Nomad’s Super Awesome Manga Review Part The Nth: Buckaroo Banzai

By Nomad(There! Evil PURE AND SIMPLE by way of the Eighth Dimension!)Otto

I have a series of papers to write to justify my continued suckling of the public teat. They are due very soon. They require data which I have not yet fully collected/analyzed. They are very important and need to be super awesome in order that I might avoid teaching in the future. This means that my room and desk at the office have been made very clean, a great deal of boozahol has been consumed, many sci-fi/gangster  movies have been watched and a great many used book and record stores have been visited. Moreover, it means that some of the manga that’s been sitting around unread is being/has been read.  This is a review, or, rather a series of reviews. I would have more words, but they are currently being pressed into the service of SCIENCE! and my future conquest of both my own sanity and the pitiful nations of man. The pictures have been stolen by pixel elves, and I have no time or desire to travel to their kingdom to get them back. Now, Son of Jor-El: KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!

I may have seen this movie a couple of times, yes.

Eden of the West

Aaron Copland’s Rodeo animated by Eleanor Stewart

Shangri-la 8: Rube Goldberg, not MacGuyver

All the pieces are there, assembled by thumbs.

Update, one week later: This post starts out negative, as that was my first reaction to the episode.  Then as I thought about it more and more (as I wrote this post) I began to appreciate how the episode had been put together.  The end result was a complete reversal in my feelings, such that I think this episode is actually quite good.

I’ve tried to believe.  There’s been a lot that’s quite good about this overly-maligned series.  But really, this episode was almost bad enough to be worthy of the disappointing Allison and Lillia.

You can see that they’re trying.  The climax wasn’t a deus ex machina — we see all the bits of the machina being assembled, Macgyver-like, from things that have been introduced earlier in the series or in this episode, and it’s easy to see that something is going on.  There’s pleasure to be gained from seeing how all the clues we see will be put together.

Unfortunately, some of it requires prison-guards with an almost Imperial-Storm-Trooper-like inattention to detail, plus there’s a small coordination problem that is glossed over: how does solitarily-confined Kuniko communicate the plan she’d hatched, during her three-days of punishment, to her co-conspirators?

Eden of the East 6: Laughing Akira

I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes

How scary is it that all I had to do was type “I tho…” into the browser search-box, and its first suggestion was the quote I was looking for?

A wolf loves pork — further excursions in “anime”

It’s Japanese.  It’s animated.  Anime!  It could use more Horo, perhaps.

One of the reasons I love animation (of which anime is one form), it the inventiveness of the creators.  This film is an example of that.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Haruhi Suzumiya

The cover of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a novel

Don’t panic, Kyon.

I haven’t had so much fun since friends started babbling about this thing they’d seen called “The adventures of Asahina Mikuru”.

Ginkurya-chan

This is so wrong.

Undine Nakiami

Watch Xam'd now.

Late update: memes from the Megatokyo Anime Grand Prix, where Nakiami was (sadly) defeated, due to too little familiarity with her series (and the rallying cry became “Watch Xam’d now!”), and where Akari was in a match-up at the time of this posting.