Forum - View topicShelf Life - Neo Toyko
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JimmPantsu
Posts: 3 |
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Yeah, you could change the region setting but I use a programm so that I can use the BD drive for all BDs. So I can make reviews for my Blog.
It war really expansive but the Box is worth the Money^^ I was surprised that it was sold out so quick. |
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daveriley
Posts: 117 Location: Philadelphia |
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Man, people be hatin' on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. For my money, I'd take it over Summer Wars any day of the week. Summer Wars was a bit too heavy on the "ganbare! everyone band together!" attitude that Japan so loves. It messages, focusing on family values and put-your-nose to-the-grind-stone, fell completely flat to me. Summer Wars affected me pretty much not at all. That is maybe a reason to dislike it more than something that is actually bad.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time on the other hand, dude, I loved that movie! It might have something to do with "teen starts out as charming and irascible ne'er do well but eventually learns about personal responsibility" being my favorite plot of anything ever (see: FLCL). Makoto was completely charming. The guy in Summer Wars? The only character trait of his I remember is "good at math." But I do agree the ending of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was upsetting. The writing was so good up until that point and then they dumped like fifteen minutes of really hammy exposition on you. I don't think the ideas they were trying to convey were bad or too complicated, but man, you can't just have a character sit you down on a bench and go "here's the entire plot" unless you are watching a detective movie. I will always root for movies like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (In Japanese we call it A-Toki o Kakeru A-Shōjo(chan)), movies with a really small scale, concerned with a really small cast of characters, and -- personal bias -- starring a hyperactive teen who nobody gets. I remember what it was like to be a hyperactive teen who nobody gets! I don't remember what it was like to be a faceless and painfully shy math nerd with a wacky, outrageous family, so Summer Wars never had a chance. I really enjoy characters like Makoto because, about ten years too late, it says "you were not the only person who felt this way in high school." That's a feel-good moment way more satisfying than the largely faceless cast of Summer Wars hacking the Gibson. And if I had a time machine, hell yeah I would have done karaoke for six days straight. That was adorable! As for 2040, it's probably wasted effort to defend it, but, dude, at least it tried. The characters in the OVA have so little characterization that it could be considered negative characterization. The only person that has a character trait beyond "aerobics instructor" or "likes cake" is Priss, whose defining characteristic is "gets mad when people kill her friends, a event that happens with alarming regularity, so often that you probably should not be her friend, even if she bribes you with irresistible cake, NENE." Meanwhile, 2040 reaches for the brass ring, with plenty of Greek mythology references, and a super sweet microwave gun, and making Sylia completely insane, and one of those Aliens "THEY'RE ALREADY INSIDE THE ROOM" moments, and something called THE DRAGON LINE, a pretty cool mid-season reveal re: the hard suits, and that awesome part in the first episode where Priss descends upon a boomer as one would in a samurai movie. Plus it has a sweet episode about a dude who gets his brain transplanted into a robot and cuts a city-wide swathe of destruction trying to get home to see his wife. Yeah, it's got some pretty bad animation. So what? Nene's still terrible, yeah, but Priss and Sylia are ratcheted up enough to compensate. And I'm not hating on the original, obviously I like that show too, but it gets kind of old when Priss has to spend an entire episode killing the SECOND lesbian vampire robot. Oh! Before I forget: robot dinosaurs on the moon. Seems like a good enough place to end my screed. |
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Zin5ki
Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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As much as I enjoyed the original, I can only applaud the manner in which you have summarised it. |
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bravetailor
Posts: 817 |
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Finding a character "charming" is not a character trait, it's an opinion! To be honest, my big problem with Hosoda's protagonists is that they are always "average Joes/Jills." Yes, the guy in Summer Wars is good at math, but like you implied, he's just really ordinary in personality. Unfortunately, I also felt Makoto was pretty ordinary as well. "I'm a regular girl! I don't particularly excel at much, but I do have some friends and stuff! Look look, we're ordinary people. Just like most of YOU in the audience!" She's like that ordinary girl in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, where there's nothing particularly special about her and she has the most ORDINARY type of concerns and emotions. |
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Macron One
Posts: 151 Location: Netherlands |
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Hmmm.. while the series definitely uses a number of digital shots, based on the sheer amount of BGC 2040 production art that's out there (we're not talking a handful of post-production relizu here, but literally thousands upon thousands of handpainted production cels, some of them with the original matching BG) i'm inclined to believe that the series was primarily produced using cel animation. My own BGC 2040 cel is a handpainted two-layer image of Priss (or rather her back) and Leon, accompanied by a douga of Leon's eyes. It's a rather unattractive cel actually, which pretty much eliminates any possibilty of it being a fan cel or post-production cel, as those tend to be made based upon the most eyecatching snapshots from the series. Heck, just look at the volume of BGC 2040 production cels that can be found in celshops and cel collector's galleries alone. This kind of quantity is generally indicative of a mostly cel-animated production: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 |
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daveriley
Posts: 117 Location: Philadelphia |
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Re: Plain Jane protagonists, why shouldn't there be room for that in anime? The reason I liked the movie so much is because Makoto was immediately resonant with my experience. This is not the same reaction I have to shows like Cowboy Bebop or Golgo 13. Even though I love those shows I am not a space bounty hunter or an international assassin. I enjoy the extreme fantasy of those characters and I like the situations they get into, but that's not the only experience I want out of consuming any media, let alone just anime. Average people acting in the way average people do can be very profound. Which is maybe another reason to prefer Makoto over Math Guy and his family, a group composed entirely of badasses who are the pinnacles of their respective fields. |
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ashez2ashes
Posts: 44 |
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How could you watch One Piece and miss several main characters' backstories? That's a hugely important aspect of One Piece.
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erinfinnegan
ANN Columnist
Posts: 598 |
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I didn't miss them?
Well dog my cats.
I'm glad you piped in on this, as I was sure I'd heard Justin complaining about it. Also I can usually tell cell animation by the dust on the cells. Daryl's probably right, some episodes were digital, others may not have been. Any non-digital scenes would yield a lot of cells onto the collector's market.
Co-ed friendships aren't weird, but we are talking about a movie, and a lot of time relationships happen in movies in the course of two hours... In my personal experience as an adolescent, I had a lot of guy friends who I wouldn't want to date, but I did usually consider whether or not I would date them at one time or another. It seems Makoto has never considered dating anyone at all, or that her guy friends might be attracted to her as a lady. |
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