Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 6, 2009 in Animation
This fan made video is brilliant — someone edited together every single scene from Star Blazers (Space Cruiser Yamato) which features Leader Desslok firing the famed but ever so flawed Desslok Gun which is a cannon mounted on his flagship. Needless to say if he ever destroyed the Yamato with his gun the series would have been slightly on the short side. One things that’s interesting for me to note is that I like the American voice actor (Eddie Allen) for Desslok much better than the Japanese actor. By giving him a Boris Karloff he seemed much more original, interesting and somewhat twisted: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 2, 2009 in Animation
This is a trailer for the upcoming anime series Shangri La which is based Eiichi Ikegami’s novel. Here’s a crude translation of the description for the show: “Due to global warming Tokyo has been transformed into a tropical city, to fight these effects the center of the city is being transformed into a forest — a utopia (Shangri-La) where global warming does not exists. In the center of Tokyo the privileged citizens live in an Atlas-like tower city while ordinary people are intimidated and lead a life of squalor. Houziyou Kuniko is an 18-year-old heroine with her massive boomerang made of carbon fiber leads a fight against government forces.” Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Mar 28, 2009 in Animation
Not to date myself, but I grew up watching Lupin III episodes on VHS from Japan — my all time favorite episodes of the show were the ones directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki as we all known known is an animation genius, but when you put that together with Lupin there was a real sort of magic. Lupin III started life as a manga and the first episodes date back to the 60s, but when Miyazaki got his hands on the show it went from being a manga adaption to a place in television history. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Mar 26, 2009 in Animation
It’s amazing to me that Hollywood can do such a good job adapting American comic books to live action films, but when it comes to manga or anime they don’t always seem to know what they’re doing. A good case in point is this latest trailer for Dragonball Evolution which falls flat — and if the trailer doesn’t get you excited you know you’re in trouble! Fox is convinced that this film will indoctrinate a new generation of Dragonball fans, but it may have the opposite effect…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Mar 25, 2009 in Animation
This is a trailer for an potential upcoming anime series called Cat Shit One by studio anima. First off what makes this look so different is that it’s interesting to see a Japanese studio do their take on what CGI should look like — we’ve seen Pixar set the pace for years, but this series clearly has its own sensibilities. Which brings me to the next point: The subject matter of this show is war with the twist of featuring cute woodland creatures. The last time anyone has tried anything like this was the animated film Watership Down which while being an amazing film was never a huge commercial success. Read more…
It’s funny the one thing that always hit me about the character designs in Full Metal Alchemist is just how cute they seem to be, but this set of Full Metal Alchemist Choco Minto pushes it to the next level. These figurines are part of a merchandising push that ties in with the debut of the latest series which stays true to the storylines established in the original manga. Here’s a trailer for the upcoming series: Read more…
The above advert is for the upcoming April issue of Comptiq magazine. The magazine got started in the 80s as a computer magazine, but over time shifted to computers and in 2003 became mixed media. Over the years Comptiq has featured a quite a few serialized manga from Gunbuster to my favorite Lucky Star. Of course what caught my eye in this ad is the very prominently statuette of Konata which looks very cool.
When I first came across this commercial my first thoughts were “this has got to be an upcoming CGI Star Blazers movie that I’ve been waiting for my entire life!” But then I noticed at the end of the advert that there seemed to be some sort of box — I figured then that it had to be some sort of amazing videogame:
Well after a minuter or two of googling the subject it turns out that this amazing animation is for a new Space Battleship Yamato Pachinko machine! By you’ve got to check out the website — it’s all in Japanese but the interface with make any old school Star Blazers fan weep with joy: Read more…
For us old time anime fanboys PBM Express USA had a great collection of retro goodies at the Toy Fair! Shown above are action figures for Mazinger Z and Grendizer, and below is a highly detailed Captain Harlock Statue:
Wandering about the plushies section at the Toy Fair you wouldn’t expect anime, but much to my pleasant surprise Toy Network LLC has done a deal to bring out a full line adorable Shin-chan characters! And the whole crew is here: Boo, Georgie, Penny, Hima, Shin Chan, Maso, Whitey, Principal Ench, Action Bastard and of course Happiness Bunny. By the way you can buy them in bulk for your local anime convention!
From a fanboy point of view one of the coolest exhibitors at Toy Fair 2009 was the Attakus Collection booth which was packed with highly detailed collectables that take your breath away. The Star Wars Probe Droid above first caught my eye due to the huge scale (and loving detail), but they also had a an amazing collection of smaller scale figures based on everything from Marvel Comics to AstroBoy: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 14, 2009 in Animation
The Galaxy Railways is a 2003 anime series produced by Leiji Matsumoto which reminds me a great deal of Galaxy Express 999. What’s neat is that Funimation is starting to put full episodes of this series up on YouTube. What makes Matsumoto interesting to me is that he was the king of steampunk long before the term was invented — his work in the 70s was filled with space pirates and Victorian trains in a Star Wars universe. This latest series feels slightly xeroxed from his older work, but just the same it is neat that Funimation is putting it out there. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 13, 2009 in Animation, Fandom
If you’re an otaku near New York City you’ll want to reserve Sunday March 1st on your calendars: Japanese cosplay singer Reni will be performing her “Japanese Maid Show” which features anime and J-Pop songs done in an authentic Akihabara style of singing and dancing:
Top Tunes, 303-305 East 53rd Street at 2nd Avenue
March 1st, Sunday 5-6pm (Doors open at 4:30pm)
No cover charge/one drink minimumRead more…
You’ll have to wait until January 22nd, but in the meantime here’s the trailer for the Suzumiya Haruhi no Gekidou (the DX Pack) dance game for the Wii. Anime fanboys and fangurls will be able to hop along with Haruhi Suzumiya — the official website is here (in Japanese) and you can purchase the game here. I can really see this game being a real hit with the cosplay crowd at anime conventions! Read more…
Going through my Flickr stream I came across an image titled Name That Anime Slot Machine so of course I knew I had an interesting challenge ahead of me! The slot machine was spotted in an Ohio antique mall —the only real clue I had was that it was based on a baseball manga or anime series. Now while there are tons of baseball manga (and all sorts of sports manga in Japan) I realized that it had to be from a show popular enough to merit an anime series. Read more…
Over the years I’ve kept running into the same group of 3D retro-styled characters in Japanese printed advertising and that at first reminded me of Rankin-Bass style stop motion characters but have their own original look. I was guessing they might be stop motion since they were photographed rather than drawn or rendered.
On doing some research I figured out they came from a mid 1960s series Hyokkori Hyoutan-jima (ひょっこりひょうたん島) which translates to something like “Unexpected Gourd Island” and the characters were puppets rather than animated. They have to be Japan’s most famous puppet TV show though of course the Muppets are seen all over and “Saku Saku” was trendy for a while.Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 15, 2008 in Animation
Who has a notebook you can write in to kill? DeathSponge NotePants! It’s funny but when you kitbash SpongeBob SquarePants with Death Note it sort of reminds me of Sweeney Todd.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 12, 2008 in Animation
Within the last hour I’ve been twittered by everyone about verymelon.com a website setup by whattheanime.com. The entire site is nothing but a looped clip (shown above) from the anime series Konjiki no Gash Bell (which translates into English as Zatch Bell! – 金色のガッシュベル!!) which is subtitled by Anime Destiny. For those not in the know the show is a fantasy themed comedy series that ran from 2003 until 2006. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 10, 2008 in Animation, Cinema
I got a very bad feeling about this film about 57 seconds into this trailer when the Transformer styled vehicle appears. To me it looks like the film is taking itself a bit too seriously…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 8, 2008 in Animation
What’s interesting about this is that the Deputy Dean of Russian Literature and Intercultural Communication at the Pushkin Institute of Russian in Moscow (how’s that for a cool job title?) feels that the show doesn’t promote pedophilia in an outright way, but does so subjectively with humor (i.e. it’s subversive!): Read more…
Anime and manga expert Gia Manry is now the managing editor or Anime Vice a well done website which is worth adding to your RSS reader. Vice is a video rich community focused site which has quite a few user friendly features — and is already stocked with a wealth of cool content. I really loved their up and coming release section and of course their cosplay photo collection has to be seen. The devil is in the details and one can tell that Gia sweated those details to put together one of the better fan oriented encyclopedias that I’ve seen in a long time (and as a blogger it’s nice to have other places to link to rather than ANN or wikipedia).
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 5, 2008 in Animation
It looks like 20th Century Fox is settling in on a name for this film, in fact they’ve already already taken the web domain DragonballEvolutionmovie.com. For a generation of anime fanboys (and fangurls) Dragonball has a cherished place in their childhood, and I hope Hollywood doesn’t get it wrong (although from what I’ve seen Im not too hopeful): Read more…
The above advert is for the upcoming April issue of 
