What are you Watching?

[greg]

There's not much difference in quality between ADV's Macross and Animeigo's--in fact, I believe some tech geeks determined that the picture quality on the ADV is slightly better...but I recall that we've had this discussion before. So I won't keep pushing it.

I am pretty superficial. The fact that it was made and translated by AnimEigo, it has the beautiful all-black packaging, and the fact that I can just put the DVDs in and play without having to mess with the language options first to set it to Japanese, these were the main reasons why I chose AnimEigo's Macross over ADV's. Plus the fact that I never cared for ADV from the beginning... I was used to ADV replacing the Japanese credits with English ones and loading the translations with F-bombs.

[llj]

IIj, on the subject of quality, do you know off-hand what the Animeigo sources were for their transfers? I only ask, as I was very depressed when buying some of their DVDs (Arcadia and UY especially) only to find they were muddier and grainier than their own LD releases.

I seem to recall that Animeigo remastered the series themselves, so I don't know if the source materials were necessarily the main problem.

[greg]

For more AnimEigo goodness, I've recently watched Bubblegum Crisis episodes 1-3. I can attest that the remastered DVDs do not have any audio synch issues. There's only a few instances of synch issues that are just the way the anime was made.

In other news, my daughter has discovered Galaxy Angel. She LOVES watching the show now, because she loves the Nomad character. That stuffed doll is always getting trampled and shot with guns. While the Galaxy Angel manga is somewhat serious and follows the video games (the premise of the video games is basically that it's a Sakura Taisen set in space), the anime is so incredibly off-the-wall goofy.

[usamimi]

I'm pretty sure some comic shops I frequent still have copies of the Madox 01 DVD floating around their stores.

Wow, for real? Are they reasonably priced? XD

I believe they're around the same price as they were when they first came out on DVD.

So like, $20-30? Hmm...if I can scrape up some money, I might have to see if you can do some sort of pick-up...

[llj]

Finished Basilisk. Did Kill 'Em All Tomino direct a ninja series and I didn't know about it?

Reasonably entertaining series with tons of casualties and blood flying everywhere. There's a good story here, but despite the fact that someone important dies about every episode or so, for some reason the show seems to move really slowly. The main character actually spends the first half of the series basically sitting in a room and thinking! Makes me marvel at how much an older anime like Rose of Versailles manages to pack a lot of story into one episode.

[llj]

Finished Another last night. Even though many fans complain about us being awash by moe (a progressively tiresome generalization of the state of modern anime) what people have overlooked is the rise of the horror genre in anime TV. While horror usually was restricted to OVAs and movies in the 80s and 90s, one good consequence of late night anime and cable/satellite was its freedom to show gore, and this is something that horror has taken full advantage of.

Another is a pretty decent horror series. It's more creepy than frightening, depending on your experience with horror. For the horror veteran, they'll enjoy the various references and hodgepodge of elements both old and new--the show mixes Final Destination, The Shining, The Omen, They Were 11, Carrie, The Drifting Classroom, George Romero (especially the social commentary aspect) and some good old fashioned slasher action--and throws them into a blender. It even references Edvard Munch, John Saul and Stephen King directly.

To be honest, I'm a little wary about using the Final Destination comparison. It's used a lot online, but I think it might actually serve to turn away viewers. It's a good point of comparison for younger people, but it conjures up the idea of snarky, unlikeable people dying randomly and attempting to uselessly run away from Death's whim. The Omen is probably a little better comparison, in that there's a certain supernatural force behind the killings, something a little more malevolent behind the deaths, and there's a mystery to be solved about it. I never really warmed to the idea of Final Destination's "hey, Death's plan is completely random and you can't do nothing about it!" message.

[usamimi]

I've been meaning to watch "Another", since it's up on a couple of legal free streaming sites. I like horror and I wish that there was more horror anime being made.

[greg]

We finished the first box set of Galaxy Angel last night. That show is so hilarious and nonsensical. It's making me keen on trying to figure out the Galaxy Angel Xbox game I own. At least I'd like to re-read the manga. If anyone would accuse me of hating too much on post-millenium anime, Galaxy Angel is one of the shows I can point to and say that I love.

[Animusubi]

Since Tumblr was reminding me it was the anniversary of Satoshi Kon's death, I decided I should watch more of his movies. I had only seen Tokyo Godfathers, so I watched Paprika a few days ago. Boy they weren't kidding when they made comparisons with Inception. Wish I had seen it before Inception. It was good. I don't see myself being much of a Satoshi Kon fan, I appreciate him more from an artist standpoint than an anime fan. But I do plan on watching the rest of his major works. I think it's because his work is more realistic and serious.

[SteveH]

A quick look at Space Pirate Captain Harlock, via Discotek.

Clearly I haven't watched the entire set of 42 episodes yet, but I thought some might like some early impressions, or maybe they're waiting to read some specific things to decide if they're going to buy it.

Short answer, yes, buy it. There is no 'Galaxy Express 999 TV series' disaster here.

OK. First, packaging. Doublewide Scanavo box holding 6 discs. Inside front has 2 discs, inside back has two discs and there's a 'flapper' holding 2 discs. The front hubs are very solid and hold the discs tightly. The back hubs are a little hard to get discs free and the hubs on the flapper are somewhat weak. But here's the thing: I think this is a rather well designed case for the most part because the flapper hubs are designed to plug into the back hubs, and then a small tab locks the flap down. It's very secure and even if a disc does pop loose in shipping it's not likely to rattle around and get scratched. Of course a case designed like this has no place for a booklet, so it's just as well no booklet is included (altho needed. More on that later).

The discs state they are made in Taiwan. I cannot find any indication if these are DVD-9, there's no code I recognize. It's logical they should be because there's 7 episodes on each disc. Discs all share the same art, but do have both disc volume number and episode numbers.

Picture quality seems excellent to me. I've not seen any 'blocking' or 'jaggy edges' so far, nothing is bleeding or blowing out and if there's a show that would suffer from that it's this one. There are such intense bright reds and whites that back in the VHS days would just smear and blow out like crazy after only a generation or two of duping, not a drop of that here. Blacks are solid and not artifacting like crazy. There was one scene, a vertical pan 'up' Harlock's body while standing at Tochiro's memorial on Earth (ep. 1) that looked a little odd to me, not EXACTLY like a MPEG compression stutter but...I dunno. I'll have to wait for someone more tech minded to see it.

Subtitles are...troublesome to me. They could be better, they could be WAY worse. Translation is overall solid but the Transliteration is all over the place, ranging from 'tight' (direct translation with no 'smoothing') to 'reasonable' (removing the dire formatting and reading more like reasonable spoken English) to 'odd' (either seemingly made up or reading like an English translation of a Chinese translation of the Japanese dialog). As we rarely get direct contact with people like Discotek I can't tell if these are Toei-provided translations that have been 'massaged' a little or what. SOMEONE should have caught that 'thunder cannon' should have been translated as shock cannon, or just ignore the time they use that and stuck with Pulsar cannon which is used most of the time- as one small example.

But the BIGGEST sub issue I have is the so-far inconsistent use of subtitles for songs within the episodes. What I've seen so far is a song will start, we'll get subs, then a chara will start talking and *woomp* the song subs stop, even as the song continues to play. Another time it did this, then cut the song sub back in when a chara stopped talking, then cut out again. third time they didn't bother to sub the song. Now, I know that subtitling on a DVD is a king bitch (cf. statement on ANN's Answerman column) compared to the crazy world of the fansubber but there had to be a cleaner way to do this. And the worst issue, the OP and ED credits. Now, if you know Space Pirate Captain Harlock, those title cards that flash up have HUGE kana/kanji on them, so between them and the animation under there's not a lot of spare room. I think the 'black screen at the end with scrolling English text' style that Mediablasters uses would have been a better choice because we only get like 15% of all the credits translated. Basically the 'above the line' staff and most of the seiyuu. I know it probably doesn't MATTER but it's nice to have that data, isn't it?

And that's why I wish there was a booklet enclosed. Those credits could have been printed in full, the songs translated in full, gosh maybe even something about the 1978 Toei TV Manga festival featurette 'The Mystery of the Arcadia'. So there's a missed opportunity there.

Well, those sorts of things aren't the norm for Discotek so it's no surprise they're not there. Still and all it's an overall solid effort, a release deemed impossible during the fattiest of the 'boom' years of American Anime Releases (when such a risk was actually more safe but no) and I would say overall better handled than Bandai's own release of Zeta Gundam. I am not sorry I spent the money.

Hey, you know what I miss in anime today? Watching these episodes reminded me of one thing that just isn't done anymore.

The eye wiggle.

The way of showing someone holding back REALLY DEEP STRONG EMOTIONS was to have the eyes, or even sometimes just the pupils, 'wiggle' just a bit.

Ya just don't see that anymore. I'm guessing it's harder to do with digicel work than old fashioned hand animation, or something. I miss it.

Anyway, that's my foolish review. Buy it. It's worthy.