Posted by Skrud at Sunday, May 11th 2008 at 11:20pm
It’s like thick, syrupy awesome-butter spread liberally over two hours and ten minutes, garnished with awesome-sprinkles and jellybeans. I don’t even like jellybeans, but I’d eat them just to watch Speed Racer again.
I have vague memories of watching the original Speed Racer cartoon as a kid, though I’m not sure how young I was then. Fresher in my memory is The New Adventures of Speed Racer, an American adaptation that was more like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than anything else. According to Wikipedia, it was pretty unsuccessful and only ran for 13 episodes. That’s a damn shame, because the theme song rocked.
The new movie was a perfect adaptation of what I remember from the original cartoon. It felt like watching a cartoon. It was so exaggerated and over-the-top that I was giddy the entire time. It was outrageous, chock full of cartoon-style action, impossible physics, wild colours, ninjas, cheese, and everything else that I love about movies. Speed Racer was the most awesome movie I’ve seen since Godzilla: Final Wars. It’s a total throwback to old school Japananimation, from back when it was still called Japanimation. If you’ve ever paid attention to how those old cartoons were animated, you’ll love all the little details in Speed Racer. There were some scenes that were a cool modernization of the multiplane camera, where buildings in the background seemed 2-dimensional in an otherwise completely 3-dimensional world. Visually, the movie was stunning. The casting was likewise perfect. We’re talking Patrick-Stewart-as-Professor-X calibre of perfect.
Speed Racer isn’t a movie for people who are expecting a real movie. It’s a movie for people who want to see a cartoon exploding all over their brains. It’s a movie I’d watch over and over again and again like Godzilla Final Wars, which is my current movie of choice for when I need a dose of instant awesome.
Speed Racer made me all happy and giddy. I’d see it again any time.
Posted by Skrud at Sunday, July 31st 2005 at 2:49am
The Place Promised in Our Early Days (雲のむこう、約束の場所) was a bit of a weird one. I can’t really tell you what I liked or didn’t like about it - and I can’t decide whether or not I liked the movie as a whole. The first half of the movie was entirely normal. As normal as I could possibly imagine. It was still interesting, but didn’t offer anything particularly special. This does have the effect of placing increased emphasis on the unusual things that are to follow.
The story takes place in an “alternate” history setting following WWII, where the island of Hokkaido is separated from Japan and is called “Ezo” (I think). There is a weird, impossibly tall tower that extends from Ezo and this piques the curiosity of two young boys who build a plane to try and reach it. Most of the movie follows their lives as they build the plane over their summer vacation, until the necessary female falls into a coma and then their paths diverge. Once the suspense had gained a critcial mass of momentum, as pieces of the story’s puzzle fall into place and the greater weirdness is revealed, The Place Promised in Our Early Days starts to feel triumphant and powerful.
So in the end I enjoyed it a lot, despite some mixed feelings I had initially.
Posted by Skrud at Monday, November 29th 2004 at 6:35pm
I haven’t blogged about anime in a while. So I’m overdue. You may have read about Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien before when I blogged about it. You may also know that it is one of my all time favourite anime series: dramatic, depressing and entertaining all at once. I was also on the verge of total insanity waiting for the last episode to come out. The series kept me unbelievably hooked despite the romantic/tragic subject matter. And before you go all calling me a girl and stuff, KimiNozo is based on an H-Game. A really popular H-Game that has had novels and spin-offs and all-ages non-sexual versions produced, but that’s besides the point. It’s main target is definitely the male audience. (By the way, the fact that my computer’s hostname is “mitsuki” is because she is named after a character in this show.) In fact my main motivation for wanting to learn Japanese to a workable level was to play through the KimiNozo and Akane Maniax games.The genre is closer to Seinen than anything else. Either way I highly recommend it… but back to the point…
There has a been a spinoff series in the making, based off the spinoff game, Akane Maniax. Why a spinoff game? Well Akane is one character in the original KimiNozo series that became unbelievably popular for no real reason. She’s not a main character, she’s just everyone’s favourite character. She’s totally awesome, and her popularity reached the point where an entire spinoff game was made. To my great joy the spinoff game was made into a spinoff series, which was released in Japan on DVD starting this week. And the fansub came out today (by the great and wonderful people of Lunar Fansubs whose subs of KimiNozo are still my favourite). And the theme song is done by Kuribayashi Minami, who happens to be my favourite JPop singer…
So needless to say I had sshed into my computer at home to have BitTorrent grab the first episode of the OAV so that I could watch it as soon as I get home. Oh yeah. :)
Posted by Skrud at Monday, November 22nd 2004 at 11:19am
Japanese people are completely insane. At least that’s my theory. And to further back me up, it seems a new phenomenon has developed on Futaba Channel where there exist various cute anime personifications [wikipedia article] of various Operating Systems. To sum it up briefly, it all started when Windows Me was bad, and so she became personified as Me-tan, a mischievous little girl that causes an incredible amount of problems. The rest of the characters soon followed, with the Windows girls often protrayed as sisters. They also have their own personalities and proportions. For example RAM usage is protrayed as breast-size. Windows XP is stacked. While MS-DOS is very shy, because she’s always there just lurking hidden in the corners somewhere. What does scare me, but doesn’t surprise me in the least, is the sheer abundance of hot lesbian XP on 2k action (edit: if only I could link to the picture, but they don’t allow direct links)… and the fact that there are multitudinous H-Games already. While Linux-tan is usually portrayed as a girl with GNU horns on her KDE-Sprocket helmey, with a Gnome-footprint patch on her dress and holding a flags of GCC, GRUB, and LILO. I did not expect to ever come across a three-penised Tux (edit: they don’t allow direct links, but you probably didn’t want to see it anyway :P) with each wang labelled “Portage”, “dpkg”, and “rpm” respectively. I’m not configured for a particular reaction to this startling, shocking imagery. (Although the Windows girls are often sexually assaulted by tentacled bugs… ehehehehehe). I’m confused.
What’s even more awesome are all the comics (called Troubled Windows) and Doujinshi (fan-made comics) that exist for all of it. The scale is simply unbelievable, as there’s even an entire con for this already and I’ve seen various reports of an anime as well. And a few interesting blog posts as well. I think this is simultaneously the coolest and the weirdest thing ever.
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, August 26th 2004 at 8:05am
So I haven’t blogged in awhile… really, there’s nothing worthwhile to say, so I’ll say it anyway… Lately I’ve been up to absolutely nothing. I went to a couple of birthday celebrations (fun!) and thoroughly enjoyed myself at Au Dragon Rough (a medeval themed restaurant – hey! that would’ve been something to blog about)… But now I decided I should back into blogging, as school is starting soon and I’ll need to be using this space for random outbursts of frustration. That’s what blogging is for, if you ask me… (And randomness, we all love that).
<p>On the anime front, I watched <a href="http://kasshin.net:2000/kuraki/">K-Fans</a> fansub of <a href="http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=3455">Re:Cutie Honey</a> OAV and was totally blown away. Imagine, if you will, a combination of the cheesy 60’s Batman & Robin TV Show, Samurai Jack / Spy Groove, and something completely and insanely Japanese in the 70’s, and then shove it all into trash compactor and crush all of those into a little cube, and then take the cube and smash yourself in the head with it, you will begin to imagine the awe-inspiring awesomeness of this <span class="caps">OAV</span>. It is essentially a parallel to the <a href="http://skrud.net/index.php?p=195">live-action movie</a> (more like an alternate telling) and it is simply incredible.</p>
<p>Back to my point, I’ve been reading the <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/">Camel Book</a> which I’ve finally acquired form the Concordia library and am thoroughly enjoying both its humour and it’s usefulness. In the past couple of weeks I’ve written more small (and extremely useful) programs in perl than I have in any other language. It basically takes the power of “professional” languages like C and combines it with the intuition of shell scripting. It is at once both simple and elegant and dirty and hacky. I’m having so much fun using Perl :)</p>
<p>Oh, and for those of you that really care (I know – no one does), the <span class="caps">IRC</span> channel is back: #skrud@irc.rizon.net. Why rizon.net? Because that’s where all those anime music channels are located. (And that’s where I usually am, leeching and serving… unfortunately due to firewall issues and <a href="http://www.xchat.org">X-Chat’s</a> lack of a “dccserver” command, as well as <a href="http://tuxserver.sf.net">TuxServe</a> (despite being an <strong>excellent</strong> script) lacking a firewall workaround (see aforementioned dccserver lack) I need to run mIRC (blech) through <a href="http://www.winehq.com"><span class="caps">WINE</span></a> in order to serve).</p>
<p>I’ve also been reading a lot of books. Remind me to blog about those later.</p>
