The Anime Almanac

Ladies and Gentlemen, please forgive me as I’m about to lose a shed of my “professional journalist” facade in order to go totally fanboy over my review today.

Like any geeky adolescent in the late 90’s, I was a fan of the Dragon Ball Z series being aired on the Cartoon Network. I have a lot of strong memories of going over with all my buddies to a friend’s house after school to catch the latest episode of the Freeza saga.

Around the time I started going to high school, a cousin of mine gave me the first two volumes of the Dragon Ball manga for Christmas. At first I was bummed because 1) I had never read manga before and I had no interest in starting now and 2) this was the lame Dragon Ball series and not the awesome Dragon Ball Z I had come to known on Cartoon Network.

But I was curious, so I started reading it there while the rest of the family was having Christmas dinner. After figuring out this weird thing about reading the book backwards, I was introduced to a hilarious story with all the familiar DBZ characters telling dirty jokes, acting perverted, and occasionally getting naked, including a topless shot of female heroine Bulma.

And to the mind of a teenager, this was amazing. I maybe, just maybe, found myself loving this Dragon Ball much more than I loved Dragon Ball Z.

While FUNimation did eventually air the Dragon Ball anime on Cartoon Network in 2001, they were unable to release the first 13 episodes on home video due to those rights belonging to the show’s first North American distributor. But that license is now expired, so for the first time ever, FUNi is releasing the complete Dragon Ball series in seasonal box sets.

And oh lawd, it’s freaking sweet!

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When Crunchyroll began streaming this season’s Charger Girl Ju-den Chan, it created quite a stir. The original show pushed the boundaries of all decency and featured nudity, violence against women, massive crotch shots, and probably the worst taboo of them all… urination! But on top of that, Crunchyroll sparked even more fury from the fans by showing a censored version of the series on their streaming service.

But I think a lot of folks sort of missed the one part of Ju-den Chan that I found the most interesting and shocking of the whole series-

The anti-piracy warning at the start of each episode.

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In June of 1983, transfer student Keiichi and his new friends, a colorful group of female classmates, hang out together and explore around their tiny village of Hinamizawa. It is time for the town’s annual cotton drifting festival, where the townsfolk pay tribute to their guardian spirit, Oyashiro.

A few years ago, an outside development team had plan to build a dam in the quiet rural village, which outraged the locals into a mass protest and lead to an ultimate cancellation of the project. But ever since that year, people who were in support of the dam have been mysteriously murdered every year during the night of the cotton drifting festival, an occurrence that the townsfolk call the Curse of Oyashiro.

This year is no exception, as a traveling photographer and his companion end up dead by the end of the night. Since Keiichi and his friends had known the victims, they end up in the middle of the investigation themselves. But as Keiichi learns more about the Curse of Oyashiro and the back story of his new pretty girl companions, he starts to spiral into the madness and horror of this quiet town. And by the end of the fourth episode, Keiichi and every one of the main characters are dead, each one of them meeting a gruesome bloody death at their own hands or murdered by one of their friends.

The End.

Wait. Did I just give away a spoiler?

Nope, because when the fifth episode begins, everything starts all over again from the beginning. It’s June of 1983, and Keiichi and the girls are all alive, happy, well, and they’re preparing for the upcoming cotton drifting festival. And this time around, they might not all meet the same bloody fate they had in the first four episodes.

I am a sucker for creative nonlinear narrative, so I absolutely loved the way Higurashi – When They Cry goes above and beyond anything I’ve seen before in an anime series.

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Gunslinger Girl – Il Teatrino is the recently released 13-episode sequel to the 2003 anime series. In Rome, Italy, a covert government operation takes in orphan girls on the verge of death, implants them with cybernetic technologies, and trains them to become the ultimate killing machine to take out the terrorist and bad guys that threaten their country. The combination of extreme violence being coldly perform by these cute little girls has become a trademark of this franchise.

The Il Teatrino season focus on a particular story arc involving Pinocchio, a teenage male version of the gunslinger girls. An orphan himself, Pinocchio was adopted by a huge underground crime boss and was equally trained to be a cold-blooded killer, albeit without cybernetic implants. But the boy is an excellent assassin, and executes his adopted father’s orders flawlessly with almost little hesitation. Will the girls be able to take them down, or have they finally met their match with this male rival?

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A Tale of an Unknown Country is the story of Rosemarie, the young princess of a poor but stable kingdom. Her older brother, Mache, believes their land can improve by aligning with the wealthier kingdom next door, so he betroths his little sister to that nation’s prince Reynol.

But Rosemarie is not happy with this marriage arrangement as rumor has it that Prince Reynol is a mean and nasty boy. So she devises a plan to disguise herself as a maid to enter the palace incognito. Once she’s inside and spends some time with the prince, she can find out if the rumors are true about Reynol’s bitterness and she can find a way to pull the plug on the marriage.

This is CMX’s second comic release from Natsuna Kawase after they have just released her Lapis Lazuli Crown only a few months ago. I didn’t formally review Lazuli for this blog, but I did read it and found it to be a very enjoyable shojo comic. So I had high exceptions going into Unknown Country, Kawase’s debut series from 2001.

But unfortunately, Kawase just hadn’t developed the right skills yet to make this as good as Lazuli.

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Big Windup! is the story of Mihashi, a spineless wimp of a high school baseball pitcher who nervously joins his new school’s hardball team. Back when he was in middle school, Mihashi was his team’s starting pitcher and lead his team to loss after loss. In fact, he has never won a game at his old middle school, and he’s afraid that the only reason he was their pitcher in the first place was because his grandfather was the owner of the school.

Now with his self-esteem and ego seriously damaged, he goes out of his way to transfer to Nishiura high school to start over again. But when the new school’s spunky female baseball coach spots him lingering around the practice field, she forces the reluctant boy to throw a few balls to their team’s catcher, Takaya.

The catcher quickly realizes that Mihashi isn’t a bad pitcher at all, he’s just been misguided and underestimated by his former teammates. Now with Takaya’s brilliant game play strategy and Mihashi’s dormant pitching ability, the brand new Nishiura high school baseball team is on their way to greatness in this fantastic first half to the 26-episode sports anime series.

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When Otakon announced that one of their Sunday performers would be Portland-born rock singer Becca, pretty much everybody I knew had the same reaction:

Who is this American girl and why is she performing at Otakon?

What we didn’t know was the unique story of an American rock singer who had already made a name for herself in Japan. But despite her success overseas, she was virtually unknown in her home country. And so her management team are trying to remedy this with a US marketing strategy aimed at fans of anime and manga.

And her appearance at Otakon was the first step in this plan.

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I remember back when I first laid eyes on a Miyazaki film. It was in early 2003 just after Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Picture. Disney had decided to re-release the movie into theaters for a couple of weeks before they released it onto DVD. So a couple of my high school buddies and I made the trip to some remote art house theater somewhere in Jersey to see what all the hubbub was about.

What I saw was one of the most incredible films ever created. Miyazaki had managed to create such a wonderful world full of Japanese traditions, spectacular imagery, and childish wonderment. And in the film’s climax when the two leads are flying together in the air, I was bawling my eyes out over the beauty of it all.

I was truly blown away from the film and have been desperately trying to find that same awesomeness with Miyazaki’s other works. I really enjoyed films like My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, and Princess Mononoke on DVD, but they still didn’t quite speak to me the way that Spirited Away did. And when I went to the US premiere of Howl’s Moving Castle back in 2005, I found that the film’s extremely cheesy ending ruined whatever momentum it had going for it.

Well, I’m now beginning to think that Spirited Away might have been Miyazaki’s last great film. His newest one set for release in America this Friday, Ponyo, turns out to be his biggest disappointment yet.
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NOTE: This post contains profanity and depictions of fictional nudity. If you are offended by such things, please do not read.

Junko Mizuno’s Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu is the story of Pelu. He is not a dog. He is not a cat. He’s a puffy creature from an alien planet who lives with a carnivorous space hippo and a ton of beautiful naked women. After Pelu’s sister gives birth to a baby, he learns about how babies are born on this alien planet and how he, as a puff ball, is unable to have one.

But Pelu longs for a baby and will not accept this predicament. So he runs away to the planet Earth in search of an ideal mate. What follows is a series of short episodes as Pelu pursues one screwed up Earth woman after another. Unfortunately, he always seems to be on the wrong end of the stick as all the girls either end up with some other dude, or die some horrible death. Oh, what’s a poor little fluffy gigolo to do!

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There’s a joke among the Twitter community that if an anime or manga series wants to get a good review out of me, all they would have to do is include a catgirl character. I do not deny the fact that catgirls are my one and only weakness when it comes to anime. They tend to be my favorite character in any series, from Kizuna in Candidate for Goddess to Koboshi in Pita Ten.  My love for this particular character type is the reason why my blog’s mascot is a catgirl herself.

So when I popped in the two-disc UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie OVA Collection into my video player, I was delighted to find out that not only was one of the main characters a catgirl, but she actually commanded an entire army of catgirls.

So needless to say, I absolutely loved this series.

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