Movie Review: Big Hero 6

Big Hero 6

Manga Review: Magi (volumes six through ten)

Funny enough, when I posted my review of the first five volumes of Magi I thought "yeah, I'd really like to read more of this" and went back to my library website where I found volumes nine and ten. I requested them and kept scrolling (my library, like every other one I've known, doesn't always have an author's work appear chronologically in searches) only to realize that nope, volume ten had only dropped the previous week but they had never gotten six through eight! I had a similar situation with Gundam The Origin some people might recall so I do plan on submitting a purchase request for everyone else who wants to read it (my library doesn't just ask for the title and author, I have to put in things like original publication date, publisher, and ISBN which seems like a safeguard against spam but a really inelegant way to do it). So, scanlations were used for those missing volumes and man I am glad for professional translations, I have known some scanlation groups who do a pretty good job but these were inferior to the Viz ones in style and word choice!

Magi by Shinobu Ohtaka

Anime Review: Yona of the Dawn

As probably everyone already knows, I have been a huge fan of the Akatsuki no Yona manga for years so I was happy was an anime adaptation was announced, thrilled when I heard it was going to be two cours (since adapting any part of the story into just 13 episodes was going to be a mess), and then shocked when it was picked up by Funimation from the get-go, I guess successes like Kamisama Kiss are making people a little less hesitant about shojo again. So why do I love this show so much? Well, this adaptation does a pretty good job at explaining it!

Yona of the Dawn

Book Review: Greenglass House

For my final entry in Middle Grade March I return to a familiar author, Kate Milford who also wrote the The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands set of books. As far as I can tell, this book is set in the same world as those two and her novellas (the style of the stories within stories matches up and I haven't seen Milford say it isn't) but this book is standalone so a newcomer can come in easily (or someone like me who really needs to do a massive re-read of this whole collection!).

The Greenglass House by Kate Milford, illustrated by Jamie Zollars

Webcomic Review: Cucumber Quest

While Cucumber Quest has a fairly large following I'd imagine that Gigi D.G's first comic, the Hiimdaisy (her old pen name) Persona 4 fancomic probably has an even wider name recognition and that's how I first found her work. I really liked that series of comics and was sad that it's unfinished (for the uninitiated, I really like this fandub of the comics) and I'm still surprised by the notoriety of it, I believe that the English dub for the Persona 4 The Arena game even had a reference to one of her jokes in there. So it wasn't a surprise to me that this work is also influenced by classic RPGs, although it might be an even stronger connection than I first thought.

Cucumber Quest by Gigi D.G.

Manga Review: Spirit Circle

Funny story, I actually had this post all ready to go last night and completely forgot until 11:30 to actually hit post so I decided to wait until morning. Which means, this post originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses!

This is one of the many manga I first tried out when I was using friends' guest passes on Crunchyroll and frankly my luck for finding good series on there was pretty terrible. Honestly it still is but I'm lad I stumbled across this one, I actually had no idea it was by the same manga-ka as The Biscuit Hammer and after I enjoyed this series so much I was convinced to try The Biscuit Hammer again and I think that one is growing on me too!

Spirit Circle by Satoshi Mizukami

Anime Review: Rage of Bahamut: Genesis

This is another title that wasn't on my to-watch list for the fall initially but good buzz, and some persistent friends, convinced me to try it out. Hmm, it seems as if I've been saying that about quite a few shows that aired this past fall....

Rage of Bahamut: Genesis

Cartoon Review: Over the Garden Wall

I give up, there is no way to watch this series legally online unless you're in a very specific situation. io9 has the full first episode streaming legally and the Cartoon Network website has the entire series, but unless you can log in with your cable subscriber information (and only from certain providers) you can only watch clips, that is total bullcrap and thus I pirated episodes two through ten. Clearly I didn't have to do this, I could've waited until this eventually popped up on DVD and hoped that my library would have it, hoped that it streamed on Netflix, or tried to arrange my entire free time schedule around re-airings of the show on tv but none of these are good solutions either. This has nothing to do with the show itself but I am very, very frustrated with how much harder it is for me to find American-made television legally online than it is to find anything else online, that's just dumb!

Over the Garden Wall

Book Review: Waistcoats and Weaponry

As a general heads-up, no anime/cartoon review on Monday since all of my plans to watch something have fallen short this week and I'm feeling rather grumpy about it honestly.

Like many things in life, author visits/book-signings seem to be something that happens sporadically and in groupings. I only found out about this one a week beforehand and was rather grumpy since I do own the Parasol Protectorate omnibuses and would have liked to get them signed but they were several hundred miles away from me and I didn't trust the post office to get them up to me in time. I only found out because the local indie bookstore that was helping with the events posted it in their newsletter, Carriger never goes on tour on the East Coast and didn't announce it on her blog until just two days in advance! Grumbling aside, it was a good talk and I was quite happy to spot this book just a couple of weeks later at my other library system since I still recalled some of the things Carriger said in her talk that were rather pertinent to this book!

Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger

Movie Review: Interstellar

Normally this film would fall into the category of "movies I'm interested in but not enough to pay DC theater prices so I'll wait for the DVD" but, much like Princess Kaguya, this is a film where the experience of seeing it on a big screen is part of the draw. Or in this case, seeing it on a 70mm film playing IMAX theater at work with the sound so loud it was literally rattling some of the building (not an exaggeration, I had to deal with the rattling first hand when I was covering for a coworker). Even with an employee discount the ticket price still made me wince, was it worth it in the end?

Interstellar

Anime Review: Ashita no Nadja

Over on Star-Crossed Anime Blog, Psgels (I believe this is where I first heard about the series) dubbed this one of the "50 episode Shojo Series of Awesome" and while awesome may be a bit of a strong word I will back him up and say that this is a really great show. I'm more familiar with the shojo demographic of manga than I am with shonen/senien/josei and for me this series was a fun throwback that felt like a mixture of 80s/90s adventure shojo and a number of turn of the century books for girls that I read when I was about ten (The Secret Garden, Heidi, Betsy, Tacy and Tibb, Anna of Green Gables). Those two kinds of stories might not sound that similar at first but they really are, they're almost slice of life stories focusing on the main character as she grows up and her relationships with her friends, her crushes, and the world in general (and the western novels often focus on the girls for years and years which is something you don't really see replicated in any kind of YA fiction these days). And that description fits Nadja to a T, the story starts out with a very small goal but gradually grows in scope until it becomes not quite a coming of age story (merely because Nadja is only 12) but something rather close.

Ashita no Nadja

Movie Review: How To Train Your Dragon 2

Sometimes I'm really really hyped for a sequel, or a brand new movie, to come out and it's practically all I can think about during the more mundane moments of my day. But the more time that goes by between installments the less this happens, I'm still happy about it but it's been so long that I can never quite remember how much I enjoyed it and why I should be so excited. Which was the case here, this was absolutely on my list of "movies that I need to see in theaters" and even though I had surprised myself by adoring the first film I just wasn't as hyped for it. So with that I can very clearly say that I think this movie was even better than the first, and when I saw the first film I wasn't crammed into a front row seat getting a crick in my neck the entire time!

How To Train Your Dragon 2

Anime Review: Space Dandy

When I was looking at the panel listing for Otakon I noticed that Shinichiro Watanabe had a panel on Sunday which was listed as something along the lines of "the second Watanabe panel" and I though "Oh so are they finally going to announce Space Dandy?" Some fans online had already found out about the project (I believe through searching who was buying what site titles) and sure enough the project was announced during his Saturday panel and they spent the first bit of the Sunday panel showing all the material again (and it was pretty fun to see the trailer that practically no one else had seen, and it wasn't a crappy cam-rip either!). It also lead to the most surreal moment of my life where I was on twitter, live-tweeting a tiny bit, sat back during the Q& A to just listen and read my own feed, to have someone in line say that they were live-tweeting as well, they had actually shown up on my feed, and that a staff member who had worked on the show had responded to something he had reported that Watanabe had said about him. So it was a given that I was going to watch it and when Funimation said that it would actually air on American tv before Japanese tv dubbed well that makes it even better, gotta take special situations like that as they come!

Space Dandy

Spring 2014 Anime Round-UP

It's that time of year again folks, time for me to talk about the sudden onslaught of new anime and I'm starting off this season with almost a blank slate since just about all my shows have ended, as is usually the case since winter shows tend to be one-cour and it's rare to have a show run for more than two-cour so all my fall shows have ended as well. The one exception (well, Space Dandy is split cour but it's currently off the air) is the latest Pretty Cure series, Happiness Charge (nicknamed Hacha! by fans because that's just fun to say). In case people are trying to remember, no I didn't finish Doki Doki Precure since, well, it turns out that wasn't one of the better series. This I'm still a little cautious about, once burned twice shy after all, but I already like how they're fleshing out the character better and the fights are rather fun and silly, just what I want from a children's show!

Not included here are Break Blade and Knights of Sidonia since I already saw the BB movie's years ago and this is just a re-edit of those (possibly with a few new scenes and a new opening but nothing can compare to the movie's wonderful opening song) and Sidonia is actually getting broadcast, dubbed, on Netflix in the summer so I'm waiting for that. Well, that and Sidona's CGI is making me nervous, I hope it looks fine in the series but those trailers do not fill me with hope.

Winter 2014 Mid-Season Anime Round-UP

So I was thinking the other day that gee, while everyone obviously makes a fuss right when new anime series start, and a bit of one when they end, it's kind of hard to look at a season when it's half-way through and go "right, what did I miss?" Yes I follow quite a few anime blogs that post episode by episode thoughts and feelings, plus on twitter I see quite a few people talking about shows I don't follow, but you can't just jump into the post on episode 5 and get a feel from it if this something you really really need to start or not (plus, if you just try to read through a few posts chronologically you usually just end up horribly spoiled). So that's what I'm going to do here, I'm going to talk about all the shows I'm currently watching and hopefully convince a few more people to try them out, or not as the case may be since, while I am investing time each week into some of these shows, there are at least a couple I expect to have messy endings. And if there's anything I don't mention here feel free to chime in in the comments and convince me what to try out, there's a few I'm teetering on the edge of trying but just haven't been sure enough to dedicate the time to them. Oh and just to note I'm a week behind all the shows except Kill La Kill since even Funimation has free-viewer-delays now (they started it up DURING the new season with no prior notice, bah) so hopefully the last episode of these shows didn't do anything really weird that'll completely change my views.

Now, onto the shows and in the order they air each week, starting on Sunday!

Book Review: Across the Great Barrier

Moving right along with this series (since the sooner I write a proper review of it the sooner I can write the next book, I've found if I don't I risk muddling the stories together and write overall less satisfying reviews) so there's not much to say to introduce it, it's magic, the Wild West, and not in the way you just thought when you heard those two phrases put together!

Across the Great Barrier by Patricia C Wrede

Winter Anime 2014 Round-UP

It's that time again and finally, between the fact that most of my anime ended the week before Christmas and that the rest all took a week or two off for Christmas and New Years (which I do completely understand) I was going a bit mad over here with nothing to watch. I tried out a number of things, half rewatched some others, convinced myself to not start rewatching even more shows, and just am very glad that I'm back to having a regular schedule of having anime magically pop up every few days to watch. As per usual, let me first spend a few minutes on what shows I'm continuing from the fall season (at this point I've more or less dropped Tokyo Ravens and don't even ask about Space Bros, I'm at least a full season behind):

Kill La Kill: Oh damn, when KLK (along with these other two shows) took a two week break I wasn't that impressed where it ended. Some new things had been revealed, the second half was set up, but a couple of major things I expected to happen, well, didn't. They still didn't happen here but the story has finally done it's "major upset to motivate the second half" and this should make things quite interesting, at least for the next few episodes. I still am torn about KLK in many ways, the story has grown on me, I like the soundtrack, I like the characters, yet dear god it's just so much fanservice each week. And no guys, I don't think you can really say "these super skimpy outfits empower the female characters!" when, well, unless I'm wrong this is a show with a mostly male staff and guys, characters don't technically get to decide what they wear. Cosplayers? Sure, people on the beach in skimpy bathing clothes? Absolutely, but not fictional characters, not really, and that's putting aside the "okay howcome it's empowering when I wear little clothing but not when I wear baggy clothes that I really like?" detail. It's a problematic show in a lot of ways yet it's also really fun, just be really really careful where you watch it since it's rare for it to go more than 10 minutes without hitting NSFW territory.

Nagi-Asu: Finally, we're back to the plot! For those just tuning in, Nagi-Asu is a semi-fantastical, semi-coming-of-age story about a group of kids from the sea who are going to school on land and it was slowing down right before the mid-season cliffhanger a few weeks back. However the story is moving forward once again and quickly, as predicated by many viewers we have had a timeskip (although, given the character designs if I hadn't been told how many years it was I wouldn't have guessed) and it works out much better than I would have expected. The show is at it's strongest when it treads the delicate line between happiness and sadness and for once I think the show made a good call to focus on middle schoolers, instead of an older age group, for a romantic story given just how tumultuous that time of your life is without all the additional problems. And those additional problems are why I love the series actually, it takes a while but the fantastical setting finally comes into play and both creates new problems for the series and uses it as a metaphor for others, I would love for the series to focus on the fantasy a bit more this time (which I think it will given the slight change in setting) and it's gone from being a show I was unsure of to one of my favorites of the season.

Samuari Flamenco: Oh man SamFlam, what are you doing now? To recap, SamFlam started out as a show about a regular guy who wanted to be a superhero except, well, since there's no such thing as super-villains he was doing stuff like stopping people from littering. I didn't like it at first, lead Mayoshi's viewpoint grated with mine but as he changed and grew (both in thinking and his ability to not get beat up by hooligans) and it progressed rather nicely until about a seventh episode which honestly felt like the end of the series with everything wrapping up. Then, completely out of nowhere, the series underwent a huge genre-shift (less of a shift and more of a "gets in a monster truck and jumps across the arena" actually, social media was fun that day) and then it played around with these new superhero tropes, seemed to get comfortable with those as well, and then in episode 11 it seemed to shift over into a new one again and frankly I just don't like the current setting. It's sentai, which I have nothing against, but it plays all the ideas and tropes too straight, there's too little of that real-world connection the first two arcs had (and Goto who serves as the series comedic straight man) and without that I'm finding it boring. I'm sure we're going to go through another shift and I just hope it comes soon and that I like the show more again after it!


All three of these shows are streaming on crunchyroll, KLK also goes up on hulu fairly quickly and Sam Flam (both of which are licensed by Aniplex) has slowly been going up as well. Nagi-Asu has also been licensed but by NIS America instead.


Okay, time for the new stuff!

Anime Review: Galilei Donna

This has been a bit of an odd year for the noitaminA timeslot. In the winter we had two continuing shows, Psycho-Pass and Robotics;Notes and in the spring the entire timeslot was taken up by a rerun of Katanagatari (which baffles me since the only thing new were the credits and I don't believe it was getting a rerelease). The summer had another rerun, AnoHana (which did originally air in the timeslot and was promoting it's new movie, it still felt like a bit of a slap to have reruns two seasons in a row however) which was accompanied by Silver Spoon (which will be back in just a couple of weeks) and then the fall had two anime original stories, Samurai Flamenco (which is also continuing on in the winter) and this entry. I was fairly excited about it since the art looked nice and the summary made it sound like a family coming back together to go on a quest (which means adult characters, wohoo!), sadly only one of those things turned out to be true.

Galilei Donna

Movie Review: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

A bit of book-keeping first, as people have probably seen I have finally gotten the ads working on the site, wohoo! So yes they're supposed to be there, nothing to be alarmed about. And I'm experimenting with the formatting of the reviews a little bit, I was never happy with how far you had to scroll down on the main page so I'm going to experiment around and see if I can find something I'm more happy with.


Alright down to the review, even thought I was rather grumpy with the first Hobbit film I was still a bit excited for this one, guess all of Peter Jackson's conditioning to make the world get overly excited whenever their's a new Tolkien film has worked. Funny enough I did hear recently that the extended edition of the first film actually works a lot better than the theatrical cut, explains a few things and the mood shifts work a little better. I'm not sure the same is going to happen to this film but I have to admit I am curious about rewatching the first one now.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Movie Review: Frozen

Initially I had no intention of seeing this movie and my list of reasons why was pretty long. From the fact that, in retrospect, the marketing was terrible (someone has to reassure me, and I had to do it in turn afterwards, that the snowman actually wasn't this terrible character who ruined the movie), compared to the original story (a girl saves a boy and goes on an adventure to do it!) the summary for it (a girl must save her sister from becoming evil and a guy helps her do it!) sounded rather, uninspired. The character designs also rubbed me a bit the wrong way, both the fact that Anna and Elsa looked like they were Rapunzel's sisters (especially once again compared to the original designs, plus there was a comment from one of the staff about having to constantly make the girls look pretty which didn't sit well with many) and the reminder of how many stories we get about cute, young white characters and so few about non-white ones (the This Could Have Been Frozen tumblr both has some really cool art and for me was a reminder of how rarely you see non-white characters as leads in traditional American media). So why did I try it after all? Because at the heart it's a, non-romantic, story about a relationship between two sisters and that's a kind of story I want to see and I was hoping that the story was strong enough to make up for all of the things I just listed.

Frozen

Summary: Anna and Elsa are sisters in the kingdom of Arendelle and while Anna is a happy, outgoing child Elsa is a bit more withdrawn and quiet, terrified that she'll hurt someone with her strange ice creating powers. When she ascends to the throne her secret slips out and she accidentally turns their sunny, summer land into a winter wonderland and Anna has to set out to apologize to her sister and bring her back so that everything can be set right again.

The Good: That was a way better story than I was expecting, hurray! Unlike what I predicted Elsa has not turned evil and it's up to Anna to use the power of love to restore her heart, nope Elsa is just a combination of scared and embracing the new freedom of not being where she can harm people (and as many people have pointed out, this is one of the rare times where a Disney film has shown that the parents, while well-meaning, were certainly wrong). The movie questions the idea of love at first sight, makes it clear that familial love is just as important and great as romantic love, and actually has a plot twist that caught my theater by surprise (I figured it out once the movie started but Disney waited just late enough that I had started doubting myself so kudos to them). I liked Anna and Elsa's character arcs and felt like the story stayed true to itself by the end, this wasn't supposed to be some very very silly comedic story, it's a fun story with plenty of funny moments but at it's heart it's about two sisters and it remembers this all the way to the end.

The Bad: Really, whoever was in charge of the marketing (in the US anyway) did a terrible job at getting across the real mood of the film, if I hadn't looked up reviews and heard some good word of mouth I never would have seen it this soon. As for the movie itself, I felt like it dragged on in one or two points in the last third/half (especially since this was when there was a time-specific plot point) and there were times when Anna/Kristoff felt like a little too anachronistic compared to the rest of the cast (as much as I like Anna and I'm sure tons of little girls feel like she's just like them she feels a bit like they were trying really hard to inject bits of a "modern teen/pre-teen" into her).

The Production Values: I heard the song "Let It Go" before the movie and wasn't sold on it but somehow when it played in the movie it just worked. That was easily my favorite song of the film but I thought that everything sounded fine. I know some people on tumblr have been up in arms about some moments of shoddy animation but even when I stared at the cam-rif-gifs of the scene in question I still couldn't spot it so I feel like I can say that the movie looked pretty good too. Still not thrilled that Anna and Elsa have easily the most boring faces in the entire film (as I mentioned earlier that just felt like, well, a cop out considering what's previously been done in animation) but the rest of the designs (character, clothing, and setting wise) were rather pretty.


For being actually a really good movie and having the kind of plot I've wanted in a story for years I'm giving this film a 4 out of 5 and just hope that Disney A) Actually changes the faces for the female characters in their next film and B) Realizes that just because you have one black/Middle Eastern/Asian female lead of a film doesn't mean you should wait another five, eight, or more years to make the next film (and for god's sake you can put them in the backgrounds too, non-white people appeared in the background in just ONE scene!)