It’s been a week jam-packed with anime reviews, so much so that I don’t even have the time to tell you about Anime Limited releasing Aldnoah Zero on May 30th. My first review of last week was actually a re-review, as I took a second look at Love Live School Idol Project Season 1. It’s being re-released on DVD, and released for the first time on Blu-ray, this time with an English dub. The original collector’s edition DVD was a PAL sped-up affair with a couple of authoring issues. The dub and sub re-release is on NTSC discs without speed-up, important for a show about music, and it’s fixed those annoyances from the original release. I got to watch the show about a girl idol group coming together to save their high school, this time in English. Click on the review to see how I fared.
Sometimes a sentence or just a word can trigger unlikely connections in the mind, freewheeling associations that are influenced by past experience and memory. Ever since I watched A Letter to Momo, I’ve been afflicted by an earworm of the KLF, singing about the Justified Ancients of Momo. Momo isn’t ancient, although she’s certainly justified in blaming the odd occurrences around her on goblins, not that anyone believes her. In this family fantasy adventure movie, Momo and her mother move from the city to a backwater island community following the death of her father, and it’s there that she encounters three strange goblins.
Next up, it was Tsukimonogatari, yet another instalment of the long running Monogatari franchise that has been doing so well for MVM. It’s just the ticket if you like quirky animation, great characterisation, and a whole lot of wit and wordplay with your dialogue. This time around, it looks as if protagonist Koyomi Araragi is turning into a vampire, for real. There may be no way back for the recent high school graduate, but maybe he can get help from the deadpan homunculus Yotsugi. Click on the review to see how this adventure in the Monogatari saga fares.
Finally for the week, I watched Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie, which differentiates it from the other three Ghost in the Shell movies. This one isn’t just a spin-off from the most recent Ghost in the Shell Arise franchise, it actively concludes the story begun in those four OVAs, and continued in two further episodes that haven’t yet been released in the UK. It’s your typical cyberpunk procedural tale, with a hostage crisis gone wrong coinciding with the assassination of the Japanese Prime Minister, and a mysterious hacker behind it all. And for me, all isn’t fine and dandy in this iteration of the Masamune Shirow creation. Click on the review to see just why I’ve fallen out of love with Ghost in the Shell.
This Week I’ve Been Mostly Rewatching...
D. Gray Man. This is one of those ‘Last Chance Saloon’ titles for me, shows that I’ve seen a couple of times, and have been wholly lukewarm about, found a few points of enjoyment to keep me vaguely interested, but never enough to get me even halfway enthusiastic. So this is my last time watching D. Gray Man, before I give it up as a lost cause, and consign it to the wastepaper basket of history. It’s another long running shonen adventure show, in the same vein as Bleach, and Naruto. A nefarious character named the Millennium Earl is trying to end the world as we know it, by tempting the recently bereaved by promising to restore their dearly departed. Once they sign on the dotted line, he does this by calling their souls back to a cursed frame, and ordering the resurrected to kill and wear the bodies of their loved ones who were daft enough to agree to the deal, and he compels the resulting Akuma to hunt down and kill humans. All that stands between him and the end of the world are the Exorcists, warriors fuelled by the mystical power of Innocence.
This could have been a fantastic series, a great show, with its biblical overtones, its creepy as hell premise, and a steampunk Victorian setting that offered great prospects for gothic visuals and an inventive worldview. But I don’t think I’ll be revisiting D. Gray Man again, as its execution was exceedingly lame, with bland characters, the same tiresome story tropes, and failing to express its individuality strongly enough to stand alongside its stablemates such as Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. Here’s my review of the final collection. D. Gray Man was just too bland, and just too boring. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. As Funimation who released it in the US, got only half of the 100-odd episode run, and out of that fifty or so episodes, only the first two collections, 26 episodes got Blu-ray releases. Naturally Manga Entertainment in the UK stuck to DVD only, and again, they just released the same episodes that Funimation dubbed. However, someone is willing to give this franchise another chance, as a new series, D. Gray Man Hallow is currently being broadcast in Japan, a sequel to that original half-finished series. Anyway, six years since its release, the Complete Collection of D.Gray Man from Manga Entertainment is still available to buy, and it’s also streaming on FunimationNow.
All the Anime released A Letter to Momo on DVD and on Blu-ray/DVD Collector’s Edition on May 2nd. MVM will release Love Live S1 Collector’s Edition Blu-ray on May 16th, and they release the standard DVD that I reviewed on the same day. MVM will also release Tsukimonogatari on DVD and on Blu-ray on May 30th. Manga Entertainment release Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie today on Blu-ray and on DVD.
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