Anime Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans

Normally I order these reviews from my most-favorite anime of a season to least so I should put up a little note that says: this was not my least favorite show of the season! I just go so slammed by con work back in February that I was barely keeping up with anything and even since then I've been non-stop busy and seeing folks make, disapproving noises at the last half of the show wasn't the kind of motivation I needed to finish the show. The fact that it's already dubbed and airing on Toonami in the US is however so let's get onto this very late post.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans

Anime Review: Aldnoah.Zero

In the past I determined that 12 shows is about the max I can watch in one season and this summer season seemed to prove that, I didn't even watch 12 shows every week and my weekends were still too full! On Saturday's two shows primarily competed for my attention, Captain Earth and this one and they were both a bit uneven, I can't actually remember any weeks where they were both strong, and in the end this was the more uneven, and ultimately weaker, of the two which is the exact opposite of what I would have predicted!

Aldnoah.Zero

Movie Review: Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' On Heaven's Door

It took me much longer to get a hold of this movie than I would have liked so believe me, the almost year wide gap between me talking about this movie and the tv series was not intentional. I don't think it matters if you watch the movie after the show or when it's chronologically set within the show (which I believe is around episode 24), and while the story is self-contained enough that a newcomer could probably follow the movie it does provide some foreshadowing for the end of the series which makes it a more enjoyable movie for someone who has already seen all or part of the series. We did show part of the movie at my school's anime club and it seemed like everyone, fan and newcomer alike, enjoyed it but I do think a fan is going to get more out of it.

Cowboy Bebop The Movie: Knockin' On Heaven's Door

Summary: It's almost Halloween night and there's a criminal on the loose who wants to play a "trick" on the capital city of Mars, releasing a deadly virus that's almost impossible to detect and cure. So when the government puts out the largest bounty ever for his arrest the crew of the Bebop all get to work tracking him down in their various ways but will they be able to find him in time?

The Good: The story feels exactly like an episode from the later part of the story, the characters have been mostly fleshed out, they each track down Vincent exactly how you would expect them to, and there is some foreshadowing about Spike's past and future thrown in as well. The setting feels just right, from the looks to how everything interacts with each other, and all in all the movie felt cohesive and rather fun as a fan of the series. It was exactly what I expected to get from the movie, was entertaining, and made me want to re-watch the original show again which is the best thing a movie like this can do.

The Bad: Technically the movie doesn't add anything to the story so some would consider it a cash-in attempt where the creators made it just for the sake of making money. If you feel that way about franchise movies then avoid this since you'll just be grumpy about it, but with a story like Cowboy Bebop's (which was held together more thematically than with an overarching plot) I think it works fine. Vincent, the criminal's, backstory is a bit confusing at points, I still don't know if he fought in a war as a modified solider or if there was no war, just scientific testing, but in the end it's not a detail that really matters so even with some confusing parts like that the story still manages to stand strong. 

The Audio: I of course watched with the English dub and the cast all sounds pitch perfect, like there wasn't a break between dubbing the show and dubbing the movie (I don't know if there was or not but point made). The new characters also sound rather solid, I was a bit confused why one character had an Australian accent (I can only guess they had an accent in the Japanese version), but other than that everything was spot on. It was nice to hear the Cowboy Bebop music as well, there weren't any new tracks that stood out to me but overall everything fit very well.

The Visuals: As is the case with many movie properties of anime series, the movie looks a bit better than the series with crisper lines, richer colors, and doesn't skimp on the fight scenes which all looked really good. There wasn't any really noticeable CGI in the film, and while I have nothing against CGI it just feels more impressive to see everything really well cel-animated, and I was overall impressed at how good a ten year old movie looked.

So I'm adding this to my to-buy list as well (and it reminds me how I need to get a move on on these Bandai titles, ugh) and really there's not much to say. If you like the show you'll like the movie and you already know what to expect, there's just not much to say beyond that.  

Book Review: Life on Mars: Tales from a New Frontier

Back in January when I was at the library trying to find the tv show Life on Mars I was also hunting around to find a few books which didn't seem to be on the shelves like they were supposed to be. So I decided to check out the new books section as a last resort and, while I didn't find the books I was looking for, I found a book called Life on Mars just staring me in the face. I'm not sure if this was the universe's way of mocking me or an apology for the tv show being out but in any case I decided to check this one out, especially since there were a lot of authors in there I didn't recognize (the only authors who I was familiar with were Nnedi Okorafor and Cory Doctorow*).

Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier edited by Jonathan Strahan

Not much to say about this cover, it works well showing what the book is about but honestly with a title like that the cover doesn't need to do much explaining. I did like the color scheme used though, it was a smart move to use that dusty red-color to tie everything together since that is a color people associate with Mars.

Summary: 12 authors and 12 different takes on Mars, our next frontier, and what kinds of lives we’ll live there.

The Good: There were some genuinely interesting stories in this anthology, I liked the few that dealt with the health aspects of living on Mars (“Goodnight Moons” by Ellen Klages and “Martian Heart” by John Barnes, even though those stories were a bit more tragic) and the ones that focused more on the kind of technology in the future (“The Taste of  Promises” by Rachel Swirsky), and one towards the end which was about the very first steps to Mars (“Discovering Life” by Kim Stanley Robinson). In short, I liked the ones that spent a bit more time thinking about their setting and making it the focus of the story instead of, well, the background. There were details in nearly every story that I found cool (like the journal in “The Old Man and the Martian Sea” by Alastair Reynolds, it reminded me a bit of the books in The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson) and it is harder to fill a story with details when it’s only 20-30 pages long but in an anthology it’s the details that separate the okay stories from the great ones.   

The Bad: I know that most, if not all, of the stories would have been written without knowing what the other contributors were doing and that you should therefore view each story separately but I was still surprised (and annoyed) at the sheer number of unlikeable lead characters in the stories. I think I only really liked two or three leads (all from different stories), the rest were simply too ignorant, mean-spirited, or just plain boring and I didn’t care about them. I was also sad that out of all of the stories none of them were set on a fully terraformed Mars far in the future, there’s a limit to how many stories you can read set in the exact same setting before it simply gets tedious (I read these over the course of a week and a half alongside another book so it’s not like this was even the only thing I was reading at the time and they still got tedious).

Not a super strong anthology, honestly I would rather recommend people a whole slew of other science fiction books to read instead but who knows, this could still appeal to some people out there I suppose. And it looks like this might be my last science fiction review for a while, glancing at my to-read list it looks like it's once again dominated by fantasy (with some realistic fiction in there, no clue where that came from), little sad that I'm ending such a long streak of sci-fi reviews with a whimper instead of a bang.



*ironically enough, I think both stories by them fit into the canons they had created in the books of theirs I have read. I can easily see The Martian Chronicles game being a progression of the games in Little Brother and For the Win by Doctorow and Okorafor's young adult books are set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where people have developed magical like powers, the same ones described in her short story (although I didn't realize this until I finished reading the story, her works are also set in a 'verse with alternate worlds, an odd combination with post-apocalyptic and it's been a few years since she had a YA book come out).   
 

Anime Review: Aria the Animation

Nozomi Entertainment/Right Stuf is still uploading more and more of their shows onto youtube for limited streaming and the latest title to catch my eye was the first in the Aria  series. Years ago I read the two volume prequel to Aria, called Aqua (the new name for Mars which the series is set on) and a few volumes of the series itself but it was too slow moving for my taste. So I was hoping that approaching the series from a different angle, watching one episode a week and having it on in the background as I worked on knitting or other crafty endeavors.

Aria the Animation

Summary: Aqua, formerly known as Mars, has been terraformed so that the majority of the planet is covered in water so that in many places, including the city of Neo-Venezia, boats are required to get around. Akari is a trainee gondolier who will one day show clients all around the charming city but for now she's still learning about the city herself.

The Good: There's a very small sub-genre in anime of  "healing shows," ones that are so simple and charming that you feel better merely for watching them (and the director is almost always the same as this one, Junichi Sato) and that description fits Aria to a T. You can watch it to cheer up or to relax, with it's simple and charming stories it doesn't demand a lot of it's watchers and lets you settle into the mood.

The Bad: The show doesn't start with the material from the Aqua prequel and assumes that you are already familiar with some of the characters, which I was, so fans who are completely new to the series might want to give the wikipedia page a quick glance over when new characters appear. The other real issue with this show is not that it's slow paced but rather that not much actually happens. I can enjoy a plot light show if the character grow and develop but there's very little of that actually going on here, only one side character got development and that was simply to make her a bit less shy. I generally don't enjoy shows where you can watch the episodes in any order and honestly there is so little change in the show that you could do that fairly easily.

The Audio: The show doesn't have a set opening sequence but has a rather lovely song that gets played over the first few minutes and the sound is well-mixed too, the character's dialogue and the song never compete with each other and generally the first few minutes are set up so that nothing on screen competes with the song as well. The ending song is less memorable but still fits the mood well. This series does not have an English dub but the Japanese voices work well enough that it doesn't seem like a big loss.

The Visuals: The show doesn't need to have spectacular visuals to make the series work but it does have some rather nice ones. The backgrounds look lovely, and make Neo-Venezia's connection to the original Venice more aparent, and I've heard a story of how the production team went to Venice, realized they had animated all the sculling the gondoliers were doing backwards and reanimated all the scenes they had already done to fix it. Everything looks nice and clean and it does help add overall to the feeling.

So, not the show for me but, since I don't hate it, I think I will continue watching it. Nozomi is currently streaming the first couple of episodes and has started streaming the sequel, Aria the Natural, and I'd recommend people checking this out, you can probably start watching with the Natural and not miss tons of stuff.