Nick's Anime Weblog

Though I've seen some quick write-ups from some lucky bastardspeople who got to see (and meet) Makoto Shinkai at the BFI in London, Martin was another of those lucky bastardspersons who got to even shake his hand and wrote about the experience at Nakama Britannica.

A new member at Cherry Blossoms Falling1 had pointed out an interview of Makoto Shinkai on the Electric Sheep Magazine site, the first I've seen since Shinkai released his Five Centimeters Per Second last year.

What interested me most was the real reason Shinkai did without color in Other Worlds and She and Her Cat:

1. 1. Please ignore the banner there. If you don't know what I mean by that, don't worry about it...

I just watched this documentory titled THE RISE AND FALL OF ANIME FANSUBS. Here you go:

PART 1

More parts and my opinions after the cut.

Well, this is very promising:

And so is this.

Wabi Sabi's post on the trailer of Yasuhiro Yoshiura's Time of Eve reminded me to search for a DVD of Yoshiura's earlier works. And found it I did on CDJapan. The R2 DVD does come with English subtitles (and Aquatic Language on the DVD comes with English dubbing) and I have a region-free DVD player, so no worries there.

So for a birthday present to myself (getting to the ancient age of 29 this Sunday), I decided to order the R2 DVD. Besides, I've liked Pale Cocoon enough that I feel I should at least own a real copy of it.

Martin has said everything I probably would have said about Pale Cocoon, so go there to read about it.

Looks like Don and Author have noticed NHK's AniKuri 15 shorts that have been floating around on Youtube lately. I have Makoto Shinkai's contribution, "Neko no Shuukai", linked to in an earlier post before I realized it was part of the AniKuri 15 collection. Someone else has contributions by Satoshi Kon, Micheal Arias, and Kazuto Nakazawa up.

I do have 1080p versions of 12 of the shorts that I have acquired a while back, but I do concur with Author:

Dear NHK, please sell us a DVD.

Please do, NHK!

Demon ChildI had finished The Twelve Kingdoms Volume Two: Sea of Wind novel a while back, and I have to say that I've enjoyed it1. Like most books, it goes further into Taiki's thoughts and experiences than the anime does. Too bad it doesn't have Takasato's experiences in modern Japan, which is told in Demon Child, the actual first book by Fuyumi Ono in the Twelve Kingdoms world before Ono was encouraged to build a fantasy world. Unfortunately, it looks like Demon Child was released by a different publisher than her other Twelve Kingdom novels, so it's likely Tokyopop was unable to license it. Fortunately, there are always fan translations2.

In other news, I did stumble on what would be a very good t-shirt...

1. 1. As expected
2. 2. Hey! That Prologue is very familiar after reading Sea of Wind.

Here's the new trailer directed by Makoto Shinkai for the game "ef - the latter tale", Music was composed by Tenmon.

I haven't gotten a chance to watch it yet. My internet connection is being very obtuse right now. Hopefully, it will clear up in the morning so I can actually watch the entire video.

(Heads up via Daike. He also has links to where you can download higher-quality WMVs, which is probably the route I'll try to watch this.)