trailer

Pale Birthday

Nick — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:05:37 -0500

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.

Here's the trailer of Yoshiura's new film, Eve no Jikan (Time of Eve; I've also seen it titled Are you enjoying the time of EVE?):

I do agree with Wabi Sabi; the visuals and atmosphere in this trailer energize the Makoto Shinkai fanboy in me. I do hope the film delivers on that, too. I see info that it's been released, but I haven't been able to score a copy of it anywhere.

And here's the English dub version for Aquatic Language.

UPDATE: Got an email from CDJapan that my order shipped yesterday, June 8, 2008 (On a Sunday?), and my previous order took 10 days from when they emailed me the shipment notice to when it arrived at my house. I'll probably will be getting Pale Cocoon next week, though the email claimed 4-12 days delivery.

Interview with Tekkon Kinkreet's Director

Nick — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:02:05 -0500

One of the biggest things that intrigued me about Tekkon Kinkreet is not just the reception it already received in Japan, nor the fact that it was produced by Studio 4ºC (Though that is the major reason I first took notice of this movie), but the fact that it was directed by an American. A rookie American director, at that. Though Micheal Arias has lived in Japan for 15 years and has worked with Studio 4ºC in the past on projects like the Animatrix, this is the time a westerner was at the helm of a Japanese animated feature.

And, more importantly, AniPages Daily has an excellent interview with the man! There's also information after the interview about the premier of the movie in New York City on April 25-30 for those who are in the area.

There's some very interesting tidbits in there, like that the original script was written in English from the English and French translations of Taiyo Matsumoto's manga, Black & White. But most telling of all was when this statement:

At one point I shopped the project around Hollywood and, though everyone liked the pilot, I got some very strange suggestions: change White to a girl, make the characters older and make the story a romance, etc.

I guess the biggest reason I'm excited about seeing an American directing a Japanese animated film is that I know that American artists and writers can just be a creative and imaginative as their Japanese counterparts can be, but the American business world seems to have a culture of telling designers and creators how to design and create instead of letting them do their jobs.

Well, I'm getting off-track here. In any case, Tekkon Kinkreet is on my "must see" list. And make sure you give that interview of Micheal Arias a read-through.

Here's the Japanese trailer for the movie (A Youtube link, as the embedding option was disabled for this video).

And here's what looks like the 4-minute CG pilot for the film:

I can't wait to see this film in full!

UPDATE: Here's another trailer:

Byousoku 5 Centimeter premier and The Place Promised in Our Early Days image gallery!

Nick — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 02:01:28 -0600

Well, according to the Makoto Shinkai Fan Web (Who performs the wonderful service of translating tidbits from the official Byousoku 5 Centimeter site for us English-speaking Shinkai fans), the final edit of Shinkai's upcoming film had been completed sometime before this previous Tuesday (Jan. 23, 2007) and that it will premiere at the Cinema Rise theater in Tokyo in March 2007! Heck yeah I'm excited!

Check out the screenshots that I've captured from the high-definition preview trailer! You can also download the trailers themselves from the official site, and you can also find subtitled version if you look around (I.E., search on YouTube . I would do it for you, but YouTube was down for maintenance when I was writing this entry...).

As an added bonus, I've gotten my hands on a 720p version of Shinkai's The Place Promised in Our Early Days and took a lot of screenshots of that one! Check out the massive gallery! Hopefully, these don't spoil the story of the movie, but they should showcase Makoto Shinkai's animation style. Though seeing it in motion is something else...

I'll be cropping out more headers from those images in the near future, that's for sure!

Satoshi Kon interview and Paprika trailer

Nick — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 09:11:00 -0600

Thanks to Don from "beware the kawaii" for these links!

Excessive reality

Here's an interview with Satoshi Kon.

You can watch an English-language trailer for Paprika here. (Click on "Bande annonce," then select "VO.")

I'll have to comment on this later. Back to work!

New Byousoku 5 Centimeter Trailer

Nick — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 13:14:09 -0600

Another trailer for Makoto Shinkai's new movie trilogy, Byousoku 5 Centimeter, is available! I've been a big fan of Makoto Shinkai since I first saw Voices of a Distant Star and She and Her Cat, and I loved his first feature film The Place Promised in Our Early Days. I can't wait to see his new movie!

Thanks to the Anime News Network for announcing this.

Update:

The high-definition version of the new preview trailer is not available any more. You can still get the smaller stream versions of the preview trailer and the stream versions and the high-definition versions of the original 40-second teaser trailer.

A New Movie by Satoshi Kon?

Nick — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:47:04 -0600

Woah! I can't believe I missed this post on Anime News Network about that Paprika May Contend for an Oscar! Paprika is a Japanese animated movie that's directed by the venerable Satoshi Kon , one of my most favorite directors in anime (Second only to Makoto Shinkai) and I'm pretty excited to see what he comes up with here!

For those interested, here's a Trailer for Paprika from Sony Entertainment.