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Finished Dennou Coil!

I don't really know what to say about the last couple of episodes since pretty much everything is a major spoiler, but I will say that I got a rare sense of definite closure from watching the finale.

Oh, also, I love all of the crazy foreshadowing in this show.

The first thing you see in the opening theme is the four manholes that mark the Coil Space. They're also present in the ending credits as the last thing that Densuke walks past. Densuke also walks past little kids drawing the portal next to a pair of glasses. You can see Satchi on a poster several times in the first episode, and Tamako Harakawa and Sōsuke Nekome are both clearly seen hanging out in the restaurant that Yasako and Kyoko go to in the first episode

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Oh man, I just found out AMV Hell is back again after dying for the third or fourth time a while back. I wasted so much time on 1-4 in college. It looks like the final cut of AMV Hell 6 is supposed to be released sometime in the next few weeks, but the original draft i up on Vimeo in its entirety since a lot of it is supposed to be cut out.

 

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I've watched a bit of anime while playing FF 9, the Persona 4 animation is as good as the game it's based on, but... Was the ramen delivery girl in the original game or exclusive to the anime? I don't remember her at all! It's fascinating how they crammed that massive game in one season, although they kinda cram all the "social" stuff in one episode... It's also hilarious to see every woman fall in love with the main character like in the game, also... NANAKO!

 

I finally watched Gurren Lagann and while I love the first season, I quit during the beginning of the second one... 

The world is ending, the woman you proposed to is now evil, the world hates you and has sentenced you to death and it's possible your best friend has betrayed you... and all the cool bots are gone. I'm sorry, but this seems like a desperate attempt at drama gone wrong. When you go too far I stop caring, it feels lazy in way. The baby that "ended" the world just happened to be the one from your friend? SHEESH!

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The entire point of Gurren Lagann is to be ridiculous and keep getting more ridiculous. That is its purpose in life.

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But it stopped being ridiculously funny and became ridiculously depressing... The shift in tone is staggering. 

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I can't think of a single moment when it became depressing besides that dude dying. After which it almost immediately went back to being ridiculously badass.

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Also, that AMV Hell thing was fantastic. I never knew a thing like that existed, and this is number six? Man. I never expected to enjoy it as much as I did.

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I don't know if this was season two or another series in the same world, but this is AFTER they defeat the big bad of the first season, the Spiral King.

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Tanukitsune: I hated the start of the second season, but you seriously need to keep going. It starts being more like its old self fairly quickly, after...

Simon accidentally invents teleportation so that he can go halfway around the world for the sole purpose of punching Rossiu in the face.

 

 

Also, that AMV Hell thing was fantastic. I never knew a thing like that existed, and this is number six? Man. I never expected to enjoy it as much as I did.

It's a long-running thing made for anime conventions, usually released simultaneously with a version that's deliberately offensive. They're really fun! There's actually more than six, though I recommend sticking with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and maybe the Minis.

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I stopped watching Gurren Lagann when the dude died and the new chick showed up because I didn't care about any of the characters any more.  I might give it a second shot though, I just really didn't like the new girl though.

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A couple years ago, I got wind of a Swedish DJ and musician named Rasmus Faber putting out jazz covers of anime songs. He's up to his third volume now on iTunes and every track is classic. There's one in particular from the anime The World God Only Knows that I find absolutely entrancing. As a result, I've gone to look up the anime three times since the last album came out a year ago, only to rediscover time and again that it's a creepy-sounding show about a guy given the power to "cleanse" girls of demons by "conquering" them with love. Still, the theme music is great West Coast jazz, right?

 

 

The past couple months have been weird in terms of the shows I've been watching. After finishing the first season of School Rumble, which is a great slice-of-life anime bogged down by the worst main characters imaginable, I decided to work on my knowledge of older anime (which means pre-2000 for me, when I started watching). One of those, Martian Successor Nadesico, was a bust despite a great reputation as one of the classic from the nineties. Sure, it surfs on the zeitgeist of Evangelion pretty well, but its genre-fusing parody is laid aside too early in order to devote more attention to blatant anti-war and anti-corporate soap-boxing. At least the movie, which everyone hates, gave up on the comedy angle and was better for it.

 

But now I'm watching the Mobile Police Patlabor OVAs, which are great. I can hardly believe they were made in the eighties, to be honest. There's something about sci-fi procedurals, at least in anime, that makes them both mature and progressive. I always bring up Major Kusanagi Mokoto as a great example of a strong female character in anime, if you can overlook the cheesecake body that Shirow Masamune gave her to console himself that he wasn't drawing porn for once. Patlabor is the same: smart without being pretentious, political without being preachy, forward-thinking without being technofetishistic. I'm actually excited that there's a massive franchise -- three movies, two OVA series, and a TV show -- for me to plumb, since Ghost in the Shell has been dormant for years and is now getting a reboot that looks pretty disappointing.

 

April's going to be an exciting month. A Certain Scientific Railgun, which is as good as the parent series A Certain Magical Index is bad, is getting a second season, plus the third Rebuild of Evangelion movie releases on Blu-ray in Japan and therefore will be subbed on the internet in short order. I thought about diving into the Gurren Lagann discussion here last week, but I don't have much to say. That show is all about ludicrous stakes, so if they don't work for you, you either keep watching until they do or you quit.

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I wanna see the next Rebuild movie.

 

I started a show that I would highly recommend as a mature, well-constructed anime: Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. That's a singularly generic name for an amazingly animated series with literally no filler. Every scene is relevant, everything else is cut. As a result, it feels like a very deliberate, toned-down fantasy yarn that deals more with people than with the slight nuance of supernatural stuff sprinkled on top. Give it a try, I am finding it intruiging and refreshing.

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Seirei no Moribito and its - for all intents and purposes - spiritual successor, Kemono no Souja Erin, are both great. (I think I liked Moribito more, but that's kind of meaningless, because it's very fantastic.)

 

ALSO: Weird how I identify these two series using their Japanese names. That's not normal for me. I had to think about it before I realized I had seen the anime you were talking about.

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Hey, Moribito is by Kamiyama Kenji, who did the two Ghost in the Shell: SAC TV series (but is not doing the upcoming OVAs, hence the disappointment)! He's a great writer and director who makes tight, realistic stories... well, except for Eden of the East, which is undercut by a kind of soullessness that stinks of focus testing.

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Eden of the East wasn't bad, but certainly not the tight and deliberate experience Moribito is turning out every morning during my breakfast.

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Wow, that's just jaw-dropping. I love how Blu-ray has given distro companies a chance to return to the oh-so-successful pre-bubble prices for anime. Durarara!! is being sold in a two hundred-dollar "lunchbox" and the first season of K-On! is only available in thirty-dollar singles.

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From what I understand, the high prices for anime in the west have always been due to sheer stubbornness on the parts of the Japanese distributors rather than the American ones. Since Japanese DVD players are all region-free and Japan shares a Blu-Ray region with America, they're worried that they'll cannibalize the market if Japanese consumers can just import the US releases (which are generally of higher quality anyway) at a reasonable cost rather than pay the exorbitant prices that Japanese DVDs cost due to the extremely low demand (I remember seeing a breakdown of anime sales figures in Japan once. Seeing that Kaiba sold something like 500 copies was the most heartbreaking thing), so they pressure American distributors into making everything far more costly than it has any right to be.

 

They really ought to work something out, because it's just not sustainable.

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Well, the K-On! fiasco was because Bandai spent an arm and a leg to get the license to the most profitable franchise back in Japan, then decided it wasn't worth it to try to compete in a one-company marketplace with FUNimation and instigated the worst commercial rout I've ever seen. But in general, yeah. Japanese companies are terrified of backflow collapsing the home market.

 

Which I think might be a little irrational, because I'm pretty sure -- in terms of visual quality, not pricing or extras -- native Blu-ray releases are better than their American counterparts. Especially at FUNimation, there's a tendency to remaster the remasters they get from Japan. Not-invented-here syndrome, I guess? Above and beyond the debatable wisdom of upscaling a native 480p digital video source in the first place, that's what made for the awful Samurai Champloo and FLCL Blu-rays a few years ago, as well as better but still oversharpened releases like Haibane Renmei recently (that said, the Lain remaster is beautiful and I want to be with it always). I'd say maybe one in twenty archive-quality fansubs use American Blu-rays for source, usually from smaller operations like Sentai Filmworks née ADV Films that don't have the manpower to waste second-guessing the original encode.

 

It's a very unusual situation, for sure. Japanese companies charge ridiculous licensing and distro fees to keep the American market manageable because they don't have a means to capitalize on overseas growth. No risks taken whatsoever, even if it means smothering great but underperforming series like Nichijou in the cradle.

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Kaiba has an Australian release which I haven't gotten to that's pretty reasonable. http://www.fishpond.com.au/Movies/Kaiba-Houko-Kuwashima/9330080007936?cf=3&rid=309978462&i=1&keywords=kaiba

 

I would probably buy that Gurren Lagann Blu-ray set for completionists sake if it were under $100, since I don't really like the show but I like Hiroyuki Imaishi. Unless it appears for a reasonable price somewhere, then I'll pass.

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I would probably buy that Gurren Lagann Blu-ray set for completionists sake if it were under $100, since I don't really like the show but I like Hiroyuki Imaishi. Unless it appears for a reasonable price somewhere, then I'll pass.

 

See, in Japan, there are plenty of people who'll buy everything with a popular anime/manga/light novel franchise's name on it, even if they're charging five thousand yen for a set of pencil boards, but I've only met a couple people like that stateside (and even then over the internet). In the strictest sense, it must be nice to be able to count on that sort of customer, but I can't imagine it being too profitable.

 

If you or anyone else is comfortable talking about buying habits with a stranger, what does completionism look like to you? I'm really curious to know one not my own, which mostly just consists of buying the nicest and most compact format if I enjoy the show enough to rewatch it someday.

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Well for completionism, I probably have like 15 books on Gurren Lagann, and I don't even really like the show (this is the fault of my OCD and it's stupid I know), I think the only other books I've had rival this are ones for Akira which are gorgeous. However, I think the only other rival is about 6 official books of production art on Panty and Stocking which I also enjoy, while only 2 books were ever released for his Dead Leaves short, so most stuff pertaining to animation I enjoy from Japan tends to be inexpensive and not hard to get them all if you know where to look. A lot of time for less popular stuff or anthology shorts, there tends to be only one book released (much like Pixar films) where it's just a best of storyboards, pencil tests, production art, background art. Shopping for art books in Japan is tricky but they tend to be plentiful, so it's a lot of copying and pasting names in Japanese and searching online stores and using Google translate.

 

When I started collecting more art books years back, I used Ebay US a few times for books but they tend to be pricey, and it's mostly a guide to know what you are buying. If you just cut out the middle man and import books yourself, it gets much cheaper. Amazon.co.jp offers better used deals than Ebay US, but even moreso I've found Mandarake.co.jp to be the best source of inexpensive books and more recent still FromJapan.co.jp allows me to use Japan only auction sites and resalers for really cheap deals on some rarer books I could not find previous. Considering the general cost of most non-Japanese art books, which rival these prices in many cases, 5,000 yen for a rarer pencil test book isn't so bad but indeed is a little pricey, especially with the shit exchange rates right now.

 

I think the most I've spent on an art book in Japan in $125 for the painted backgrounds for Steamboy, since I bought it long after the fact, but most of the time I can find nice deals in the $20-40 range per book if I'm patient enough, but these collections go for years in the making when I have the money. Either way, it's an expensive hobby to collect them, but nothing ever nears what you'd pay for importing an anime DVD or Blu-ray. Those prices are nuts and most stuff isn't even English friendly anyway. I never understood the reasoning of just importing anime you can't even understand. For instance, that Gurren Lagann Blu-ray set contains every main episode in English in HD, but a lot of those extras which were subtitled on the earlier English DVD release will no longer be English friendly. Are there a lot of anime fanatics that don't understand Japanese but import this stuff out of fanaticism? I'm curious to see if Aniplex will see this as a mistake and make a price that doesn't just entice only the major spenders.

 

I remember searching high and low for Robot Carnival's legit R2 Japanese release and it probably was too expensive. Had a DVD in the U.S. existed, I would have never done that as the thing is bare bones. By the time I found out about the Japanese Little Nemo DVD with the early pilot films and concept art extras, it was starting at $150 going up to $300 currently. I guess this is a normal price for a "collector's" DVD? Luckily someone finally released a nice Nemo Blu-ray stateside for like $20 with the extras, so grateful because that movie is special to me for all it's faults. I think the worst I've ever done on the rare occasion I import a Japanese DVD is for this crazy ass Mind Game boxset with 6 discs and artbooks that I blew my graduating present monies on. But most of it was English friendly or had extras that did not have any speech. I know Studio 4C will never do any English friendly DVDs again of their stuff, which sucks majorly, because apparently by putting subtitles on the expensive Mind GameDVD (I think the barebones one was still $60) made it appear on torrent sites the day of release. Admittedly that's how I  saw Mind Game in the first place, but I tend to end up getting physical copies of things I like.

 

And that was a shitload of rambling.

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I've held off thanking you for sharing this, because I don't know how to contribute, but I found it all really interesting. I own a couple of anime artbooks, but only ones that came with special-edition DVDs and Blu-rays. Though the books are pretty, especially the Lain one by ABe, I'd never buy one on its own, but you're an artist, right? That might make more sense.

 

I occasionally spend a hundred dollars on certain box sets, but my grail is video quality. That's why I'm take pride in my remastered Berserk and original Geneon Gankutsuou, though I haven't worked up the guts to pay monster bucks for out-of-print Blu-ray titles like Jin-Roh. I don't like to import non-RI discs, because of my own quasi-OCD issues, so I do have maybe fifty anime on my list that get instant buys when/if they get a US release. Some never will, so I just archive the best fansubs and find other ways to express myself, like buying all the Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei manga. I like the idea of having a collection that extends beyond a bunch of discs, but my attachment to anime is so closely tied to the onscreen experience, I can't really imagine it any other way.

 

 

Anyway, speaking of Bandai Visual Blu-rays, I went ahead and bought Gunbuster vs. Diebuster after watching all of the former but only two episodes of the latter. I liked Gunbuster a lot for being early Anno, with the themes that would create Evangelion already visible, but Diebuster really surprised me. It's like FLCL or Gurren Lagann if they took themselves more and less seriously, respectively.

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