I’ve got two words for you: DANCE PARTY. You’ll know it when you see it.
I love Alan Tudyk as the voice of the sentient boat. He’s been doing some quality voice work lately.
LALALALALALA… I haven’t seen season 2 yet either. We binged season 1 and have been waiting for season 2 for a while now. We’re limited, though, in how much we can watch because we have to wait until Mr. TM’s best friend comes over as he wants to see it too and doesn’t have a Prime membership.
You don’t have to watch this. Practice self-restraint if you must.
I just found this, though. I have to share.
DANCE PARTY!
If you’ve been keeping up with Game of Thrones, then you know that Sunday’s episode was the big battle between the living and the dead. Longest filmed battle sequence in history. They used one of the battles in The Lord of the Rings as their benchmark.
If you saw it, you saw how dark it was, not in terms of subject matter but instead simply being able to see what was on the screen. Almost three months of nighttime filming instead of using the day for night technique, and the decision was made to do it this way as a “because we can” decision. Slate has an article on “Why You Couldn’t See a Damn Thing on This Week’s Game of Thrones” that identifies the tech advancements that actually make watching nighttime scenes worse. (Note: some spoilers in the article.)
- Faster workflow by filming in digital instead of on analog film.
- Low-end high definition TVs don’t produce the color black very well, and it sounds like the old CRTs might do it better than most HD TVs. (If the electron gun didn’t need to activate a particular set of RGB phosphors, they were just off, I think, whereas an HD TV has to keep those elements going no matter what, leading manufacturers to advertise “the blackest blacks” and “perfect blacks” as they work towards that.)
- Digital TV is compressed. The networks apply the first layer of compression and cable companies re-compress the signal on the fly they get from the providers.
So you get an episode that’s almost all night scenes and it gets mangled into making it difficult to watch.
What to do about it? The article recommends turning off lights, watch it from a streaming service because you’ll skip the extra layer of compression introduced by the cable company, and calibrate your TV, even if you use the less-precise method of calibrating with a THX DVD or Blu-ray with test patterns on it, rather than with professional calibration equipment. Another article over on IGN recommends if you’re streaming the show, wait to watch it so you’re not fighting for bandwidth with as many people, and this will cut out some of the jitters, artifacting and buffering.
What you don’t want to do if you’re someone involved in making a movie or TV episode with a dark scene is blame the viewer. To be fair, that’s not what cinematrographer Fabien Wagner is doing in Wired’s article. He pinpoints the same thing: TV sets need the right room lighting and to be calibrated. He also says watch the show like you’re at a cinema/theater, which means don’t watch it on something small like an iPad.
Making a movie or TV show “by committee” can ruin it (more than what’s already built into the infrastructure of making them), but the people that make them do need to start thinking about what it’s going to look like to the viewer, rather than just on their high-end, professional level equipment.
TV is no longer the dumping ground for movies so you make your movie the way you want to and you expect it to be chopped up and altered to fit the limitations of TV. Cell phone providers and TV providers are pushing customers to get used to watching things on mobile devices. And the hard fact is that most people who buy a TV from Walmart, Target or Best Buy aren’t going to turn their living room or den into a room that’s exactly the equivalent of a movie theater. Some will spend the money to get it as close as they can, others will add things that make it better than average, but a lot are just going to take it out of the box, plug it in and use it as is.
Just like how there’s 3D movies that look too dark because of the conversion process and adjustments have to be made to compensate for it, the people that make movies and TV shows that have darkly-lit scenes need to make adjustments to compensate for the fact that the compression that is inherent in the delivery system for their content is going to make something that’s already difficult to see even worse.
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We noticed the episode was dark, but it didn’t bother us… We figured it was a stylistic choice. We also didn’t see any compression artifacts or similar with our setup, which I admit would have been annoying.
It looked fine on my TV. It was dark but I could make out what was happening. I did see some minor banding in dark outdoor shots, but it honestly wasn’t too bad. I did stream it on HBO Now as it went live.Sunday night.
Now looking into downloading a calibration DVD/BR.
Looking over on Amazon, there’s three choices: Disney’s “WOW: World of Wonder”, Spears & Munsil “HD Benchmark and Calibration Disc 2nd Edition” and “Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics”.
For the first, the reviews say the DVD version works as well as the Blu-ray version because your TV will upscale the signal, is cheaper ($20 vs. $55+) and doesn’t include some mini Disney movies. Both have a “let Goofy be your guide to calibration” walkthrough you can skip for intermediate/advanced settings.
The one by Spears & Munsil can produce better results on 4K TVs, but it’s going to take more work.and you have read the manual. $30.
The last one was created by actor/director Joe Kane (the second Joe Kane the director, that made “Twisted”) and it advertises “Easy to Use HD Set-up Toolkit”, $10 or $18 for the 2012 (updated?) region-free version. Seems to be heavy on technical jargon and it’s more of a “here’s what HDTV is” that includes calibration tools. That makes sense since the original “Digital Video Essentials: High Definition” DVD version was released in 2007 and the “we’re switching to a digital signal so you really need to get an HDTV set” deadline in the U.S. was about two years away. Plus, his Joe Kane Productions website sells professional calibration products. (There’s a glitch on the first page where the list of links is partially hidden, so click on “About Us” at the top to see a cleaner page, then as you go to each page, scroll down to the bottom to see that’s page’s info. It’s kind of a bad website design.)
I just downloaded the Monster ISF HDTV Calibration DVD and will see how that goes.
I bought my last television at Goodwill. I’m not even certain what resolution it is. The television before that was from 2007. I think.
This looks promising.
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Bodacious. Adjective: Blatant, unmistakable, remarkable, outstanding, audacious, bold, brazen, sexy, voluptuous.
Space. Noun: Big. Really Big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
Pirates. Noun, plural: Persons who have been given written legal permission by a government to engage in the aquisition and seizure of property from others, which often includes providing entertainment for passengers aboard cruise ships.
Let’s take a trip into the distant future, to a time when humans have both colonized and terraformed other planets. We’ve been to Tau Ceti and beyond, through the usual steps of colony/sleeper ships and then developing faster-than-light travel. Even though it’s one of the closest planetary systems to Earth, expansion continued and left it behind as a quieter region of space. A few planets, such as Tau Ceti’s Sea of the Morning Star, formed a Colony Federation but were overseen by the Stellar Alliance.
As explained in the opening narration of various episodes of Bodacious Space Pirates, the Federation eventually got fed up with the way the Alliance was handling things and fought a War for Independence. Before either side could win, the much larger Galactic Empire swooped in and absorbed both sides, then kind of left all of them to govern themselves.
During the War of Independence, the Colony Federation bolstered its forces by issuing Letters of Marque to pirate ships, making them government-sanctioned extensions of their military. Once things settled down, the Letters of Marque continued to be renewed as long as at least one act of piracy was committed on a regular basis, changing over the next 120 years to an every 50 days requirement, with the involvement of contracts, insurance companies, staged takeovers of luxury liners and child labor laws.
The series parallels the events of the colonies in North America declaring their independence from Britain and becoming the United States of America. Letters of Marque were a big part of how they increased the size of their Navy, to the point where there were more pirate ships than official Navy vessels. The bonuses of being legal pirates were often better than what you got in the Navy.
This is the world Marika Kato suddenly finds herself in when she learns her father died and was a space pirate. Another rule with the Letter of Marque is it can only be passed down to direct descendants, so her mother, Ririka, is ineligible to take over the ship. Struggling to cope with everyone’s expectations that she already knows all about space pirates when her mother never bothered to tell her, Marika now has to balance these new responsibilities with her life as a high school student at Hakuoh Academy and a member of the Academy’s Yacht Club. To compound her struggle, space pirates are almost a myth by her time, despite how active they have to be to keep their Letter. Much of that activity seems to take place elsewhere.
The twenty-six episode series and the movie, Bodacious Space Pirates: Abyss of Hyperspace, show her journey as a trainee captain. She has a natural instinct for some tactics and decisions and the rest she figures out as she goes. She becomes more familiar with her crew and her ship, the Bentenmaru, to the point that during one battle, she remembers a maneuver that was executed recently, calls out with a vague “What about the thing from before?”, and the crew gets it and uses it to save the ship. In another battle on a different ship, she figures out how to use some of its equipment in a non-standard way to disable an enemy. As Bart Mancuso once said, “Combat tactics, Mr. Ryan.”
Unfortunately, this story ends at a point where it’s clear that there needs to be more adventures. As a young captain, Marika receives a lot of help from her own crew, including them enforcing rules about the hours a minor can work, help from other pirate crews, help from her yacht club and help from a clandestine treaty that protects her until she’s 18.
The movie takes place when she’s 17 and in her third year at the Academy, so it’s just a few more months before the gloves would come off. Her battles as the captain of a pirate ship would no doubt have been more fierce when her rivals stop holding back. The final episodes show her there’s a much bigger world out in space than she was aware of and the landscape of pirating is about to change. Abyss of Hyperspace digs deep into how hyperspace works and how the routes ships use in it can be cut off or expanded into new routes, shaking things up further, and gives her a chance to uphold a promise her father made years ago.
The potential for higher drama, tension and action is there, and a chance to learn more about her father. But outside of the light novels the series and movie are based on, we probably won’t get to see what happens next.
BSP is a fully-realized series with a lot of details worked into it and some very gorgeous images of space. If I lived on a world like Sea of the Morning Star with partial rings of cosmic dust that light up at night and there were clusters of stars in vivid shades of blues, purples, reds and more, I’d be looking to get out amongst it as often as I could, just like Marika did.
While the Stellar Alliance and corporations with their own space fleets often have ships built to look like Bowie knives and swords, the pirate ships range from rugged and compact to long and sleek with deployable solar panels like aboard the Odette II, one of the Original Seven pirate ships from the war that the Yacht Club gets to use for their practice runs, though most of the club members don’t know its history. Luxury liners have paint schemes that look like filigree and are gorgeous as well.
Other technology is a mix of the familiar and the futuristic. Sea of the Morning Star has futuristic-looking public transportation, but private vehicles look a lot like the cars and trucks we have now. For instance, Ririka drives a car that could pass for a mid-60s Chevy El Camino. Marika rides a bike to school every day, even though her planet isn’t so crowded that bikes would be a necessity, but while the design shows it’s made from advanced materials, it’s got the same basic layout your average bike has now. Houses and buildings for businesses can be made out of brick or stone, yet have the same kind of doors you’d see on a spaceship where two halves close together in the middle to create a safety barrier.
There’s definite physics involved in how spaceships move. Whereas sharships in Star Trek and Star Wars swoop and bank, usually with no indication of how they change direction, pirate ships use visible thrusters for steering. Trek does have maneuvering thrusters, but they’re typically used at a near standstill for getting into position next to a docking port and the like. The rest of the time, impulse engines steer the ship, again with no visible means of doing so. Ships in BSP have main engines for forward momentum and all horizontal and vertical changes are done with thrusters. Since this is a series about pirates, steering is done with the same kind of ship’s wheel as water-bound pirate ships from centuries ago, with the ability to push and pull on the wheel to change vertical direction.
In another difference with Trek, et al, entering and leaving hyperspace is shown as having physical resistance. It takes several seconds of effort for ships to get through the barrier between hyperspace and normal space. Hyperspace is treated much like Earth’s oceans are. There are currents and routes you travel in and if you want to dive to a lower level, it takes even more effort to get there and it’s harder on the ship to run at that depth.
When was the last time you saw a spaceship where the area around the bridge retracted during combat? The Bentenmaru’s bridge does that. The hull over the bridge descends, covering the windows, and the sensor/warfare array below the ship can be deployed and retracted as needed. During combat, additional technology comes into play that I’m calling “U&U tech”, for “ubiquitous and unobtrusive”.
We’re working towards “ubiquitous” with the Internet of Things, but instead of devices that talk to each other to share data, BSP’s U&U tech comes in the form of holograms that can be displayed against any surface or in the air. You’ve seen this in some of the Marvel movies, but it feels different here. When the Bentenmaru’s hull retracts to protect the bridge, the ceiling becomes a full-length image of the outside, with small graphics that momentarily appear to remind you you’re looking at a display and not a window. Luxury liners use this, too. When you want to someone you a message, you grab ahold of an envelope in the air and toss or push it to them. Some tactical displays mimic greenbar or pinkbar paper.
Homes have this same tech and the holograms used for video conference calls can stretch and change shape as people move, like the time when the former Yacht Club president called to talk to them. She leans forward and rests her arms on the table, which made the hologram shift to a 3-D image so it looked like she’s leaning through a window. I call this tech unobtrusive because it’s used in a way that feels natural instead of overt, like what you saw in the live-action version of Ghost in the Shell.
They have FTL communications between planets and to ships, with a choice of using a simple telephone for voice calls if they want, and because the ships are registered with the government, you can look up a pirate ship in an online phone book and give them a call even while they’re in hyperspace. All ships have energy-based and matter-based weapons (lasers, missiles) but much of combat occurs through electronic warfare, which uses graphics to track progress that are wooden sailing vessel-based with masts and the hull.
It’s typical in series that involve spaceships to have some kind of gravity control. What you see in BSP is a kind of “sticky” gravity system. If you get out of your chair, you’ll begin floating, but if you come near a surface, the gravity system will pull you towards it, like if you’re floating down a corridor and you move your foot closer to the deck, you’ll touch the deck and can start walking or push off again. Once you contact a surface, the gravity system will flow around you and your hair will stop floating around. Marika figured out how to use this to her advantage when she needed to take out some trash.
BSP surprised me when it came to background music. I was watching an episode and suddenly thought, “That’s beautiful. Does this have a soundtrack?” The answer is yes. The complete original soundtrack has two CDs for the TV series and one for the movie. Almost all songs are around a minute thirty or forty, but it’s over two hours total in a wide range of styles, from techno to jazz to classical to humorous with a slide whistle and steel drums. About half of the songs on the third disc are extended/reworked versions from the TV series. Almost all songs on the three CDs are great candidates for becoming ringtones for your phone, which I’m going to be working on. I might have enough to change the ringtone every day for an entire month. I got the soundtrack and some related CDs through CDJapan. You can view the track list in English over at VGMdb.
This is the only series where I listened to the title song and the end credits every time I watched an episode, and I’ve watched the series three times and the movie twice. Usually, I tune it out after a few times, put it on mute or hit fast forward. Not with BSP. “Mugen no Ai” has a lot of contrasts and opposites in it and how we are children of the stars, with some phrases I like just because the original Japanese lyrics have internal rhyming: “Itsudatte namidame” (“always crying”) and how the words for fate and destiny are unmei and shukumei. I think the men’s choir and the use of bells in the song really helps sell it. “Lost Child” is about Marika’s two lives and is accompanied by images showing them merging together. The two songs work together as bookends for each episode, with an occasional substitution of other songs like “Black Holy”.
Both the title sequence and end credits sequence show that all 26 episodes of the TV series were planned out in advance, rather than the one year at a time other shows go through, because some of the characters in the opening and some of the outfits in the credits didn’t appear until the end of the first year or all the way up until almost the end of the series. There are changes as the episodes go on, where more people are shown as the number of people Marika encounters changes. There’s also changes in the end credits to Marika’s pirate outfit that match what she wears in the episodes.
Poor Show. Even being a pacifist and the friendly head of an large insurance agency isn’t enough to prevent being obscured by a guy with a tall hat
If I have to find fault in BSP so this isn’t just a gushing review of the series, there’s three points. The first one is pretty common in animated series. Everyone usually wears the same clothes all the time, with few exceptions. Part of this is due there being three main locations where most everything takes place: the Academy, the Lamp House Cafe and on the Bentenmaru. Marika takes it further and wears her school uniform everywhere she goes. She’s perfectly comfortable wearing a school uniform that has a miniskirt, but the one time she tries putting on a disguise of a business suit and sunglasses, she complains that its skirt is too short, even though it’s the same length as her uniform’s skirt.
The biggest change in clothing occurs when the Yacht Club helps Marika with a pirating gig and they wear cosplay outfits like a wizard and a police constable instead of pirate-themed outfits. Surprisingly, it goes over well with the passengers they’re robbing (a lot of pirating is staged and insurance companies reimburse the thefts). With the attention given to the title sequence and end credits where they took the time to update them as events changed in the episodes, it’s disappointing to see they didn’t put more variety into the clothing people wear day-to-day.
Second would be “over-naming syndrome”. Instead of saying something like “We’ll turn tail and run”, it’s “The Bentenmaru will turn tail and run”. Proper names and titles are used all the time when being a little more informal would be more natural and save a lot of dialogue. It’s even pointed out in one of the episodes where Marika meets Princess Gruier Serenity, who formally introduces herself, then Marika formally introduces herself, then it repeats a short time later and Marika comments on it. Since the series comes from Japan where formality is the norm, it’s to be expected, but I could do without it so much. It does set up a running gag where a no-nonsense teenager named Chiaki Kurihara keeps telling everyone, “There’s no -chan” when they call her “Chiaki-chan”. She doesn’t like being called cute.
The last is the name of the light novels the series is based on: Minisuka Pairētsu or Minisuka Uchū Kaizoku. “Miniskirt (Space) Pirates” is spot on and I know the name was likely chosen because some readers would be very interested in seeing drawings of middle school and high school girls in miniskirts. It’s the “hook” or gimmick. I think it does a disservice to a series that might sell itself short at first glance. “Bodacious Space Pirates” is a better name, given the first seven definitions: blatant, unmistakable, remarkable, outstanding, audacious, bold, brazen. Marika Kato isn’t blatant or brazen yet. She’s a teenager, after all, and makes mistakes like everyone and has to figure out this new life she’s drawn into, but she exemplifies the other five qualities. As to sexy or voluptuous, that’s a discussion that needs to wait until she’s about ten years older.
Okay, I’ll add a fourth. The movie included one sentient or artificially intelligent mecha. Maybe those are more common in the light novels, or it’s unique to the movie and the manga that was adapted from the movie. It seemed like the movie could have done with a standard ship instead.
Now, before I forget, I teased this review with a little parody song about wanting to be a Blaster. That refers to Ririka Kato, who had been pirate aboard the Bentenmaru with Marika’s father, Gonzaemon. There’s no indication if he and Ririka were married, but she gave up pirating to raise Marika. Once she sees Marika settling in as captain, she decides on a career change away from being an aircraft controller. Yeah, that isn’t stressful at all.
Throughout the series, people talk about the quality of her character and how she exudes what Will Smith once called “nuclear cool”. (He was referring to The Fonz from Happy Days.) It takes a while, but we finally see why she’s called “Blaster Ririka”. She has more than just a proficiency with firearms. She’s someone you can trust to protect your life with those weapons without being careless in their use. And her pot-au-feu gets complements and rave reviews.
I’m going to leave you with a couple of things to look forward to. There’s a World War II reference in the TV series and another in the movie, and there is a multi-layered Easter egg in one of the last episodes. You’ll have to hit pause to catch it. It takes a little bit of research to figure it out, but once you do, it’s really clever. It’s very obscure so if you can’t find it or can’t figure it out, send me a private message and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Bodacious Space Pirates is available on Crunchyroll, Amazon and iTunes but not the movie on any of them. Buying a DVD or Blu-ray version will help with being able to pick up on the details like the Easter egg. The prices at Sentai Filmworks are a little lower than over at RightStuff. Haven’t checked Amazon yet, but I don’t need to. I got the series and the movie on the Sentai Filmworks holiday sale in December for a total of $8 for the DVD versions. So I didn’t have to do any pirating of my own in order to see a great anime series.
If you have TV service though Comcast, The Ambition of Oda Nobuna and season one of Space Pirate Mito are currently available in their OnDemand section. However, it looks like there’s only 12 of the 13 episodes for Mito.
I also spotted Made in Abyss, but again, it’s only the first 12 episodes. Maybe they’re leaving out the final episode to get you to subscribe to a particular service to find out how they end?
Today’s review is of a shorter anime series that feels incomplete for a variety of reasons. It’s one I picked up because a person pointed out that the ship is unrealistic but is a very pretty design, so that was enough for me to add it to my order and see what it was about.
The series is Sol Bianca: The Legacy, a re-imagining of the original Sol Bianca. Both are about a small group of women space pirates and their ship, the Sol Bianca. Each of the women has a name based on a month: April Bikirk, Feb Fall, Janny Mann, June Ashel and May Jessica. The roles are completely different between the two series, and some of the incompleteness comes from this being a re-imagining of a series that was never finished.
The first series had two episodes, #1 at 60 minutes and 40 for the second. It was canceled before they could make a third episode, so if we divide what was released by a standard TV “half hour”, it’s roughly five episodes. Legacy is six full half-hour episodes and tries to be a complete story that’s completely different, but there’s a lot that isn’t explained and should have been.
The premise of Legacy is we’ve branched out from Earth to colonize other planets, but as time passed and the expansion and colonization kept going, people forgot about Earth. Except, they haven’t. Earth-made artifacts are highly prized because some of the tech and skill in making them has been lost.
Case in point, some planets are fairly technologically advanced yet haven’t seen spaceships in forever. A couple of the vehicles look distinctively Earth-made from about the 1960s, mixing things like hover capability with having an AM/FM pushbutton radio. When it comes time to head to Earth, the crew of the Sol Bianca don’t have to go looking too hard to find people who know where it is. And apparently, Earth’s interstellar computer network could be accessed if you can get past its firewall.
I could go on with these kinds of inconsistencies, but since I bought it to see what the ship was like, let’s switch to that.
The Sol Bianca in Legacy was done with CGI and looks pretty good. I have no idea of the scale of the ship, but it has to be huge because inside it has dual grand staircases and a mosaic in the floor like what you’d find in an upper-class hotel, plus a fountain, swimming pool, and a central area where a gigantic holographic woman that represents the ship’s A.I. can be seen. She’s called “G”, which I’m guessing stands for “Goddess”. What little else is seen like crew quarters and the bridge don’t indicate anything on the ship could be considered cramped.
Tactical displays are unsual. The artwork reminds me of late 1980s or early 1990s computer graphics. At least something Amiga-level. When a command is given, vine-like pathways start growing, leading to a new branch of a decision tree. Other displays show roses with their stems. As an example, when the command was given to attack, the pathway lead to a list of weapons. In them was “Goddess Bow”. It’s selected and the ship starts powering up that weapon.
But why call it “Goddess Bow” if you’re not going to show a goddess with a bow? Boy howdy, do they ever show it.
People watching the battle taking place in low orbit around their planet (one where spaceships haven’t been to in a long time) see a holographic longbow begin extending above and below the ship, and an even larger version of G appears behind the ship, from about waist up. She lets loose a holographic arrow, which is the energy beam from the weapon in the ship.
The ship is massively powerful, an example of the lost tech of Earth and it itself had been lost for a long time until April found it. In short, April’s parents die when she’s a young kid, she goes to live with her aunt, aunt tells her about “The Ship of the Sun”, possibly on her deathbed when April’s an adult, and April finds the ship after who knows how long or brief of a search, because that’s not addressed in the series. My impression was it was fairly quick, maybe a couple of years, because of where it was found and somehow everyone else missed it that might also have been looking for a ship of legend. They certainly started looking for ways to capture it once April started her mission to retrieve something that was lost or stolen from her.
The character designs reminds me a bit of Titan A.E. That also mixed CGI ships and the CGI-created Drej with traditional animation, but the character movements are better than in Titan where sometimes people running don’t look quite right.
One last design choice I really liked was the DVDs themselves. The version by Pioneer that comes in a Bailey box features DVDs that look like holograms on the label side. It’s a minor point, but after seeing so many DVDs with a plain solid color background and bland lettering, or worse, a silver background with a different silver color for the lettering, I thought it was worth mentioning because it stands out.
Sol Bianca: The Legacy is available from RightStuf Anime for $15.
Sentai Filmworks had another sale last month with a lot of clearance items for as little as $2 so I splurged and bought a lot of the cheaper titles. They currently have a Monster Sale going on with some of the same items for the same price as before. If anyone’s interested in a series I reviewed previously, they have the Blu-ray for Kill Me Baby on sale for $7.
Another that I just got but haven’t reviewed yet is Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 Complete Collection on DVD for $6. I can’t find the article about it on Fandom any more, but what it said about the series sounded good and that’s why I bought it. The title is spot on. I just started watching it last night.
For this review, it's a case where one of the low-cost series I bought for $4 called "The Comic Artist & His Assistants" sounded promising but wasn't. The description reminded me of another short series called "Animation Runner Kuromi", a parody of animation production. "Comic Artist" started as a 4-panel manga comic about an artist who draws a 4-panel manga comic. It became an anime afterward.
In the anime, Yuji Aito draws a 4-panel manga comic called “Shy Café”. All we really know about it is it features a lot of panty shots because that’s what he’s interested in. There’s some sort of explanation along the lines of draw what you know or your drawings reveal your soul as or something like that, and there’s a discussion about the type of underwear someone wears is an indicator of their personality like a zodiac sign is.
But despite being really interested in panties and buying them and adult magazines for “research” and “reference materials” for his comic, he doesn’t know much about the people who would typically wear panties. That is, women. When he gets stuck trying to figure out how to draw a breast being groped, he convinces his assistant Ashishu to grope her own breast. She reluctantly does and he, of course, goes bonkers over it.
This is kind of a harem comedy instead of a fantasy because there’s no chance sex would ever take place. Ashishu and the three other women who help him make “Shy Café” put up with his antics, his awkward and convoluted attempts at creating any kind of romantic situation and him not wanting to admit he’s lecherous and a pervert because he actually does have talent as an artist. It’s immediate apparent when they look at his drawings, and later on, he offers good advice about comic production and technique.
I want to give more of a description of what happens in the series, but I can't. There really isn't much beyond that. He is so shallow he swings back and forth between "you don't like me and you're going to abandon me" to "you like me again and here's my obligatory comment that shows I'm still a pervert" in an instant.
He spends long hours playing dating sims to the detriment of the production of his comic but he’ll rush to meet a deadline and drink a half dozen or more F-Cup brand energy drinks to help him stay awake all night so he can finish. He’ll do this weird wiggle with his shoulders and hips, with his hands clasped in front of his crotch like he’s trying to say, “Look at me, I’m cute and embarrassed so feel sorry for me.” Which they do and he’s back to extremely happy a second later.
The moment it’s suggested that if he doesn’t shape up, the woman who is his managing editor might get replaced by a man throws him into a panic at the mere thought of losing her and spurs him into another night of energy drinks and going into overdrive to produce enough that they’ll have no reason to reassign her. One time when she walked into his apartment to check on him, he went on and on about his own mortality and how his comic would eventually come to an end and life will eventually end, and she’s just standing there, annoyed and bewildered at what could possibly have set him off this time.
What was it? Her bosom increased by two millimeters. Two millimeters. Not even a tenth of an inch. Let’s ignore the fact he detected the change through her clothing from over fifteen feet away when she didn’t even know it had happened. Her changing in even the slightest way was enough to throw his world into chaos. He wanted her to physically remain the same forever. Even Sheldon Cooper learned to deal with some change and grew as a person.
This guy never will. All of his attempts to understand other people are limited to using their physical form as reference for his drawings and not to understand them as a person. That’s what made the series so disappointing for me. I really wanted there to be more to it. I kept watching because I wanted to give it a chance to improve. It just never did. Not even the song in the final episode about the virtues of panties offered any glimpse he would ever improve.
Each episode of the series is about 11 minutes long and usually consists of three segments that may be a direct continuation of the previous segment or are unrelated. The home video release also includes six OVAs that are about five minutes long. It's only available with subtitles, so unless you understand Japanese, you can't play it in the background and just listen to it.
Do yourself a favor and skip this one. Even at $4, it’s not worth it.
We’ve continued watching Rached and watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which is a movie, not a show, but they’re related…)
I’m still thinking of Watchmen as we watch Rached. It’s got a story that’s interesting on it’s own. She’s a deep, complex character, and not totally ‘evil’ despite a first arc where she destroys a few lives to merely set her plan in action.
And, interestingly, by around episode 5-6 her plan is totally gone to the flaming dumpster outside the scenery-porn mental hospital that is the setting for the show. She’s involved in what may be an actual love affair, her scheme has been rendered moot, and we’ve got a weird peek into her history and she’s gone from ‘cold schemer’ to ‘horribly traumatized by childhood and WWII.’
I’m still wondering if the last few episodes will draw more ties to the movie… As with Watchmen, where I felt like it was using the Watchmen name and a couple references until mid-way when the links got a lot more detailed.
I am working on a review of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 but it’s not going to be ready just yet and I’m running out of time. RightStuf Anime and Sentai Filmworks have had the DVD for really cheap since Thanksgiving, but RightStuf just took it off sale. It went from $5.14 back to its regular $44.99 price.
Sentai’s still got it for $3.99 for at least a couple more days. Robert’s Anime Corner Store has it for $9.00 as part of their “Holiday Salvo #2” sale. I can’t link to to just that one, so you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page before you can add it to the cart. Their sale will probably end on January 1.
This is a case where if you can trust me when I say that this is a good drama you’ll want to watch several times, get the order in now so you don’t have to pay full price. Amazon has it for a little bit of a discount at $32 for the DVD or $50 for Blu-ray. (I don’t know why the Amazon page says “Multi-Format”. It’s just Blu-ray.) But $32’s more than $4 or $9 and both Sentai and the Corner Store have other titles on sale you might find interesting. (Free shipping at $50 and $75, respectively.)
Some of the things I will cover:
- Info on the story itself.
- Why having subtitles turned on is crucial for watching instead of a nicety.
- The digest version, where they condensed the 11 episodes into one 55 minute movie.
- The realism of the series.
- “Walking in Mirai’s footsteps”, a series of maps with her route home.
That last one is the reason why this review wasn’t done two weeks ago. There are so many recognizable real-world buildings and signs that I’ve been able to piece together many of the exact streets Mirai and the other characters walked as they headed home.
For example, I can show you where on Google’s Street View to find a specific sign the characters walked past, the entrance to the building they slept in the night after the earthquake hit, and which park they were in when they saw ducks swimming in a pond. I can also tell you what building was crushed when another building fell on it.
So, yeah, if you can trust me on this, order it before Saturday. It’s going to be worth it for you to watch this.
I don’t know what I was expecting from Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but My Name is Earl, Bucky Barnes Edition was definitely not on the list.
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Friday will be the 11th anniversary of the Great Tokyo Earthquake.
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I can’t believe it’s been 11 years. I was in Japan a month before it happened.
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