Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - YAS Hands
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doomydoomdoom
 Posts: 278 Location: Michigan, USA |
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Very nice look at YAS's (I had no idea that that's his "official" nickname lol) contributions to anime and his Jack-of-All-Trades work. I'm looking forward to reading Gundam: The Origin soon.
I had forgotten about Crusher Joe and Venus Wars, as well as the Jesus "biography". |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8459 Location: Penguinopolis |
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I thought Crusher Joe was kind of fun, but ultimately forgettable. If anything, I thought Venus Wars was better, even if the story was a bit sparse. And of course his work in Gundam is the primary Yas output. You can't really compare fluff like Crusher Joe to Gundam.
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Bamble
Posts: 130 |
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Love YAS's character designs too. Venus Wars was an early anime movie for me, so I'll always have a soft spot for it, despite some of the aforementioned narrative problems. It has a fantastically detailed care and attention to virtually each animation cel typical of high-budget bubble-era anime. An added bonus if you watch it in English is that you get some Peter Marinker!
I tried Arion, and while I thought it was wonderfully visually, I thought the story meandered a little. I can see why Venus Wars was chosen over Arion to get an official release back in the day.
Funny that both Gorg and Layzner both failed to materialize due to issues with the masters, that A) didn't seem to occur in Japan, and B) seemingly only came to light after it was clear Gundam '79 was failing HARD on TV... |
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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Disagree completely. Never had much use for his Gundam work but I quite liked Crusher Joe and Venus Wars is a very worthwhile if also deeply flawed movie. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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Maybe not so much the character designs, but I really took notice how "modern" Crusher Joe was looking in 1983 for all of the designs and background and definitely for the number of frames of animation. It's much closer to Do You Remember Love than to Arcadia of My Youth or Queen Millennia, despite it only being about a year between each. I think it's the prime example of more budget and more coalesced animation talent working its way into the industry. I feel the same way about Genma Taisen as well, which oddly came out the very same day as Joe. Even with that film's ridiculous story and progression, once you lay your eyes upon the unfortunately cropped BD, you can actually begin to appreciate the artistry. With so many older films coming out on BD, Joe's gotta have his number up soon; Arion's already out and it looks great. Speaking of BD:
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2541 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I saw Arion a few years back & I really loved it. Yeah, the plot was a bit hit-or-miss at times, I'm guessing YAS was intent on fitting the entire 5-volume manga story into a 2-hour movie, but it was simply such a great piece of animation to watch (plus, the Hisaishi music was excellent & the characters were really enjoyable). It's flawed, sure, but it's amazingly entertaining & I agree that it's shocking that it never saw release over here back in the 90s; it would have fit in perfectly with the times & would have been a great "first anime" for people.
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Anime World Order
 Posts: 389 Location: Florida |
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The ComicsOne release of the Jesus manga was interesting. It certainly did get released in its entirely 14 years ago in August of 2000, but unlike Joan it never actually made it to print. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because the entire series was done in color and each of the 2 volumes were over 200 pages long. Someone probably figured out they had no chance of selling enough copies to break even given the extra costs of color over black and white. They just figured that out right before going to the presses, it seems. So they put it up digitally at about $5 a volume in PDF format. YAS was actually the topic of discussion for our most recent podcast in which we reviewed Giant Gorg. Which, given that's now a month old, means I'd really try and remedy that now... |
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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No, Crusher Joe can be many things, but one thing it is not is to be forgettable (and this one really really really needs a license rescue). It is one of the greatest science fiction action movies of the 80's. And I'd say of the 90's as well. Venus Wars is not science fiction at all. It's more of a classical war movie set on future Venus. In my opinion Yas best works are not to be found in Gundam. Crusher Joe, Venus Wars, Arion (what an amazing movie this one is), Giant Gorg. They all eclipse his character designs in Gundam. Crusher Joe versus Gundam ? No doubt at all, Crusher Joe wins hands down. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Never heard of the Combattler V English dub before, so if it does exist it'll probably be very hard to find.
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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The italian edition of Venus Wars on Blu-ray is an absolutely magnificent looking transfer. Even if sourced from 16 mm film. I have the english Venus Wars dvd from Diskotek and while looking quite pretty for a dvd it can't hold a candle to the italian blu-ray. Unfortunately the blu-ray has only italian and japanese audio tracks. No english audio nor english subtitles. But for the price around 15 $ you can't go wrong. After all how many people watch raw animes ? If you're a real fan you simply cannot go wrong buying it. |
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Buster D
Posts: 81 |
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The Italian BD is also in 1080i50 so it has PAL speedup, but it was pretty easy to use the -slowdown option in eac3to to convert the video stream to 1080p23.976 without re-encoding and mux it with the audio from the LD (the US DVD audio will also work fine, I imagine). It only played back properly on my Oppo BD player and PC though, after some research it's not possible to fully convert an interlaced h264 stream to progressive without re-encoding.
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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It's not 50 i. It is 25 frames per second progressive. It is only encoded as 50 i which means each progressive frame is split in 2 (this process is nothing like the 2-3 pulldown of ntsc). But there are no interlacing artifacts since interlacing artifacts arise when combining half frames corresponding to different instants in time. There is no speedup in the italian audio track since it was recorded to be synced with the 25p video natively. As for the japanese track yes you can hear the speedup since it was originally synced to the NTSC 23.976 speed. While I don't know if the blu-ray will have problems playing on an american tv, it doesn't have any problems playing on a computer screen. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13549 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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That's sound a bit contradictory because you said it had its entire release done but didn't make it to print. |
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Buster D
Posts: 81 |
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You're correct in that it doesn't actually have any interlaced frames and looks great on a PC, but since Blu-ray doesn't directly support 1080p25, it had to be flagged as 1080i50 (similar to how 480p23.976 MPEG-2 could be flagged as interlaced on DVD). But even after slowing down the video to 1080p23.976, it still wasn't a fully Blu-ray compliant video stream. It says somewhere in the eac3to thread on doom9 that interlaced h264 can't be fully converted to progressive without re-encoding. |
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Frazmataz
 Posts: 103 Location: Sheffield, UK |
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I love Yasuhiko. Crusher Joe is possibly my favourite animated film, period. Gundam the Origin is probably my favourite comic. He brings an extraordinary level of dynamicism and intensity to his characters and storytelling that very few other animators or illustrators have acheived. He sets a high benchmark, one which I would be ecstatic to even get halfway torwards in my own artwork and storywriting (all in my spare time).
Thank you Mike for a wonderful article on this master of animation. |
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