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 12 – The Big O – I Came For Noir And Robots, and I Left With Chiaki God Damn Konaka

(Even though I’m still working on Finish or Fail 11, I wanted to get The Big O out of the way first. The GITS SAC rant will continue later. )

This ‘Finish or Fail’ series has been very interesting for me so far, because it has given me the opportunity for the first time to drop shows that I actually enjoyed to some extent. Most of the shows that I’ve dropped in the past were cut within the first couple of episodes just because they weren’t my thing to begin with. The FoF series consists entirely of shows that I have actually wanted to finish for a long time and already know that I enjoy. The shows that have ‘failed’ so far all made it for 8-10 episodes, meaning that, for one reason or another, I actually did enjoy them, but just couldn’t reconcile the things I didn’t like enough to finish.

It’s cool, but it’s also quite sad to do this, because I will often be hit with the biggest disappointment from a series that I really wanted to enjoy. I had thought that Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro might become a favorite on it’s characters and premise and wacky art style, but the episodes that kept getting more boring drove me to stop watching the show. I had similar feelings about The Big O, and this has been the most extreme example to date. Actually, I was pretty damn sure that I was going to drop The Big O after episode 15, but I liked the show so much that I kept trucking through and finally found myself dropping it halfway through episode 20. I will detail to you just what the hell went wrong.

Something has gone wrong all right... art by ug http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=ug

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