No, Alexander Nevsky does not return as a magical girl

First Squad: the Moment of Truth is a Russian-written Studio 4C production.

Nazi sorcerors conjure the Teutonic Knights, bringing them back from the dead to reprise “the battle on the ice” in the service of Hitler’s push to the east, and Soviet Intelligence’s Psychic Squad (their most valued remaining agent: 17-year-old Nadya) scrambles to thwart their plan applying the immortal principles of Dialectical Immaterialism.

The film is presented as a quasi-documentary, alternating animated story flashbacks with interviews of live-action talking heads presenting Russian and German veterans, psychologists, and historians all talking about “The moment of truth” portrayed in the film.

No Heroine of the People is complete without her samurai sword nor her Young Pioneer bandana

All the dialogue is in Russian (except for some of the German veterans), all the animated dialogue (including the Germans) is in Russian.

It’s a good deal better-than-B-movie, but not really first quality — it’s not up to Studio 4C’s high standards (though it would do a lesser studio proud). The acting is a bit wooden, the film is exposition heavy (the talking heads are okay, but also the animated actors spend a good deal of time bringing one another up to speed — Nadya is blessed with shell-concussion-induced amnesia). I thought the action scenes were quite good, and there were several individual scenes that were outstanding (Nadya’s vision among the soldiers at the front; the climactic moment).

Newsreel footage

At one point Nadya’s comrades go on an amusement-park-ride through her subconscious.  This must have looked great as the staff conferred over the storyboards, but it comes off a bit cheesy in the actual film. Nadya’s own visit to the theater of the subconscious is much more successful.

There's plenty of room left for a sequel

Update (9 Oct):
Somehow, I missed this review by PSGels, who also liked it.

After years of having the book on my shelf (and having a scanlation on my hard-drive), I finally read Hayao Miyazaki’s Shuna no tabi (Shuna’s Journey).

Shuna is the prototype for many Miyazaki heroes and heroines

It is the tale of a the prince of a small impoverished country. One day a traveller appears, and, dying, tells the story of a rich grain that grows in a land far to the West. In the weeks that follow, Shuna can think of nothing else but finding this grain and returning with it to benefit his people.

...and images from this early story found their way into Miyazaki's later films

...or into Goro Miyazaki's Wizard of Earthsea

As Shuna travels west, he encounters different people in a desperate world — full of slave-traders and cannibals.

Ashitaka, er Shuna, encounters a strange old man who tells him of gods in the West

Shuna encounters a proud slave-girl, and cannot bear to see her enslaved. He frees her and her sister, they flee, parting company at the border to the land of the gods, with a promise to meet again in the North.

Shuna climbs down into the “land of the gods”, and steals the grain, fleeing in desperation, forced to abandon both his gun and his knife. He wanders in the wilderness, until Yakkul catches his scent on the wind, and rushes off with Thea to find him, mute, and mad.

It is a fine, melancholy story, inspired by a Tibetan folk-tale. This picture-book format is a good one for Miyazaki. It’s something of a shame that he hasn’t used it more.

The book was written in the early 80s — around the same time as Miyazaki was starting work on Nausicaa. You can see echoes of Nausicaa in the landscapes and costumes, but you’ll also see echos of Shuna in many of Studio Ghibli’s works — images from this book could have been used to storyboard bits of both Princess Mononoke and Wizard of Earthsea.

With ISBN-10: 4196695108 or ISBN-13: 978-4196695103, it’s available from
from Amazon.co.jp, and is well worth adding to your collection, especially since it costs a mere 470 Yen. The images reproduced here are taken from the “Scum Scans” scanlation. This, and other scanlations are readily found using a search engine.

Watch Aquatic Language now!

Time of Eve comes to an end (at least a temporary one) with a double-length broadcast centering not on Rikuo, Sammy, nor Nagi, but on Rikuo’s robot-averse friend Masaki.

Masaki finds THX in the Time of Eve cafe

There have been hints that something like this was coming — notably in “Nameless” when we caught a brief glimpse of THX (“Tex”) standing in the shadows of Masaki’s home.  (You all know where the initials THX come from, don’t you?)

Many of the episodes of this wonderful series have captured the spirit of Asimov’s original robot stories in wrestling with surprising implications of Asimov’s iconic Three Laws of Robotics.  It’s like math, really, the way so much lovely complexity arises from the interplay of three simple axioms.  This episode is no different.  Indeed, this episode is Asimov’s laws triumphant.

This sweet little series deserves to be placed among the best animated science fiction, with the way it tangles with the implications of androids, and the way it succeeds in packing an emotional punch.  Is there a Hugo for animated shorts?

Best actor of the year

This simple figure conveys a surprising amount of emotion with its gestures

We learn a great deal more about the time of the Time of Eve, with tantalyzing hints dropped about Nagi’s past and why she created the Time of Eve — but not enough.  The episode ends with a plethora of hints that we can look forward to more, and I certainly will — more in the world of Time of Eve or any other endeavor Yasuhiro Yoshiura and his Studio Rikka chooses to pursue.

Come back soon, Nagi.

A commenter over at Jason’s place pointed this out.

Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, episode 7, about 10:02

If the above doesn’t come out as an animated gif, try here.

Text slowed down a bit:

What. outta money after moving to a new office?!
Gotta cut corners to make a profit. huh!?
Your production costs are the same but other companies are selling a lot better!
You really can’t pull this off at the same time as Ghostory, can you!
The pictures aren’t moving! You can’t even call this animation!
The anime industry’s collapsing!

Update: And, two seconds into the much-maligned episode 10 of Bakemonogatari:

Bakemonogatariapology

Or maybe that should be “Araraginko”.

In the maligned episode 10 of Bakemonogatari, at about 7:57 in the episode, Mushishi fans can hear that familiar three chord descent on the piano, interweaved with a jazzy tune (Mushishi meets Brubeck’s Time Out), as they’re ascending the steps to the shrine once more.

I'd already been thinking that Araragi's one-eyed look reminded me of Ginko

Oshinbo may have the mushi-mastery, but Araragi is the one who keeps trying to solve people’s supernaturally-induced problems.

(Updated 9 Sep 2009, see below.)

Bakemonogatari 9 started and I thought I’d stumbled on a lost episode of Mushishi

I walked ten thousand miles, ten thousand miles to see you...

(sometimes that’s an animated gif of the opening few seconds of the episode, if not, here’s a link to something that might work better.)

This episode (the first of the Nadeko Snake arc) was a visual feast — from the bamboo as Araragi and Suruga climb to the shrine…

And every gasp of breath I grabbed at just to find you....

I climbed up every hill to get to you, I wondered ancient lands to hold just you.

…to the bibliophile-pandering bookstore porn

Bookstore porn

Until we discover that Koyomi still has some vampire left in him, since he doesn’t cast a reflection in the glossy floor:

Oh baby, lay some literature on me.

It’s a busy time (as hinted at by the frequency of posts), but there’s always time for Bakemonogatari. Shinbou visuals plus Nisioisin’s playful otaku-fest dialogue leads to some of the best anime in quite a while.

Update (8 Sep 2009): the jury is still out about this image:

Stylized beauty or crude collage?

I think the use of color and light here is wonderful.  The composition of the image — the way the curve of the stairs and the light on the right draw your eye to the two figures (and the countless steps beyond them) is nicely done.  But the bamboo are strips of litmus paper with chalk marks!  This is okay stylishness on the left — where the bamboo ends are concealed in grass, but on the right, the bamboo just ends (though the glowing light distracted me in an artistic sleight of hand, so I didn’t notice it until it was pointed out to me).  The color composition of this image really appeals to me, but I really wish I hadn’t noticed the bottoms of the bamboo on the right.

Yummy Take cover art

When I first read the description of NisiOisin’s Zaregoto:

It’s the vacation of a lifetime, a trip to a remote island filled with geniuses – and murder.

On Wet Crow’s Feather Island, a tiny speck in the Sea of Japan, lives Akagami Iria, the exiled daughter of a powerful family. Born into great wealth, she was a princess of the highest pedigree – until she was cut off by the leader of the Akagami Foundation. For the last five years, she’s lived on Feather Island with her maids. But she hasn’t been alone. She has invited the best minds Japan has to offer to come and stay with her.

And so 19-year-old college student Ii-chan and his best friend, computer genius Kunagisa Tomo, find themselves as Iria’s guests at her elaborate mansion. Surrounded by fascinating women – a chef, a fortune-teller, a scholar, and an artist, not to mention his own friend Tomo – Ii-chan is feeling a little overmatched intellectually. But the sudden discovery of a grisly murder sends the island into shock. Ii-chan discovers that he does possess a bit of genius: the ability to discover what is real and what is fake… who is who they claim to be – and who is a killer.

I wasn’t particularly excited.  “Oh, a locked-room mystery on an isolated island, how uncontrived”.  Not even Andrew Cunningham clearly plumping for it and Omo being cryptic was enough to interest me.

But then I got hooked on NisiOisin’s Bakemonogatari with it’s odd characters and their odd monologues, and grew hungry for more.

Well, if you’re looking for a hit of that Bakemonogatari magic, this is a good place to look.  Once again you have your nebbish narrator surrounded by weird women with the ability to spin words into webs of fascination.  NisiOisin actually manages to make his characters’ supposed genius at least credible (even if they do take a bit long to seize on the post hoc).

And, hey, it’s a pretty decent mystery.  Even better: there’s a twist to the solution that even eludes the main character, delivered with the sort of punch fans of Bakemonogatari are accustomed to.

The only bad thing is that Del Rey doesn’t seem to plan to bring the second volume of the series out until June of next year.  Give them encouragement.  Go buy it.

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!

Story: Dude in art club carves a women out of a tree. Comes to life. Is one of the local gods. Is relatively powerless etc. You’re probably familiar with the story from the show.  My only real comment is that, like many other manga of this type, the minor characters deserve their own spin off series where they can be zany without having to deal with the lame main character.

Art: Pretty modern Moe style. It’s solid, but not particularly daring.

Ease of Reading: Fairly Easy: furigana + conversational vocab make a pretty simple read.

Other comments: Alright, so, if you’ve never read a magical girlfriend/comedy/drama series, you’ll love this manga. On the other hand, I’ve already read AMG, so there’s nothing really new here, other than the humor, which, I must note, is done remarkably well. The problem is the same as the problem with every other comedy/drama anywhere, and that’s that the balance between plot and comedy is impossible to keep, and, so, sooner or later, you end up with a drama series with an occasional funny chapter. Kannagi his this point at about volume 4. Nevertheless, the humor remains strong, so, if you’re willing to slog through the story, I’d give it a look-see.

Story: Lawrance lives in a world which is more or less in the high middle ages, with the Renaissance soon to come. He’s a merchant, and makes his living trading from his cart, which wanders from town to town. After various circumstances, he and Horo, and immortal wolf-god, begin to head north, so that Horo can return home, and Lawrance can make a buck.

Art: Realistic without becoming overwhelming. I approve, even if Horo is a little on the Moe Checklist side.

Ease of Reading: Non-trivial: Especially the economics bits.

Other comments: I really like this series. Lawrance is a solid hero, walking the fine line between moronic heroism and selfish bastardy. He’s not the epic slayer of dragons. He’s not the brilliant and powerful magus. He’s a dude with a cart and a sharp mind. A kind, open-minded dude with a cart, but a human nevertheless. SaW is much better in manga form due to the reasonable explanations of economic content (well, at least from my broken japanese, it seemed solid).

Story: Hyper-loli magic ninjas battle evil and understand the meaning of friendship or some shit. I can’t really be arsed to care.

Art: OH GOD. THE HORROR. So, aspiring artist-types out there, take note. If you decide to have a cast of bizarrely proportioned magical loli ninjas, please do not make their heads giant spheroids, upon which you throw their eyes as far apart as possible. Moreover, do not have them inhabit a world of people with normal, adult, human proportions. It makes things hella-creepy.

Ease of Reading: Easy: Furigana + simple vocab are your only friends.

Other comments: I’ve mentioned this before, but I really need people to unload shit on. I’d sell at a 90% discount if it would mean that I was able to get these things out of my room, so no-one could ever see the bad decisions I’ve made, purchasing wise. If you ask me why I bought it: it looked vaguely okama-esque from the tiny picture on amazon, and it was recommended by the same service. Amazon reccomendation service, you are not invited to my birthday party.

Story: Midori  is an Akiba electronics nerd.  She frequents one of the few remaining electrical equipment retailers in the district, you know, like Radio Shack, except less worthless, builds various devices and generally does her thing. Then she gets a call from her childhood friend, Suzu, who moved away when she was very young. Turns out she’s in Akiba too! But she’s a maid! At a maid cafe! and she’s clumsy! But she has a heart of gold! And she’s moved in right across the way! Hijinks Ensue!

Art: Alright, so, let’s say you have a friend who wants to become a famous cartoonist. He’s decided that those manga-thingies are popular, so he wants to add some elements from that into his work. He wants you to explain what makes up the modern manga style. Show him this book.

Ease of Reading: Fairly Easy: I have a little trouble with the electronics terminology, but it’s not actually in there that much.

Other comments: This series is profoundly average unless the conditions above apply to you.

Title: Nemurubaka

Story: Well, there’s really not a lot to the story. It’s about a girl, and her friend. They’re both broke, and live in a tiny apartment. The heroine is stuck in a dead-end job at a bookstore with an obnoxious art-snob who hits on her, while her friend is a struggling musician who seems to be unable to turn her band into anything that even smells like a career. It’s about learning when and where to compromise, and when to stand your ground. I liked it.

Art: Workmanlike. Panels aren’t filled with much details, and the character designs are relatively iconic. It’s not really what the manga is about. The only exception was the weird scene on the beach, with the bizarre monster-y-things.

Ease of Reading: Fairly Easy: No furigana, but conversational vocab, mostly.

Other comments: There are a couple of minor things that show up and are hilarious, most notably, the moe-navi.

Title: Megalomania

Story: Magical detectives in a future where human/animal hybrids are a persistent underclass. It’s nothing special, story-wise

Art: If One Piece and Full Metal Alchemist had a baby, which then had a baby with that one other series which has the dude with the giant hand and the girl with the boots that ran in SJ, it’d look like this. Well, it would. If comics could procreate. But they can’t. Which is a relief, because otherwise I’d have a bigger problem with storage than I already do. And we’d live in a horrible hellscape as reality broke down around our ears, but the storage thing would be annoying too.

Ease of Reading: Easy- This is a step up from Yotsuba, but it’s on one of those medieval staircases where all the stairs are really close together.

Other comments: Meh. It’s like a paper towel. You understand what it’s for, but it’s disposable and you don’t form any sort of attachment to it.

Title: Kyo Musume

Story: There’s a very large (you know something that has always weirded me out? The fact that I’m taller than most of the HUGE DUDES in manga with heights like 190 cm. Wooooo genetics!) woman named Jyo. She works in a Yakitori stand. She’s rude, violent, and basically a font of endless violence and suffering. She hangs out with a bunch of chumps who have the combined sense God gave a mayfly. She also has a boyfriend, who is tiny, quiet, shy, and polite. Together, they aren’t quite Wyld Stallions, but they do make for ynsane comedei.

Art: Bad. It’s part of the charm though. It’s like underground comics from the sixties. They’re drawn like that because they’re about REAL LIFE, well, real life of bizzare people who are endlessly neurotic and whose lives are like a train-wreck in slow motion. THIS IS THAT TRAIN-WRECK! Except not in the sixties. And with less focus on R. Crumb’s ass fetish. Seriously!

Ease of Reading: Non-trivial. The text isn’t hard, but there’s a lot of it. Scrawled between the margins. It’s full of hilarity, but you have to dig for it!

Other comments: I think this was published in 07ish, so the lack of a second volume has me curious. It’s not like the manga, you know, actually ended at the end of the volume.

(Artbook) Reiborhood: Like guns? Like Black Lagoon? Like sexy pictures of girls with guns? Whoa man, dude has you covered. If you’re not a warped violence enthusiast, there’s much less (read: nothing) here. I’m not really fit to comment more on the art etc. So, whatev.

To Conclude: BANZAI! I’LL-A SEE YOU IN-A HELL!

Yeah, that's it for now

Aaron Copland’s Rodeo animated by Eleanor Stewart

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?

The creators of Shangri-la actually try to account for the problems.  We see the prisoners exploiting the corruption of some guards; the inmates stage a fight, creating a plausible cover-story that a potential weapon is to be used to get revenge against another prisoner; we see the components for the escape being assembled from parts we can understand — alchohol distilled from fermented orange juice, hydrogen generated by an alchohol-catalyzed reaction — the hydrogen was introduced in an earlier episode as fueling explosions used in the logging operations; we see a vital component tossed from Kuniko’s window and discovered lying in the dirt by one of the prisoners.  There are lots of significant looks and exchanges that only make sense once you see all the pieces put together. The only “luck” involved may be the timely arrival of the ice-shrapnel storm.  Even that is accounted for: Kuniko sighs that the “weather prediction was right, for once”, when it arrives.

I imagine this episode actually works in the novel (which is not something I expect is true of Allison and Lillia).

On screen it still adds up to being disappointingly unbelievable. What tries to be a plot built by MacGuyver feels like it was built by Rube Goldberg, instead.

Update: The one thing I will say in its favor: paradoxically, the more I think about it, the better it looks: the mis-direction worked on me as well as the prison-guards, I suppose.  It’s just that first impressions count for a lot (moreover, the escape is followed by a few happy coincidences that are poorly timed to win this viewer’s sympathy).  This series has shown signs of being very subtle and clever, this time I think it was too clever by half.

Update update: PSGels keeps the faith, I think with some justification.  As I said in comments there, it’s possible that, in the context of the entire series, this episode will come to seem less contrived than one’s original impression leads one to think.