfortunately, I found out that maybe there was a reason why I have never heard of this before… (-_-)

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When I read the fifth volume of Black Jack a few weeks ago, I decided to give in to the peer pressure of my fellow manga enthusiasts and open myself up to the grandfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka. I wanted to dive deep into this man’s massive catalog of decades old works. So when I found out that Digital Manga Publishing was releasing the 1968 Tezuka classic Swallowing the Earth this week, I leapt at the chance of securing a review copy for my second fray into the world of this legendary manga artist.

In World War II, an American soldier dies with a smile on his face in front of the Japanese. He uses his final breaths to tell his oppressors the name of one woman, Zephyrus, and hands them a photo of a beautifully buxom blond woman.

The Japanese soldiers are absolutely infatuated with the woman in the picture, and begin to ask around about Zephyrus. What they come to learn were stories of a goddess among women, a seductress with the power to charm any man into bed with her. After nights of the most incredible pleasure, the men literally shrivel up dry and get thrown aside, then the blond siren moves on to her next boy toy.

Twenty years after the war, those former soldiers still remember the picture, and they just so happen to hear that a woman named Zephyrus just checked into a Japanese hotel. To add to the mystery, she is said to be just as beautiful as she was in the picture, and hasn’t age at all in all these years. So one of the soldiers employs his drunken slacker of a son named Gohonmatsu Seki to spy on the girl. If there’s any man strong enough, or just plain stupid enough, to not fall for the siren’s tempting advances, it would be him!

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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In my years of fandom, one of the most interesting people I have ever met has been Erica Friedman. As a lesbian and hardcore manga fan, Erica has become very vocal and passionate about the yuri subgenre of comics. She’s so into it that she writes in her Okazu yuri-blog many times each week, runs the occasional Yuricon in both America and Japan, and has even started her own independent publishing company called ALC Publishing.

The somewhat annual yuri anthology Yuri Monogatari is Erica’s pride and joy. A combination of short stories from both Japanese and Western manga artists, Monogatari offers a wide variety of “authentic yuri” manga compiled together from the queen of the genre herself.

So how does this compilation play out for a more mainstream manga fan such as myself? Well, I got to check out the latest volume, and I discovered that like pretty much every manga anthology, you’ve gotta take the good with the bad.

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If I had to cite the biggest turning point in my anime blogging career, I would have to say that it was the AnimeNEXT convention last year. AnimeNEXT was the first convention to ever grant me a press badge, which opened myself and my writing to far more information and opportunities than I had ever had up until that point. On top of all of that, that convention allowed me to sit down with American voice actor Greg Ayers to write my most popular blog post ever.

Because of that, the AnimeNEXT convention will always hold a special place in my heart, and I very eagerly anticipated returning to it for my second year. But so much has changed this time around since the convention packed up from Secaucus NJ and moved to a new location half-way across the state to Somerset. Did the convention continue to improve in this new venue, or did it miss its mark in this unfamiliar territory?

Here are a couple of highlights that defined my AnimeNEXT experience this year.

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Best. Marketing. EVER!

On site today:

Scott from The Anime Almanac	Kim	animenext from AnimeNEXT
Narutaki from Reverse Thieves	DJ Ranma S from Anime Jam Session	OutOfTimeProd from Out Of Time Productions
Greg	Kyle Hebert	Carl from Ogiue Maniax
Toshifumi Yoshida	Vince A

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