Overthinking Interviews w/ Psycho-Pass & Ghost in the Shell Writers

This video was unscripted, so no text version this time.

I happened upon a 2007 interview with Kenji Kamiyama (GitS: Stand Alone Complex, Eden of the East) and Tow Ubukata (Psycho-Pass 2, GitS: Arise, Le Chevalier d’Eon, Mardock Scramble) around the same day that another Ubukata interview was released from ANN. Comparing the two proved interesting to me.

I’ve made videos on a bunch of these guys’ shows, so check those out if you haven’t seen them before:

Psycho-Pass vs. Psycho-Pass 2: What Happened?: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw6UBKuaMyFComQugm9hi3gA0yG8AHO9f
Ghost in the Shell Franchise Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H7fRNexE2c
Eden of the East Quick Analysis and Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m6jolMTiRg&list=PLw6UBKuaMyFCcIGkAqFuT7XotJjcpMfrQ&index=53

You can find the ANN interview here: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2015-05-20/tow-ubukata/.87808

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5 Anime For Coping w/ a Broken Limb

Text version and links:

Ghost in the Shell – Franchise Overview

Text version and links:

SaiMecha! Submit Your Nominations!

SaiMoe is an annual tournament-style competition to determine whom the most moe anime character of the year is. Some people have a lot of fun participating in it each year, while others make their own English-language versions or alternatives like “SaiGAR.” Currently, set-up is going on for SaiMecha, a tournament to determine the most… well, the mecha that can get the most votes, I guess. Find all your info here.

Anyone can contribute nominations while they’re still open, and each person can submit up to fifteen mechs via email to executiveotaku AT gmail DOT COM. This post is to show off my noms in the same vein as ghostlightning and Schneider. These nominations are in alphabetical order by the name of the mech.

There are three general categories of interest for me when it comes to mecha: first and most importantly, their appearance. Second and equally important, their presence in the series. And third but still important, how they move. The third criteria has nothing to do with the functionality of their movement, but more to do with how that movement is animated.

Finish or Fail 11 – I Still Plan To Watch 2nd Gig, But Let Me Rant About Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 1 For A Bit (Part One, Because I Ended Up Going On About the Animation Till I Had A Full Post)

I’m falling behind on Finish or Fail posts. I still have to do them for Index, Utawarerumono, and Mononoke (spoiler: all finished) but I felt like writing about Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex real quick.

I will say upfront that I did not finish SAC season 1. After 8 episodes, I gave up and decided I would just watch the Laughing Man compilation OVA before moving on to season 2. I would have probably finished the season if I didn’t realize there was a compilation movie, so it’s not like I ragequitted the show. I just figured it would be easier to get through it in a more compact version. On to the rant…

I never, ever get tired of this shot. Oh what could have been...

Tracking Down Film Noir In Anime – Part One: Cast in the Name of Noir, Ye Not Guilty

Yesterday afternoon, I found myself suddenly full of a desire to watch something extravagantly produced, and when it became apparent that the Mononoke files Funeral had on his hard drive were of shit quality, I set to the highly time-consuming task of downloading the years-old show and, in the meantime, decided to finally resume watching another show on the hard drive to which my sights had been turned for quite some time: The Big O. I already knew a good deal about The Big O from having seen bits and pieces of it on Cartoon Network ‘back in the day’, and likewise read a fair share of series commentary and reviews, but I had never managed to see enough of the show proper in the correct order to say with any certainty what, exactly, happens in it. It was as I began to watch that I became interested in just how much this series was utterly steeped in the tropage of film noir.

Oddly enough, film noir is a genre that I know almost entirely from the sidelines. The only real noir films I had seen before today were the likes of Sin City and bits and pieces of Bladerunner, in spite of the fact that I knew all of the genre’s tropes by heart and was a huge fan of many of those tropes as well. It was perhaps because my experience with whatever noir films I must have seen before lead me to believe that every noir film was criminally slow that I always considered the genre to be something I probably couldn’t handle. These days, though, I can handle a slow pace pretty well, and the more that I see and learn about the noir genre, the more that I realize it is truly the perfect genre for me.

art by digital404 http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=digital404

Mamoru Oshii is an Evil Bastard, So Why Do I Love Him? (An Exploration of My 'Old-School Tsundere' Relationship With The Acclaimed Director)

Without a doubt, Mamoru Oshii is one of the most acclaimed and important anime directors around. His entire career has pretty much been a nonstop train of landmark works. After directing a few episodes here and there of various late 70s anime, he got his big break as director of Urusei Yatsura, the legendary series that put Rumiko Takahashi as well as himself on the map. Oshii directed just over 100 episodes of the show and then did 2 movies, the second of which, Beautiful Dreamer, is largely seen as the ‘birth’ of his career, as it was the first work to feature his signature mind-bending style.