Anime Review Roundup

MVM Line Up Nekomonogatari

You have to be quick off the mark with your licence announcements these days. You’d think that it would make sense to wait for Comicon at the end of the month, to make more of an event of it. But when Aniplex announce Nekomongatari (Black) in the US, and Hanabee announce it in Australia, there are fans impatient enough to push the import button straight away. So it is that MVM let loose their announcement that they too are releasing the prequel to Bakemonogatari, the Nekomonogatari (Black) series on DVD and Blu-ray on August 25th, and you can pre-order it now.

So What Else Do You Want With Patema Inverted Ultimate Edition?

Last week I noted that Anime Limited were going to launch a kickstarter this week to fund an Ultimate Edition of Patema Inverted. They needed £16,000 to get all the fancy packaging, do-dads, and extra features to make fans weep with delight at the shiny stuff that would ever after reside on their shelves. They set a month to raise the capital...

...

It took them five hours...

And some people say that UK anime fans only want their stuff cheap and cheerful! So now it’s the stretch goals. Open your wallets if you want truly limited edition art with your sets, and open them further if you want the soundtrack.

There is some bad news from them too, although that isn’t so bad, and it regards Gurren Lagann, which has slipped from its projected June release date to August at the latest.


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I wasn’t best pleased with the UK release of Penguindrum. What Kazé did to the title raised my ire so much that I actually went and bought the Australian Blu-ray out of spite. That’s without actually deciding if I really wanted the show or not, whether I was actually interested. But if I was going to judge the show, I wanted to judge it on its own merits, not through the haze of poor disc authoring and dismal presentation. Siren Visual’s Blu-ray release of Mawaru Penguindrum Part 1 may not be perfect, but at least I can measure the merits of Kunihiko Inuhara’s surreal comedy drama at face value. And beneath the visual metaphors and esoteric symbolism lies... well not a lot, really.




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For someone who said he’d never touch another Dragon Ball release again, my reticence didn’t last too long. But when the original Dragon Ball manga was created, it bore little resemblance to the universe shattering testosterone-fest that it would become by Dragon Ball Z. When it started, it was actually a comedy, a gag manga, with daft characters and silly situations. My hope was that the first Dragon Ball series would be a faithful adaptation of that manga. The only funny thing in Dragon Ball GT was Vegeta’s Village People moustache. There’s very little that isn’t funny about the original Dragon Ball Season 1. Click on the review to see why I’ll be happy to review Season 2 as well.



Siren Visual released Mawaru Penguindrum Part 1 on Region B Blu-ray last year, although they released a Complete Series Collection earlier this year too. Manga Entertainment’s Dragon Ball Season 1 is released today on DVD.

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