Bleach - Memories of Nobody in June

Via ANN.

The first Bleach movie will be playing in 300 theatres around the country on June 11 and 12. The event will include an interview with Noriyuki Abe, as well as a look at the movie’s talent. On the site there’s supposed to be a way to search for theaters in your area. It wasn’t working for me, so the complete list of theaters can be found by clicking here.

I’ll probably give the movie a shot if I find I’m not doing anything that weekend. I think Bleach is an okay series, and it’s not every day I get to see anime on a huge screen. I haven’t been keeping up with the series, but it’s a story disjointed from the series, so that’s fine. But, I think I’m supposed to be traveling up to northern Ohio for a boating trip. How about you readers? Did you already buy your tickets, are you thinking about going, or is Bleach just not for you? Post your thoughts, comments, and observations, but keep it civil please.

Anime Punch 2008 Whose Line

So after working myself to death for two days cutting and converting the video feed, I’ve finally finished. It’s… a whole month after the convention. Better late than never I suppose. The Acen videos shouldn’t take nearly as long to do since I’ll be living in the house with the cameras in a few weeks. Anyway, you can click the playlist link to go directly to the list, or you can click after the break for individual links, snapshots, and game overviews.

Playlist Link

Evangelion 1.01 - You Are (not) Alone

I finally watched it over this past weekend with a bunch of friends, so now I’m going to take the opportunity to review it. For those not in the know, Gainax decided to redo all of Evangelion as four theatrical works. This is the first one, which covers episodes one through six, or in terms of angels, three through five. As for what angels are, they want to kill us, so we kill them back. That’s the most cursory explanation I can give, you’ll figure out their motivation much later. Now, onwards!

Batman Anime Movie Thing

I was watching Appleseed:Ex Machina today, and ondvd was an ad for what is to be the link between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  An anime movie to be released July 8th.

Well, sort of.  It’s actually a compilation of six shorts by six different directors.

Yasuhiro Aoki (Mind Game)
Futoshi Higashide (Air)
Toshiyuki Kubooka (Nadia, Gunbuster)
Hiroshi Morioka (Tsubasa)
Shoujirou Nishimi(Mind Game and Case Closed)

and

Jong-Sik Nam (He-Man: Masters of the Universe)

And I the only one who thinks one of these doesn’t belong?

It’s similar to the Animatrix released a few years back. At first when I heard about this, I was stunned. Now that’s it sunk in, it’s a very intriguing concept. A popular American figure being featured in Japanese animation, it’s an interesting mix.

And it looks fantastic for the most part. I preferred the trailer on the dvd, but here’s the ‘official’ one.

http://www.warnervideo.com/batmangothamknight/

FUNimation possibly licenses Gunslinger Girl Il ~Teatrino~

ANN reports that FUNimation has another mystery license announcement up their sleeve. It will be made official tomorrow, but for now we get a teaser silhouette of the lead character. Hmmmm… who could it be?

ANN: Mamotte! Lollipop licensed by Funimation

Funimation has announced that they have acquired the rights to the Mamotte! Lollipop anime, which they’re retitling Save Me! Lollipop. According to Japanator, it’s been set for a single box-set release for the end of 2008.

My regular readers might be wondering, “CJ-chi, why are you blogging this? Don’t you have spring anime to be covering? Why are you talking about a shoujo anime that you don’t care about? Heck, you don’t even know anyone else who likes it.”

Precisely. Pre-freaking-cisely.

Acen Pre-report

Horrah Chicago!  Acen’s schedule of live programming has recently been posted. Here’s the direct link to the PDF . Of course, all things are subject to change about a million times like every other convention out there, but it’ll give you some idea of what’s going on.

I’ll take this time to plug the show I work on, Whose Line is it Anime. This is our fourth year running at conventions and our third at Acen. It’ll be running on Saturday from 9:30~11:30 PM in Exhibit Hall 1. We’ve been told our room capacity is 700, and last year we had a line that was easily in excess of 1000, so line up a bit early. You can find videos of some of our past shows on Youtube, and I’ve recently jacked the AP videos from Ben’s Mac, so those should be uploaded within the week. I’ll make a post when I’m done. It promises to be a fun time and it’s NOT running against Your Favorite Anime Sucks this year, so if you’re reading this, come to the show.

xxxholic kei episode 4+5

So finally catching up with episode 4+5. I have better coverage of 5, somehow. 

Mother’s Day the anime way

I’m quite tickled by this. While everyone in real life should hug and thank his or her mom today, in the anime world we get to celebrate the maternal beauties and how they’re still awesome despite not having magical powers or dedicated plotlines (and some actually do). So how many can I list…

Chii’s Sweet Home - cute kitty anime!

If you’re behind on this series like I’ve been, it’s terribly easy to catch up, since each episode is just under three minutes long. I assume it airs either as part of a variety show or in-between longer programs. Anyway, here is a good series you can enjoy without a lot of time commitment … possibly learning a bit of Japanese along the way … and just gush at how cute it is.