I had never heard of Romanov Higa or of his ROMANoV Films before. His previous claims to fame, Urda and TANK S.W.A.T. 01, neither of which I never heard of, were largely panned by reviewers. Ridian, in a review on AnimeNfo, said that Urda, among other problems, suffered from "the rather cheap and cheesy writing". Romanov Higa's latest film released on December 2006 on the web, Catblue: Dynamite, still holds this quality. But this time, that cheesy writing actually added to the full effect of this 40 minute film featuring a blue-haired catgirl who can wield three guns at once; Catblue: Dynamite was heavily influenced by 70s exploitation films. Though I haven't seen many of those myself, I did show Catblue to a few friends who are big fans of those types of films, and they were amazed. Everything in this cell-shaded CG animation, the 70s muscle cars, the amateur English voice acting, the very well used disco music, came together into what became a highly entertaining, if a bit shallow, action-thriller movie.

Warning: Extreme fanboy gushing ahead!

The following is the initial review for the first episode of Makoto Shinkai's Byousoku 5 Centimeters that I wrote on AnimeNfo with images inserted and some minor changes and edits to fit a more permanent format, as I will update the review on AnimeNfo when I see the rest of the movie. I'll most likely do a complete review of the full movie on this site.

On with the review!

When watching anime, sometimes I find learning about different aspects of Japanese society to be quite interesting.

As a kid, I always had a fascination with space. And not the fiction space (like Star Wars), but real life human efforts to go to outer space. Sputnik, NASA, the moon missions, the Voyager probes, the space shuttles, EVA, zero and low gravity environments, etc. As I grew up, this fascination slowly faded away (while the school system tried to mold me into the perfect citizen...).