Which leaves me trying to think of amusing personal anecdotes relating to his works, but the problem there is that I’m really far too boring a person to be the amusing anecdote type. My overwhelming memory of Perfect Blue was taking one of my rare trips to the nearest indie cinema to see the dub – that’s the cinema that’s built right on-top of a busy underground station, which isn’t entirely productive to the movie viewing experience (the screening of The Cat Returns I saw there years later was, mercifully, on the slightly less distracting upstairs screen). That was probably the first theatrical anime screening I went to. Same day as I saw the original Matrix movie, come to think of it… That was certainly a mind-bending day.

As far as the others go, Millennium Actress I’ve yet to watch (that’s for tomorrow, methinks). Tokyo Godfathers I remember ending up with two copies of, one of which I ended up sending to Bluwacky, mostly as a result of feeling guilty about him selling me his copy of Suikoden 2 for a far too reasonable price (although I still feel guilty about having never actually finished the game). Paprika I actually fell asleep trying to watch – less to do with the movie, more to do with having sat up far too late into the night before sticking it on. I guess that falling in and out of consciousness whilst the movie was playing tuned into it’s dream-related themes a little too heavily, providing what was far too surreal a situation when I’d sporadically wake up part-way through something very strange happening. I really need to sit down and watch that movie properly, but I ended up reading the novel shortly afterwards, and I’ve been waiting for both of them to be suitably flushed from my memory before sitting back down to it.

I suppose, all in all, I’m a bad Satoshi Kon fan, so I really wouldn’t have anything to write about him anyway.

That Kara no Kyoukai Blu-ray set that Aniplex just announced isn’t actually too excessively priced, at least comparatively. Given reactions to the price tag, I figured I’d misread it and was missing a zero somewhere – 50,000 may be a lot of yen to be throwing down in one go, but it’s not horrifically priced in comparison to the DVD releases. Sure, it’s more expensive than the standard releases of the KnK movies, but it would work out cheaper than the LE’s were (not that you get the wonderful OSTs with the BR set). Subtitles make it very tempting, though. The price per minute ratio works out well in comparison to most R2 anime releases as well…

That I can justify Japanese media prices as reasonable to myself probably means I’m in a scary place mentally more than it actually being a good price, though. Sensible money is on the likelihood of the subtitles being on these disks meaning that Aniplex will make it directly available in the US at some point in the future, although the fact they’ve screened at least one of the movies outside Japan previously does point to the fact they may have just been producing subtitle scripts anyway. I do hope this bodes well for the Japanese release of Welcome to the Space Show having subtitles when it’s released.

Speaking of Type-Moon, the Unlimited Blade Works movie is out on home media this month. I wasn’t particularly excited about that movie until I saw the shakey-cam footage of the Comiket trailer. I’m sure the story isn’t going to be the most coherent of things (doing any Fate path as a movie seems crazy), but damn it looks pretty…

Otherwise, I’ve been working on Things which I’m not yet ready to talk about just yet – which probably means I’ll never be talking about it once it ultimately ends up abandoned incomplete. It’s been kind of time consuming thus far, though, which I guess is the real reason I’ve not found something worth posting about…

And, yes, I realise I’m running about five months behind the rest of the internet here, but I’m behind on pretty much anything which isn’t Occult Academy. Truthfully, I wasn’t really sure how I’d like the show between mixed reactions to the early episodes and less-than-great reports about (admittedly the later volumes of) the novels, but I’ve taken pretty well to it now that I’ve broken down and started. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I simply like meta-humour way more than most – my favourite episode of Macross Frontier would have to have been the one that essentially consisted of a barrage of series in-jokes and trolls. So, basically, when many are complaining about Katanagatari being far too talky, I’m perfectly happy to sit through half an episode of Togame complaining about the undeniably true fact that Shichika is far too dull to stand out against the flamboyant villains they find themselves up against. I kind of thought the setting may have prevented Nisioisin from being able to veer too far in that direction, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

The box art for part four, depicting Shichika facing off against “Japan’s Greatest Swordsman” Hakuhei Sabi for the Hakutou Hari blade, is arguably more interesting than that for the volume three artbox, as despite the episode preview promising sharks discovering that their left side rendered asunder from their right one in what promised to be the most spectacular swordfight ever committed to animation. A swordfight that we never actually get to see, though Togami and Shichika assure us all that it was beyond astonishing as they discuss the many, many highlights their narrow victory whilst consuming vast amounts of dango. The entire episode is basically the kind of troll that even Chairman Kadokawa would have to stand-back and admire.

What we actually got from the episode was half an hour of Shichikas elder sister Nanami taking down three master ninjas in a most sadistic and humiliating fashion, all without breaking out of her bored, neutral manner of inflection. Nanami, who was portrayed as in the shows first episode as being intelligent yet demure and fragile, is actually far and away one of the most terrifying characters I’ve seen in anime in recent times.

Which is all deliciously thematically meta – just as the forth episode was not what it was advertised to be, differing from what was promised both previously and from what it’s packaging promised, so Nanami proved to differ from expectations in precisely the same ways. I really can’t help but respect the production for going to such lengths for the sake of thematical symmetry, even at the risk of frustrating most of the audience.

Taishou is, if not exactly the most interesting of the two, certainly the more eyebrow raising. There’s now a long-established US market tradition of sports-related anime not selling in the slightest, with Funimation having certainly made it abundantly clear that Big Wind-up did absolutely terrible for them. I suppose Not-ADV would be the only R1 label with past experience of releasing shows about plucky girls taking on the establishment by playing baseball, having released Princess Nine, but that was a long, long time ago, and market conditions are very, very different to what they were back then. You’ll have to forgive me for not really thinking that cute girls are quite enough to counteract the consumer-kryptonite that is the baseball part of the equation, regardless of what element takes precedence in the show.

Which just really makes it a shame that Sentai tends not to say a whole lot about anything these days – regardless of whether or not it does terribly or astonishing well, we’ll probably never get any reliable indication of it. Ho-hum.

Which I suppose gives the R1 a get-out clause for not following suit, as viewing conditions are less guaranteed. I really wish there’d be more options on R1 DVDs, though – this proves that less obtrusive subtitles are possible even within the limits of the DVD specification, and it’s be nice to be given the choice to use such things for those who find them perfectly readable.

So, yeah, Black Rock Shooter was certainly an OAV. I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say too much about it, for I neither really found it particularly fantastic nor particularly terrible. It did rather try too hard to be cute with it’s structure, with it’s alternating between the “real” world and the “other” world content. It didn’t exactly entirely make sense – the opening sequence with BRS battling Black Gold Saw was not only entirely extraneous to the rest of the OAV, but doesn’t really fit in with what can be established with regards to the Other world material. Whilst it’s clear that the remainder of the Other world material takes place after the Real world storyline, BRS is lacking the scars in that opening sequence she has in all others (including the one where she merges with Mato). This throws out the easily establishable logic of BRS being the alternate incarnation of Mato out the window, despite the fact that the introduction of STR in Other is presented simultaneously to Yuu within Real.

Which just begs to question precisely what all that was about. Well, beyond being a convenient way to disguise the fact that by jumping days, weeks and even months between scenes within Real would make matters a touch disorientating without them being broken up. It’s just a shame that by essentially using them as transitional sequences to clearly delineate the Real world sequences, they rather ruin what would, if strung together sequentially, be a fairly coherent and rather awesome action sequence.

Honestly, and whilst this probably flies a little against others logic, I do think the whole OAV is rather on the too long side – not necessarily for the content being presented, but at least for the way that they chose to present it. If nothing else, I really don’t think we needed the Super Happy Lets Be Friends Montage padding the whole production out by a few minutes. Black Rock Shooter was hamstrung by the limitations of it being an OAV, really. More time to expand the Real world sequences beyond what feels like a too-long episode-recap-like short-hand format would have done things wonders, but without it I can’t help but feel they’d have been better off skimming over it far more quickly.

But, hey, on the positive side, the Other world material really is super-neat – huke’s particular brand of techno-gothic design combined with the high-contrast colour scheme looks great, and whilst I don’t think the animation is quite as slick as some others have suggested, the battle sequences are certainly well executed. It’s just a shame that by stretching matters out with the over-long, err, “ambient” sequences, the ratio of content drops below what I, personally, would have considered to be more ideal.

All this sounds like I’m being far more terribly negative than I’d like, but as I started out by saying, rather than being particularly good or bad, it’s all really just kind of there.

(Sidenote: So, errr, yeah, I’m finding myself completely without anything worthwhile to write about, at least at length. Maybe I should just start a Twitter and be done with it ^^;)

Still, it does show off the games five-member units. I notice that, should you discount the extra couple of people, there’s still a few differences in the dance that the three remaining girls would be performing when compared to the first promo. Based upon that, it looks like the dances may scale to the member count better than they did in the first game, and given there looks to be contact and more dancing around each-other this time around, that can only be a good thing.

For some reason, I’m not really all that sure that’s enough of a reason for people to continue reading. I guess I might actually be forced to do something radical like, you know write about anime in order to generate content. That’s something of a terrifying thought, though I suppose that I might actually have some time with which to watch some anime to write about now. Maybe I’ll strike it lucky an manage to hit a stream of Mikan Box sightings…

The reasoning for this is that there is a percentage chance that her on the other end of the conversation may, infact, be a magical girl. Talking to a magical girl is, of course, almost certain to lead to you somehow becoming the monster of the week, as inevitably happens to any character who ever seems to talk to them.

Now, this is where the real gamble comes into the discussion. Should the transforming heroine that you accidentally stumble across be, shall we say, less than competent, then you may well be spending the rest of your days as some kind of hideous unthinking, unfeeling creature of mass destruction. If you happen to luck into one of unrivalled skill, then congratulations! Things may well work out for you tremendously and all your problems may be solved – in the short term, at least. It occurs to me that those saved rarely hang around after the episode in which they first appear, suggesting that they inevitably suffer a flashback-induced mental breakdown shortly after the immediate effects of the heroines ultimate technique have worn off.

So, yeah, probably safest just to avoid them entirely.

In other news, I see that Bandai have licensed Sora Kake Girl. This is neat, for I liked that show.

I’ve not seen the show, at least not as of yet, so I don’t have anything further to add on the matter. I suppose whilst I’m on the subject of Mikan Boxes, I have to admit I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t one amongst the many, many boxes of stuff being shifted between houses in the third episode of Asobi ni Ikuyo. Poor form, guys, poor form!

As for why this happens, it’s because I tend to listen to music whilst ingesting my regular intake of fiction, and I have a habit of not only keeping my playlists short, but also for not changing them often as I should. It’s probably not surprising that I’ve come to associate the OP from Asura Cryin’ 2 not with non-nonsensical robot hijinks, but rather with psycho-analysts getting raped, when the track repeated itself in full many, many times over the course of reading it, as opposed to the mere thirteen-ish times it would have been used in the show. It’s even more-so the case for something like a K-On! insert song, which may only ever be used once or twice in the show (though I’m finding myself associating it with pulpy space-opera rather than Twilight, having not read the later, though I’m certain I’d find it both terrifying and confusing if I ever did).

Of course, the net result is that it becomes incredibly disconcerting when I actually hear the song used in its original context again.

On a vaguely related, kind-of-music note, since watching it yesterday I’ve somehow managed to find myself unable to stop watching the ending credits of that darn PreCure movie. Indeed, I’ve got the thing looping in the background as I type now. I’d had the chorus from the Heartcatch PreCure OP stuck in my head all day, and it really is quite infuriating…