Anime Shorts: Wakakozake and This Boy Is A Professional Wizard

It's been so long since I covered anime shorts that most folks probably don't remember I even do! Considering that these are so, well, brief, I like to lump two or more shows together and not make a review that takes longer to read than one episode. Sound good? (and with this I've reviewed my first 2016 anime, I don't feel so behind now!)

Anime Review: Coffee Samurai and Hoshizora Kiseki

I'm not sure how but I have less and less free time these days. On paper it doesn't look like I'm trying to do that many things each day but let me tell you that job hunting is a soulless, long-winded task and between that and that the season is juuuuust about to finish but hasn't yet, I'm scrambling again. Thankfully I have (multiple!) back-up plans for these times so here is plan two: watch all of the shorts that Sentai has licensed over the years that are streaming on Hulu. Like the last time I did this (with Cocient and Five Numbers) I'm doing two at once and once again I am reminded of just how much harder it seems to be to tell a good, short story than a good, longer story.

Anime Review: Tonari no Seki-kun and Magica Wars

This is why I usually take November off, I simply run out of things to review and have to scramble a bit, especially when it comes to anime. Thankfully after doing this for so long I've started to anticipate this so I'm going to do something I haven't done in a little while, I'm going to talk about two series of shorts that came out in this past year. Since two mini-reviews is totally the same as one full length review, right?

Anime Review: Encouragement of the Climb and Senyuu

As I've mentioned before it can be a bit hard at times to make sure I've watched/read enough so that I have enough material to make four full reviews every week and for this week, well, I just didn't have time to watch another full series. I realized this in advance and when I was wracking my mind for alternatives I hit upon one, how about I try out some of the shorts (series that have episodes which are five minutes or less) that crunchyroll is streaming and see if any of those tickle my fancy and talk about multiple ones to make up for a full review. So that's what we're doing this time, since crunchyroll only started picking up those shows in the past year or so (or perhaps studios only started making a lot of shorts a year or so ago) I doubt I'll be able to do this again any time soon but it was a change of pace and it was nice to be able to get through an entire series in one evening and still have time to do other things.


Encouragement of the Climb

Encouragement of the Climb is a series with 3:30 minute long episodes that focus on Aoi, a quiet high school girl who wants to live her high school life quite unadventoursly but is reluctantly dragged back into mountain climbing (really hiking) by an old friend from middle school and she finds herself enjoying the sport again. I saw the first episode back when it first aired in the winter and I was rather lukewarm on it then but now that I had a chance to watch all the episodes in one go I really warmed up to it and it ended up being a really cute show. Bear in mind that it's not a sports show, rather it's a "cute girls do cute things" show and the cute thing in question (usually) has to do with mountain hiking. It never gets overly saccharine and I think that the 3:30 length is perfect for it, the episodes do feel a bit short but something happens in each one and during it's quick 30 second outro the show even shows a still or two advancing the story a little longer. So I give this a recommendation and would certainly watch a second season of it, just in one batch like I did with this, not week to week.

Senyu

A long time ago there was a demon named Satan Rchimedes and he caused trouble for the human world until he was sealed away. Now there are demons running amuck and causing trouble again so all  of the descendants of the hero who sealed him have been sent on a quest to defeat this new evil.  Now I know this doesn't sound like a bad premise, especially since the story doesn't take itself seriously at all and I know that a lot of people liked it but I just did not like this show at all. The humor got overly repetitive, was forced, the situations were rarely amusing, and even though the story was trying to break/invert some common fantasy tropes the problem is that genre-aware fantasy has been around long enough that it has it's own stereotypes and tropes which the series followed too often. I know this one has a second season coming out this summer but I won't be checking it out at all, even  if the episodes are just four and a half minutes long.

Movie Review: Banff Mountain Film Festival (2011)

This is the review that was meant to go up last Thursday by the way and tomorrow's review will be on the last season of Buffy so I'll be getting back on track tomorrow.

I first heard about the Banff Mountain Film Festival when my school sent out an email announcing the dates for it and had a link to this seriously amazing trailer. I almost didn't see it however but, after some convincing by my dad and his girlfriend, and having some extra cash on hand, I bought one of the last tickets and saw it even though I was feeling really under the weather that day. I'm super glad I made the effort to get out and see some of the films though, not only is it breath taking to see all of these films on a two-story screen (I think seeing that trailer beforehand in the auditorium did take my breath away) but these were also amazingly good films (I can barely look at the ones in my video class now).

For the world tour, about six different films are shown each night (for two nights) and, since I wasn't feeling well, I only caught four films, this is out of a total of 64 films I believe. So, since none of these were longer than 40 minutes, I'm going to do this similar to my webcomic reviews back in March and just write a quick thing about each of them. And honestly, they were all amazing, I don't know if I have anything bad to say about them anyway.

Wildwater Directed & Produced by Anson Fogel

This is actually the film that I liked the least but that's out of a group of amazing videos so it's not a bad film at all. One of the longer films, it's a documentary on white-water paddling and the direction of the video makes it look like a stylish National Geographic documentary. If not for it's length it wouldn't be out of place at all on a TV channel such as National Geographic or maybe the Discovery Channel. It was paced well, none of the shots went on too long, had interviews with some interesting people and the visuals just make you want to take up a paddle and tackle a river yourself.

Chimaera Directed by Dave Mossop

The complete opposite of Wildwater, Chimaera is a short, surrealistic piece about skiing with no talking, lots of filters, and generally a very stylish little film. I'm not quite sure what the film was trying to say (other than, skiing is amazing!) but it was an interesting choice to put right after Wildwater and is a great example that your film doesn't have to be a documentary to be shown at Banff.

Eastern Rises Directed by Ben Knight
If you had told me before this night that I would see a documentary about fly-fishing in far eastern Russia and I would laugh my ass off at it, I would have looked at you funny. That said, I can see why this won the "Best Film on Mountain Sports" award since, speaking as someone who has no interest in fly-fishing, it was an entertaining film and completely accessible. There's a lot of well-done humor in the film (narrator talks about one guy's bigfoot obsession, cut to bigfoot wandering around on the other side of the river as the guy is fishing and then appearing in more clips later on) so, as casual as they may seem, a lot of thought must have gone into planning, shooting, and editing this film. 

Life Cycles Directed & Produced by Ryan Gibbs & Derek Frankowski
The first few minutes of this film are amazing, so amazing in fact, that they could either be their own film or be a very expensive advertisement for a bicycle brand and wow, I would buy those bikes in a heartbeat. But no, the film keeps on going and and shows that these guys can shoot more than nice product shots, they can also do amazing action video. The scene of a bike flipping over tall, yellow grass from the trailer is in this film and there are some amazing composite shots of a bike rushing through a landscape that changes seasons as it passes through. The amount of editing those shots must have needed is amazing and every other shot in the film looks gorgeous as well, lots of saturation and good light balance as well. This was my favorite of the bunch, it just looked stunning and somehow managed to tell a story without any words at all.

AZADI: Freedom Directed & Produced by Anthony Bonello
Another longer film, set in the Kashmir region of India, this is the story of a formerly war-torn region that is coming back to life as more and more tourists return to it's sky slopes. The fighting over nearby Tibet seems to overshadow the trouble Kashmir has had in recent decades (it honestly sounds like it needs to be it's own country since Pakistan and India have been fighting over it for so long) but this film was about how the area is getting back to it's feet but it really needs it's tourists to revive the economy and quite honestly the ski slopes look amazingly good. This was a very down-to-earth film that talked with a lot of people in the area, both young and old, and there is a great sense of hope for the future, one can only hope that this area gets a second chance at peace.