The Anime Almanac

It’s been a long time since I last read shojo manga. As a fan of the more moé and shonen series, I very rarely pick up shojo titles in my eight years of collecting manga. But some time ago, I had a girlfriend who was also into manga, and she (literally) forced me to take in series like Hot Gimmick, Marmalade Boy, and Fushigi Yuugi. Fortunately, the girl had good tastes in manga, so despite following outside the target demographic of these titles, I found myself enjoying them a lot.

But again, that was many years ago, and I haven’t picked up a truly shojo title since then. So when CMX sent me a copy of Mai Nishikata’s Venus Capriccio to review for this site, I was worried that I might be a little rusty in being able to evaluate such a title.

Much to my surprise, however, Capriccio was an enjoyable read.

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Along with being an anime buff, I’m also a big movie buff. I probably see a new film at least once a week, so I am quite familiar with the way Hollywood and the industry works. Because I have such a huge admiration for the medium, it takes a lot to make me hate a film. In fact, I’ve only hated three films within the past year while finding the 50-some other films at least tolerable.

I hated Twilight because it was a dull film that was only meant to show off a pretty boy with bushy eyebrows. I hated Mama Mia! because the film ripped out my testicles, threw them at the screen, and then sang a song about it. I hated The Legend of Chun-Li movie not because it was a poor video game adaptation, but because it was a bad action flick.

But as difficult as it is to make me really hate a film, it’s even harder to make me really love a film and make it significantly stand out for me. So when the end credits began to roll for Dragonball Evolution last weekend and I gave it a genuine applause out of admiration, that really meant something.

Yes, I actually enjoyed this live-action adaptation of the popular manga series. I was a fan of Dragonball even before I was a fan of anime. This simple story of strength, power, and domination has reached out to many Americans and has made the franchise the most popular anime ever released over here. So because I thought that the final moments of the film captured the same awesome feeling that the original comic and anime had, I felt very satisfied that Hollywood brought the property to the big screen.

But looking around, it would appear that I was the only one who enjoyed it. The Dragonball fans hated the movie before it was even made. As every photo and trailer came out, the blogoshpere would complain about how bad the movie looked and how much it was going to suck. And in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, I was bombarded with blast after blast of hate as anime fans illegally downloaded the film and watched it on their computers.

With all this negative press leading up to the film’s release, it was no surprise that the film bombed its opening weekend and only took in a dismal $4.6 million at the box office. It even undersold everybody’s already low projections.

So where did it go wrong? How did the most popular anime property in America fail to reach out to its target audience?

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I love visual novel games. It’s an unique genre that is hugely popular in Japan yet is only known in America by otaku. It’s probably because of this cultural oddity that I find myself fascinated with the genre. Since learning Japanese, I would occasionally import a game and play through them in their native language. Just recently, I’ve been playing The Idolmaster SP import on my PSP system. In college, I gave my final presentation in Japanese pop-culture studies about this genre of video game. I even wrote an essay about the Phoenix Wright series and its impact on American otaku culture on this blog a year ago.

We very rarely see visual novels translated into English and released into the US, so when one does come around, I usually play through it with a lot of praise and fanfare. So when I was offered a review copy of Ignition’s American release of the Nintendo DS game Lux-Pain, I gave them quite an enthusiastic “yes!” at the opportunity.

Lux-Pain puts you in the position of a paranormal investigator in search of the truth behind a series of unexplainable murders and suicides in the quiet Kisaragi City. Your special weapon, Sigma, is the ability to erase through the physical world and uncover the Silent, little psychic worms of tragedy and despair. Going undercover as a typical high school student, you search around the city for these worms left around the crime scenes or buried in the psyche of your friends and classmates.

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I should probably make this a regular feature. Every once in a while, I receive an email that deserves a little extra attention from me in my response. When I received an email titled, “Keitaro Urashima Post and Why You Should Speak For Yourself Only!” I thought it was just going to be another flamer email to put on my block list.

But upon reading the email, I discovered that it was indeed filled with rage, but this rage seemed to be seriously misplaced and completely contradictory to what he was trying to prove. It was the perfect example of the otaku-vs-otaku hate that I have preached against in the past.

He never posted this up on his LiveJournal account, so I’m going to keep the letter anonymous and removed any form of identification in it.
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Japanese singer and dancer Reni Mimura makes her second local debut to a small concert that was mostly promoted by word-of-mouth. She is dressed in a frilly maid costume, carries around a pink stuffed poodle, and wears a pair of bunny ears on her head. Her set list is a combination of fan-requested anime theme songs, Reni’s self-picked cover songs, and her own original songs. Video screens around the venue show clips of the anime movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind – a personal favorite of the singer – and the whole front section of the audience is filled with camcorders and digital cameras as the fans actively try to capture the concert on film.

While this setup might seem a little unusual for a small pop concert, it’s all because she’s singing in the Akihabara-style, which is famous for its connection to anime, anime fans, and a type of geek appeal described by the fans as moé. And because of their pretty faces, cute costumes, and non-threatening personalities, the moé Akihabara j-idols are to these nerdish otaku men what the Jonas Brothers are for American tween girls. That is why when Reni goes onto the stage, the small otaku audience gets onto their feet, applaud loudly, and then enthusiastically clap along as Reni sings her first anime theme song of the evening.

But this isn’t Akihabara – it isn’t Japan – and most of the audience aren’t even Japanese. We’re in a small karaoke bar in the east side of New York City, which is being rented out the first Sunday of each month to serve as Reni’s personal venue. But for the American otaku in the audience, this is probably the closest they’ll ever get to seeing a cute j-idol perform like this.

Fortunately for them, this idol is now local, and she’s planning on sticking around in New York for quite some time.

So who exactly is Reni? Where did she come from and how did she end up in New York City?

I sat down for an interview with this singer in Bryant Park one Sunday while the nearby Kinokuniya bookstore held an “Anime Day” full of activities. But as an interviewer, it was very hard to get all the details. Like a proper J-idol, her personal life becomes overshadowed by a perky on-stage personality. So I tried my best to peel through the mystery to figure out the story behind this singer.

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Last week, I talked about the term “OEL manga” and how I felt that it was a genre that deserved to have a little recognition among manga fans. I even showed off Scott Pilgrim as the “Best OEL Manga Evar!!!” Yet recently another OEL manga have been making its rounds among the online review community, and not in a good way.

When Brigid Alverson of MangaBlog.net received her review copy of Tantric Stripfighter Trina from Tokyopop, she tweeted, “It’s like everything women hate about superhero comics, only in manga form.” She passed along her copy to Erica Friedman of Okazu, who lashed out that the OEL title “was written for and will appeal primarily to barely post-pubescent males…” And Deb Aoki fumed that the “time, money and effort thrown at pure junk [like this,] could have been spent on promoting the really great books that TokyoPop does have.” So in keeping with the tradition of taking out the trash, Deb sent her copy over to me so that the world could also get my take on it.

Considering all the things mentioned in these reviews, I was preparing myself for a complete failure of a comic to review for this week. I was even planning to contrast the Scott Pilgrim piece by declaring the series to be the “Worst OEL Manga Evar!!!”

But it should be noted that all three of these past reviewers are women. And while it’s been quite a while since I hit puberty, some facts still remain true through the mind of a 24-year-old male:

• I believe that boobs are still pretty freaking awesome.
• I believe that fighting and nonsensical violence can also still be pretty freaking awesome.

So all of this lead to the surprising conclusion that I found myself actually enjoying Tantric Stripfighter Trina.

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Deb Aoki is the very talented guide behind the manga section of About.com. She was invited to attend the preview reception of KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games art exhibit last Wednesday at the Japan Society in New York City. The problem? Deb lives on the completely opposite side of country, and was unable to take the time to fly to New York to attend the event.

That’s when she called on two New York area experts on all three genres to go in her place. Evan Minto of Ani-Gamers and yours truly checked out the exhibit last week, and we wrote out a tag-team review on it for Deb’s website.

Overall, I thought the exhibit was a little bit on the small and limited side, especially when it came to video games. However, there were still a few things that I really liked including the action figure pictured above. Also, I can’t stress enough how awesome the “giant wall of anime” room was, and I really wish that I could find a picture of it to show you guys. That alone could have been worth the cost of admission.

But I did mention all my high points in the review, so please be sure to check it out. 😉

I once heard that in marketing, the customer will become interested in a product after it has been recommended to them three times. A year ago, I had read a gushing review of the OEL manga series Scott Pilgrim in ANN’s weekly review section. A month later, the hosts of the video podcast The Totally Rad show had also given very positive impressions of the series. So it was almost too easy for Amazon to sell me a copy of the series when I was hit with it a third time in their “Recommended for you” section.

The title character of the series is an unemployed 23-year-old Canadian just off of a major break-up. After trying to date a shy high school girl, he meets a wild American girl, Ramona, who turns his boring life completely around. What follows next is six surreal volumes of comedy and ridiculous ninja action as Scott has to literally confront and battle every ex-boyfriend of Ramona in order to be with her.

And because it is created by Canadian artist Brian Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim is proof that a manga series created by a Westerner can speak to the Western audience in ways that Japanese comics can’t. It is one of the best comics I have ever read, and it is OEL at its finest.

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Manga artist Akira Toriyama must have some strange fetish for dragons. If you are an American anime fan and you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you are probably familiar with his Dragonball manga franchise. But video game fans will also be familiar with him providing the character designs for Dragon Quest, a Japanese RPG franchise that has been around since the mid-80’s and still continues to be produced to this very day.

In late 2006, Toriyama provided his familiar character designs to Blue Dragon, a new RPG for the Xbox 360. This was significant for two reasons. 1) It was one of the first Japanese RPG’s on the Xbox 360 and 2) the Japanese don’t play the Xbox 360.

But the game sold moderately well in Japan, which lead to the need to expand the franchise to be just as popular and have the same longevity as Toriyama’s previous Dragon projects. Along with a shonen anime series (currently available for free on XBM and iTunes), Mistwalker studio teamed up with Brownie Brown to put together Blue Dragon Plus, a sequel to the original game. However, this time around they are going portable by releasing the game on the Nintendo DS.

Plus takes place a year after the events of the original game. Shu, the game’s main protagonist and young-Goku doppelganger, is living in peace with his friends after they have defeated the evil villain Nene. However, Nene is not actually dead, and when he takes away the soul of Shu’s robotic friend, Shu is once again on the quest to get his old pal back. He’s joined up all his other friends from the first game, and they split up to fight all the evil monsters and robots that stand in their way.

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I have to admit, when I first heard the news that official applications based off of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise were coming to the iPhone App Store, I had mixed feelings over it. I was excited because I am both an Eva fanboy and Apple fanboy, so combining the two seemed to me like a recipe for awesome. However, being an extensive iPhone user, I know all too well how crappy most of programs coming out of the App Store actually are… especially those promoted as “official” apps… (>_>)

Well, we didn’t have to wait for long to see what coming out. Tokyo software company Appliya, makers of the feline attention-grabbing app Meow Cam, released two Eva-inspired creations into the apps store earlier this week, the Evangelion Clock (iTunes link) and Evangelion Picture Stamp (iTunes link).

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