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The most recent Crunchyroll newsletter announced that they will be presenting all of the episodes of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. For a moment, I thought this was the new Gundam series that was announced last year. But it's not.
I went to Wikipedia and learned that the new Gundam series is actually Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, which will only be six episodes long. As opposed to Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, which is 50 episodes long.
To add to all of this, the last Gundam series that I watched was Mobile Suit Gundam 00. I've seen the first season, and there's a second season that is on my plan to watch list. But.
Back to Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, which was produced in November 2008. Wait a minute. Wasn't that when the first season of Gundam 00 aired in Japan? Were the Gundam producers actually in production on two Gundam series simultaneously?
Why have I never heard of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam before now?
And just when am I going to get a chance to watch the second season of Gundam 00?
Setsuna F. Seiei, save me. There are TOO MANY GUNDAMS.
Found this while surfing anime blogs: the Top 100 Seiyuu List, done in batches of ten each.
http://atemonai.com/blog/100-seiyuu-everybody-should-know-10-1/
The above link takes you to the top ten, but you can use the links in the blog's sidebar to navigate to the entries for 100-11.
(Akira Ishida is No. 14, by the way.)
Warning: Spoilers for the entire series.
I'm assuming that if you're reading this, you've seen the entire series of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I hope so - because I'm going to spoil pretty much everything about it in a minute. ;)
Gurren Lagann has a bifurcated story. The first sixteen of its twenty-seven episodes take place when the protagonist, Simon, is a young teenager. The final eleven episodes take place after a time jump of seven years.
I'm going to discuss what happens after the time jump. Before the time jump, for me, Gurren Lagann was a nice but rather ordinary shonen anime, complete with boy hero and mecha. Then came the time jump. And after the time jump, Gurren Lagann becomes something else again.
It's fantastic.
The final eleven episodes of Gurren Lagann take the story to such a new level, you wonder why the producers didn't start the time jump sooner. If all of Gurren Lagann had been of the quality that it is after the time jump, it would have been a shonen classic for the ages.
To begin with, Yoko becomes a more developed character after the time jump. In episode 21, we see that after the Spirals' initial victory against the Anti-Spirals, the sex-bomb with the big gun became "Yomako," a teacher in a rural area far from the big city - notwithstanding that she can pick up that gun again at a moment's notice to destroy massive enemy mecha that threaten her kids. ;) Yoko was a likable character before, but after seeing her as a teacher of small children and loving it, she's even more engaging after the time jump.
For me, the most interesting development in post-time jump Gurren Lagann is the changing relationship between Simon and Rossiu, who represent two different views on how to defeat the Anti-Spiral forces.
Rossiu initially belongs to an underground village that is ruled by a religious leader, who also happens to be his father. This group's edict, when more people are born than their resources can support, is to hold a lottery and send several people to the surface - to die, basically. Although he is only a boy himself at the time, Rossiu refuses to let two toddlers (Gimmy and Darry, who later become mecha pilots) who lose the (rigged) lottery be the only victims, and volunteers to go to the surface with them, knowing nothing about what's on the surface - except that no one ever returns from there. He is, in essence, willing to sacrifice his own life because he can't stand to let two little children die alone.
After Kamina's death, Rossiu becomes Simon's co-pilot in Gurren Lagann; and thereafter quietly fades into the background of the general mass of characters that populate the rest of the humans' crew for the remainder of the pre-time jump episodes. I was disappointed by this at the time, as I thought Rossiu was more interesting than that; but I only needed to be a little patient, as it turned out. ;)
Following the time jump, we see that Rossiu has become the head administrator of Kamina City, a position that eventually leads to near-dictatorial powers. He is also involved in a secret experiment to revive Lordgenome's brain in an attempt to discover more about the Anti-Spirals.
Rossiu is no villain; he's terrified that humans stand to be completely eradicated, and so he winds up making decisions that are brutal and exclusionary but that - in what appears to be an extreme, no-win situation - arguably make sense in sheer survival terms. I don't think we can fault Rossiu for not believing that Simon could triumph against impossible odds in stopping the moon from crushing the Earth; because this is what every other human on Earth is thinking, with the exception of Simon himself. He honestly believes that they can't save everyone; and the fear that all of them will be lost blinds him to the questionable morality of his decisions in acting to save just a few. Rossiu never loses his humanity throughout his time as head administrator, a fact that is made abundantly clear from his reactions of guilt and even tears when he thinks about some of his actions after the fact.
When Rossiu goes into a funk after Simon saves the world again, to the point where he is about to take his own life, Simon shows up and gives him the Magical Punch of Awakening! as Kamina had once gifted him with. As we saw with Kamina's earlier act, only worthy people get the Punch of Awakening ;) - so Rossiu is deemed worthy, as well as redeemed by Simon's act.
Simon also seems to lose his way after the Spirals' initial victory against the Anti-Spirals. He's given a high position in government, but doesn't appear all that motivated. It's only when the human population reaches a million and the Anti-Spirals become an active threat once more that Simon comes to life again to face the challenge.
Simon, of course, is the ultimate Spiral energy representative, carrying on Kamina's legacy as the one with heart and mojo and the juice to power the Spirals' fight to live. The bright-line contrast between the Spirals (representing desire for life) and the Anti-Spirals (representing the reactionary response and anti-desire) makes for an epic multi-episode climax for Gurren Lagann, a true adrenaline rush of an ending worthy of all the superlatives fans have heaped on it.
At the end of the series, in the "what happened to them afterward" sequence, we see that Simon wandered the earth with Boota after saving the world and losing Nia. It's an odd end for Simon, who - to be honest - doesn't seem deep enough as a character to be given such an introspective fate. ;) It could be that an older Simon as wandering hermit is a logical end for a shonen hero who has nothing left to sacrifice himself for. It's perhaps one answer to the question: where do old shonen heroes go to die?
The only reason I give Gurren Lagann a 9 and not a perfect 10 is because Simon is never sufficiently developed as a main character needs to be. Look at the difference between Simon and Naruto, for example. If Simon had been given a more interesting personality and a deeper backstory, Gurren Lagann would have been incredible. As it is, it's still a wonderful shonen anime with hugely thrilling moments; and absolutely worth watching all the way through to get to the best eleven episodes of the whole thing.
I think I'm beginning to understand what the new anime series Durarara!! is about.
To begin with, Ikebukuro is a largely commercial district in the northwest sector of Tokyo, north of Shinjuku. Its train station is second only to Shinjuku's in terms of the number of people who pass through it each day. On my only trip to Japan so far, I stayed in Ikebukuro at the Sunshine City Prince Hotel, a business hotel connected to the Sunshine 60 building and Sunshine City shopping mall.
Ikebukuro thus has a kind of resonance for me. I chose to stay in that area because Otome Road, the yaoi-centric shopping street, is a stone's throw from the Sunshine City Prince Hotel. I took the following photo of Ikebukuro from my hotel room on my first night in Japan:
And don't forget the yaoi. It's good to be in a neighborhood where there are yaoi billboards. ;)
Ikebukuro seems an odd choice for the setting of Durarara!! Shinjuku has the Kabuki-cho red-light district and Shibuya has the famous pedestrian-crossing intersection. Harajuku is the Carnaby Street of Tokyo. Ikebukuro has... uh... Again, why Ikebukuro?
Ultimately, only Ryohgo Narita, the author of the light novel series the anime is based on, knows why Ikebukuro, or why anything else in this odd, impressionistically-told story.
Durarara!! opens with a timeworn premise: high school student Mikado Ryuugamine moves to Tokyo and specifically to the Ikebukuro district on the strength of his friendship with Kida Masaomi, a cheery streetwise type. Kida warns him about how dangerous Ikebukuro is, as Mikado gradually adjusts to big-city life.
From watching just the first five episodes, it's clear that Durarara!! is going to tell its story at its own pace, and in its own way. After the standard and predictable opening episode, with Kida taking kid-from-the-sticks Mikado under his wing and showing him the ropes for living in Ikebukuro, the second episode unexpectedly was a retake of the first episode, but from another character's point of view. Each episode so far has focused on a different person's take on life, often using that one character as a narrative voice for the episode.
The series has been unpredictable in other ways as well. In the first episode, a headless motorcycle rider appeared in the story. Durarara!! is set to be a 24-episode series. You would think that the mystery surrounding the headless rider would be strung out for a great many episodes, but actually... Selty Sturluson's story is told rather matter-of-factly in episode 4. She's a "dullahan" from Ireland, dullahans being people who have, well, lost their heads. Her head was on its way to Japan and she followed it there, winding up in the household of a doctor who experimented on her out of curiosity. The doctor's son, Shinra Kishitani, also grew up to be a doctor, though a shady one who makes his living by removing bullets from yakuza gangsters and surgically altering people's faces so they can change their identities. Episode 4 is told from Shinra's point of view.
It would appear at this point that the main characters are still Mikado, his friend Kida, and a girl named Anri Sonohana whom Mikado has a crush on; but week to week, the series keeps diverting unforeseeably but interestingly into other people's stories.
My favorite character so far is Izaya Orihara, a smirky punk-type who likes to observe human behavior when it's being pushed to its limits.
It's probably indicative of the sick shonen fan that I am, but the best moment in the series for me so far came in episode 3 when Izaya gets clocked by a flying trash can thrown by his arch-enemy Shizuo Heiwajima. One moment Izaya is in the middle of a casual conversation with Mikado and Kida; and the next moment trash can meets face. It's so extreme and over-the-top that you can't help but laugh. Shizuo is a beast of a fighter; at one point he picks up a vending machine to throw at Izaya. The vending machine is stopped in its path by Simon Brezhnev, a Russian of African-American descent - if that makes sense - and Izaya manages to escape.
I expect we'll see Simon's story at some point, as well as the stories of the other students, gang members, and assorted human flotsam-and-jetsam who make up the population of Ikebukuro. At the end of episode 5, Kida notes that "everything that happens in this town, even if it doesn't look like it, is connected." Durarara!! appears to be about a district in Tokyo called Ikebukuro and the many stories of its inhabitants. It's "Tales of Ikebukuro," in essence. As such, I'm waiting for the episode about yaoi doujinshi artists and pretty boys at the butler cafes on Otome Road. If this series is really about Ikebukuro, their stories can hardly be left out. ;)
I am very pleased and excited to announce that volume I of Yashakiden: The Demon Princess has been released.
I'll be honest: I haven't read the book or seen the movie of Twilight, or been a consumer of any of the other vampire-themed entertainment that's out there. Aside from a lingering fondness for Christopher Lee as Dracula in those old Hammer horror films, I'm not much into vampires. But there are exceptions.
Yashakiden is a four-volume novel series by Hideyuki Kikuchi, author of Vampire Hunter D. It's set in his "Demon City Shinjuku" universe, in which the district of Shinjuku in Tokyo is destroyed by an earthquake and then nearly conquered by demons. Now resurrected, but still teetering on the edge of the demon abyss, Shinjuku is full to the gills with all manner of paranormal phenomena. Everything beyond its walls is known as "the outside world."
The story of Yashakiden begins when four ancient Chinese vampires enter Demon City. Led by Princess, a beautiful and evil vampire queen, they begin to co-opt and corrupt the local population. Their ultimate aim is to control the city for their own debauched ends.
The four are opposed by Dr. Mephisto, the Demon Physician, and Setsura Aki, owner of a senbei (rice cracker) bakeshop - and the best private investigator in Shinjuku. Mephisto and Setsura have extraordinary paranormal talents of their own at their disposal, as well as a mysterious and complicated history with each other.
What made Yashakiden such an enjoyable project to work on as an adaptation writer is the world that Kikuchi wraps you in. From page one on, the reader finds himself in an all-encompassing universe of strangeness. The wry in-joke is that Shinjuku's human residents have completely adjusted to the madness, casually switching from regular handguns to demon-killing guns and going about their daily lives in the new normal as if the unhuman predators and morphing landscapes around them made for just another pre-earthquake day in Tokyo.
The sex scenes in Yashakiden are pretty hair-raising: they're actually gorier than the action scenes. ;) They achieve a kind of triple X-rated, grindhouse excess seldom seen outside of 1960s cult exploitation movies and hentai anime. I've edited sex scenes before, but I can safely say - none quite like these.
Altogether, Yashakiden is a fantastic read. Like I said, vampires aren't normally my kind of thing, but this is great horror literature - and emphasis on the literature. The literary narrative style and darkly ironic humor elevate this story to a cut above.
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Vol. I is available at your local bookstore (in the manga section), or from my Amazon store.
