Or at least it seems that the first half is in the wild now – shipping notices received and all that. I assume that those few in the US to whom this is of any interest will have probably gotten it already, though obviously being outside of the territory it takes somewhat longer for me to receive such things.

Anyway, this was mainly just a public service announcement more than anything, given I’ve written far too much on the subject of Xenoglossia in the past – probably more than I’ve written about the rather spectacular “proper” iM@S adaptation of recent times, whose staff were showered with awards at the Newtype Awards this weekend gone. This Xenoglossia release is pretty interesting because it’s likely to be the best English translation of the show that has been available, and perhaps more importantly, looks to be the only time that certain supplementary material is going to be available in English.

Of course, I’m not sure when I’m actually going to get to watch my copy – Scotland Loves Anime looms this weekend, and even if it turns up before I head off to Glasgow, I’m not lugging a device with a DVD player up to Scotland with me ^^;

From episode 12 of Space Brothers, though it actually appears in the next episode preview at the end of the 11th episode as well if I remember correctly – It’s been a while since I saw it.

Which is kind of problem when it comes to writing anything at length regarding this. Had I bothered to post it at the time I watched the episode, I could have thrown out some random speculation about, I dunno, how eating the space food first rather than the food likely to spoil during the incarceration test may have bitten them in the buttocks later on. Of course, at this point, I know that it was, infact, Serikas insatiable appetite as opposed to a box of mouldy tangerines that resulted in them running low in food. Ho-hum.

I should catch up on Space Brothers. I think I’m about three weeks behind at this point…

The name Katsuyuki Motohiro may not mean much to most anime fans at the moment, as the fact that Psycho-Pass keeps getting referred to as that “new Butch Gen thing” perhaps attests to. Yet, Motohiro’s most recent live action effot, Bayside Shakedown The Final (the latest, and presumably last, spin-off from an earlier TV detective procedural show on which he worked) topped the Japanese box office a couple of weeks ago, and the fact that he’s attached to Psycho-Pass as the shows chief director is bring the series attention from outside of the regular anime fan circles. Which is exactly what the point of Noitamina was supposed to be.

Back in 2000, Motohiro made a movie called Space Travelers. This was back in the day when I seemed to have far more free time and far less to watch, and I liked to buy boatloads of cheap HK releases of goofy Japanese and Korean movies to watch. I picked up and enjoyed Space Travelers back then, but never bother to revisit it. With Motohiro’s name popping back up thanks to Psycho-Pass, and having a three hour train ride into London to kill, I figured this weekend was as good a time as any to revisit it.
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It’s a little difficult to figure out where to start talking about Tiger & Bunny: The Beginning. It’s not exactly a rehash movie, which is typical for Sunrise productions – the straight rehash movies are coming to DVD and Blu-Ray directly before the end of the year in Japan – rather it’s something of a retelling of the first two episodes of the TV show with a great whacking new bit, set between the end of the shows second episode and the beginning of it’s third, stapled onto it’s end.

For what it’s worth, it’s a pretty decent retelling of those first two episodes – they compress the two episodes into about forty, maybe forty-five minutes, which may not sound to compressed until you realise that they added around six or seven minutes of additional footage (not including the all new OP sequence, added to make sure you notice where they’ve added new or changed the sponsors on our heroes costumes). I’m a little divided on some of the new material they added (more on that after I’ve given some spoiler-free impressions), but the stuff they removed was mostly sensible.
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Madhouse seem to have this curious habit of making movies that don’t appear for quite some time. Admittedly, this is rarely for the same reasons – things like Redline fail to materialise simply because they take so long to actually make, whilst things like Clover and the other Clamp shorts were too short to have a reasonable home release vector (not that it didn’t stop them from eventually releasing a DVD of nothing but Clover).

In the case of Hells, and adaptation of the Shinichi Hiromoto manga Hell’s Angels, it looks to have been stuck in something of a legal quagmire since it’s theatrical debut in 2008, until it finally saw release on blu-ray in Japan about a month ago. A blu-ray with English subtitles, at that.
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