Seems reasonable to mention here that the only Japantoon blog worth paying attention to is Colony Drop. They've a new thing on Shirow, latter-day abuser of digital specular lighting, and someone mentioned Appleseed a few posts back, so.
Thanks Brooks, both interesting and slightly depressing. I love Shirow's early/mid career stuff, particularly Appleseed, but the anime has never ceased to disapoint.
As for Shirow's later efforts, the less said the better.
@stormy when talking of his later anime do you mean stuff like Ghost Hound and Real Drive? I never did get around to watching them.
Everyone knows his recent manga efforts are just porn now. Really odd looking digital hentai. The computer hath taken away all the beauty and charm from his hand drawn work.
First episode was ok. Second episode i'm enjoying much more seeing the kid spiral into a psychopath. Or embracing what was there anyway. Working from 5pm so shall continue from then.
The wonderful Tekkonkinkreet made me want to check out the manga that it was based on, so I started reading Black and White today. Read the first three books so far and it's great.Â
The two young street urchins have quickly become two of my favourite characters in the world of Japtoons. Well worth checking out.
Yeah thats always the issue, thing is once you DO get past episode 4 (i had the same problem) it very very quickly becomes one of the best things youve ever seen and the first 4 episodes become excellent retroactively. Its an impossibly good show, just really hard to survive long enough for it to start making sense unless you're determined
It hit its stride around episode 3 and from then on and it had those mysterious hooks lodged in me. I laughed (Maniwa's fantastical interrogation was fantastic), got sad (The Ikaris) and even quite creeped out in certain places (when the real Shonen Bat appears in the police cells).
I quite enjoyed trying to figure out what each episode was a commentary on and what Satoshi Kon or the episode writer were trying to convey. Particular highlight was the suicide pact episode. Fan-fooking tastic. On the subject -
Spoiler:
so all three of them were dead by the episodes end? Were they dead from the start or did it happen during one of their "attempts"?
My only complaint is it goes a bit OTT in the last two episodes. But you can't have a go at the Japanese for that. That's what they do.
Also bittersweet and not fun is watching something like that then finding out Satoshi Kon is DEAD.
I'm not sure the dream/visual metaphory-ness of the closing episodes was strictly necessary though it did help keep things tonally dramatic I suppose, and wasn't entirely out of place given the unreal nature of the major antagonist.
(Though as a side-thing, I'm wary as fuck of the Existential Breakdown Ending trope in J-toons these days, easily inserted when shonky writing's afoot to confound the execution of tidier finales.)
Commentary-wise it all mostly comes down to "Japan today is kinda fucked up!", and because very little in Jap pop cultural channels goes there so particularly and so well as a compelling piece of entertainment too, it's a valuable show. Kon's best I think.
Hopefully Dreaming Machine'll manage to get itself completed hence.
A few of the sites I used have closed recently, but these are still active; utw.me (UTW Fansubs), animesfree.com, janime.tv, gorgeousanime.com, and bestanimes.net.Â
Manga can be found at; mangareader.net and ourmanga.com.
I'm not sure about the forum's policy regarding posting links to streaming sites, so I erred on the side of caution. They should be pretty easy to find though.
Good stuff. I like the 'How Anime is Made' episode with Maromi introducing all the guys making his toon. I can only speculate but I can imagine Japtoons doing that stuff for real so it felt nice.