Another month, another anime film festival…. would be something that would be great to be able say. Alas, I doubt any of us are that fortunate (and, frankly, even I have a limit of how frequently I can see the same movies over and over), but we in the UK have been pretty well off this year, and after visiting Edinburgh for Scotland Loves Anime last month, this time I headed down to Leeds for Leeds International Film Festival Fanomenon Anime Day.

Of course, there are only so many anime movies to go around, with just over half of the movies being shown in Leeds being titles that I’d seen previously either at the BFI back in May or in Edinburgh last month, and there’s only really so much which could be said about those movies. I mean, I can’t really think of another way to say that One Piece Strong World is a touch too long for it’s own good, nor do I feel like harping on about how the Evangelion 2.0 screening was less than ideal (for those who were there, I was the obnoxious fellow who piped up to ask them to turn the volume back up during the ending credits prior to the post-credit content).
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Scotland Loves Animation organised a couple of weekends full of anime movie screenings recently, at first Glasgow, and then at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh this weekend gone. Glasgow, unfortunately, is a pretty hellish trip for me – not as bad as it would be if I was travelling from the bottom of England, of course, but it’d be far more stressful and time consuming than a trip down to London (that is to say, it’s a good four or five hours).

Edinburgh, on the other hand, is a pretty hassle-free experience. Just as well, given that there was a fairly significant movie receiving its European premier there which wasn’t being screened at Glasgow. As such, I spent most of this last weekend sat in a cinema in Scotlands capital.
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I started along the path of an odd thought process the other day. It started when someone brought up Trava – Fist Planet in the context of being a same universe relative of the spectacular looking new movie REDLINE. This, obviously, got me thinking somewhat about Trava – Fist Planet.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing anything about Trava for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s kind of old at this point. Well, old in anime terms, which in reality means it was made in 2003, which was before much of the internet was particularly interested in looking for anything quite as offbeat as the Madhouse production was. More than the age, though, the way it was distributed no doubt hampered its following. Trava was originally serialised as part of Grasshoppa!, a DVD magazine almost like an audio-visual Faust, featuring live action and animated shorts both serialised and one-off. The best known content that debuted on Grasshoppa! is probably Studio 4°C’s Sweat Punch shorts, including End of the World and Comedy, that were later released under the name Deep Imagination.

The sad thing is that, when I finally decided that I’d kind of like to see the Grasshoppa! disks, they were extremely out-of-print, doubly so the DVD which collected the Trava episodes which had been spread throughout into one convenient package. Ultimately, of the four volumes of the series released, I ended up with only the third, and let me tell you, for something as thoroughly peculiar as Trava, the third instalment really isn’t a good place to start. It was kind of impenetrable, infact.

This is, of course, all a massive digression, as Trava, from REDLINE staffers Takeshi Koike and Katsuhito Ishii, has nothing to do with Hideaki Anno. Further along the path this line of thought had taken me, however, was the remembrance that the third instalment of Grasshoppa! also included things which weren’t related to Fists or Planets. Things like Ryusei Kacho, by a certain guest director recognisable to many a fan merely from his favoured choice of typeface.
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One of the things I really want to do over the coming months is finally get on-top of all the unwatched media I have lying around. The problem here is the huge stack of movies I bought back when I figured that I really wasn’t watching enough in the watch of HK, Korean and Japanese live-action movies. With even legit HK releases being dirt cheap, I ended up picking up a few too many titles which were a little too random, all of which have since remained entirely unwatched. Until today, that is, when everything other than this peculiar little number which found it’s way into my DVD player remain sealed within their shrink-wrapped cells.

As for why this movie is of interest, well…
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Erm, you are standing on the beach of a tropical island, and Natsumi has just been kidnapped by a robotic crab. Is it really the time to be worrying about car chases, Giroro?

Having heard that a decent, subbed release of the Evangelion 1.01 movie had been released in Hong Kong (legally, of course), I ended up heading over to Yes Asia to grab a copy. The thing with HK DVDs, though, is that the releases of Asian movies tend to be pretty cheap (£6-7-ish), and as a result the intention to order just one DVD ends up escalating to more like a dozen, though it is a shame it’s pretty slim pickings when it comes to anime. This probably goes some way to explaining exactly why I have a copy of obviously terrible The Oneechanbara, and is also why I picked up the ended up picking up the first three Keroro Gunsou movies (even though I already have the first on R2).

Anyway, the English subtitles on those HK releases that sport them are a bit of a crap-shoot in terms of quality – those on the Evangelion movie, aside from few minor typos, are pretty good. The same can be said of the subtitles to the first Keroro movie – there’s nothing overwhelming wrong with them.

The same can’t really be said of the second Keroro movie. I’m inclined to think that whoever wrote the subtitle script at least had a grasp of the Japanese language (or maybe Cantonese?), but it’s almost like they based the translation on just the audio without any idea of the context given by the visuals – aside from a few points where they’ve clearly misheard the audio, there’s a lot of lines which would make sense given different circumstances. It just a shame that the movie they were probably imagining was likely more exciting than the one I watched, though at least the subtitles added some additional humour value…