Following hot on the heels of Colony Drop’s “Good Cop” Dave and his gig over at Anime News Network, more of the Colony Drop writers you love to hate are popping up on anime websites you may have heard of!
Last month, Mark and Sean attended FanimeCon 2010 in lovely downtown San Jose (don’t forget San Jose’s motto: “San Jose: At least it isn’t Oakland!”) and wrote about their experiences for Otaku USA Magazine’s website.
Sean’s article gives his impressions of the convention and discusses the trend of moving away from actual anime content at anime conventions. Read his article here. Stick around for the comments, where a complete psychopath chimes in to tell Sean just how wrong he is!
Mark’s article focuses on the panel with Guest of Honor Hiroyuki Yamaga. Readers of Colony Drop might know him as the guy who directed Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise. To attendees of FanimeCon, he was most famous for being a guy who worked at Gainax while Evangelion was in production. Check that article out here. It should be noted that Mark refrained from asking Yamaga how he feels about the Star Wars prequels; for that kind of hard-hitting journalism, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Now is also as good a time as any to remind everyone that Colony Drop is completely willing to sell out for cold hard cash or help you pimp your product. Contact colonydrop.staff@gmail.com for further information on how you can employ us or send us your products for reviews!
We neglected it for quite a while, but in the past couple of weeks we’ve started updating our tumblr-powered side blog again. Mostly, we used it to throw up random pictures (anime related, of course) that we come across, but occasionally links and YouTube videos show up as well. Check it out.
The so-called “Fred Patten ideal” of anime (named for the first person to write about Japanese cartoons and comics in the United States) is not exactly dead as some would tell you, it is merely in traction and hooked up to an IV drip cocktail of dextrose and a few debutante anime directors like Mamoru Oshii, Mamoru Hosoda and Makoto Shinkai. Of course, when the flagship hoisting the petard of your genre is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or Code Geass, it might be time to tap your finger against the EKG monitor just to be sure.
If Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s Venus Wars was a person instead of an anime movie, it would be the chain-smoking motorcycle-straddling teenage delinquent who won’t take any of your grown-up B.S., yet is secure enough in his masculinity to admit spending his earlier years reading Robert Heinlein and James Blish before graduating to William Gibson and George Alec Effinger.
Animag was one of the earliest attempts at a professional English-language anime magazine, first published in 1987 by a group of fans in the San Francisco Bay Area. It managed to outlast most of its competition, although, a few years later, it shut down when many of the staff jumped ship to help start Viz’s Animerica magazine. The following post is a selection of advertisements that ran in Animag between 1987 and 1990.
And we all thought Tenchi would never get laid.
To recap: the Tenchi Muyo franchise is, by and large, pretty insufferable. Tenchi, the story of an awkward, indecisive teen who somehow has babes from all over the universe clamoring for his attention, helped curse us with the otaku wish-fulfillment harem genre from which we’ve yet to escape. But somehow, Tenchi Muyo in Love, the first Tenchi movie, shed a lot of what made the series so painful and became a pretty decent film.
When I heard that a fansub of a TV special based on Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki’s Oishinbo is out — finished for years but only released just now (the project broke up the fansub group for reasons I’ll describe later) — my obscure-o-sensors just about went haywire. Too curious for my own good, I grabbed this special immediately.
I was as surprised by the contents of Japan-US Rice War (a terribly promising title) as its subbers must have been. Was this really the Oishinbo I’d been hearing about, the one recommended by reputable people? And how the hell did Japan make it through a hundred volumes of this? Short of perhaps Odin, this movie was one of the dullest cartoons I’ve ever watched. I was so confused by how bad this movie was that I went out and bought two books of the Viz release, titles that had resided on my shopping list for some time now. This couldn’t be right.
Japan also makes big-deal crowd-pleaser movies out of comic books these days, you know. In fact, as anime fans sit back and worry about Hollywood adaptations like Akira, Robotech, and Evangelion that may never materialize, Japan’s been cranking them out on low budgets for years. The reason you don’t ever hear about these movies is that just like the bulk of Hollywood’s comic-book movies, they tend to suck: the reputations of the Devilman and Casshern adaptations precede them. Of course, the story of Kaiji— a young loser pushed into a never-ending series of deadly gambles, which he fights his way out of like a cornered animal— is a little easier to film than a superhero comic. That doesn’t mean they got it right. In transitioning Fukumoto’s distinctively ugly, cartoonishly gritty, and utterly gripping manga to a live-action multiplex-pleaser, the producers of the Kaiji movie have scrubbed it clean, smoothed off all the edges, and left behind precious little of what made the comic good in the first place.