March 10, 2013

Brief Hiatus

By cenimoran

You few elusive readers of this blog may have noticed that I haven’t been posting very frequently in the last few months. I have been very busy lately, a fact that is unfortunately to the detriment of my other activities. I have decided to take a 2.5 month hiatus to finish up my coursework for this term; come the beginning of June, I will begin posting weekly once again. Thank you for having read my thoughts and ideas thus far, and I hope that I may provide far more interesting and original content in the future.

Michael Stevens

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February 12, 2013

BLK Limited Edition Art Book Review

By cenimoran

I promise that this is the last art book review in a while, but I think any fan of anime will be pleased with this particular product. I (connoisseur of Japanese culture that I am) certainly was.

Huke (stylized as “huke”) is the Japanese artist behind such works as Black Rock Shooter and Steins;Gate. BLK Limited Edition Art Book is the first anthology that has been released of his work. As of this post, the regular edition will run you about $70 on Amazon. The limited edition costs about $120 or a little more, and comes with a figma action figure.

The art book itself is a beauty. It’s a fairly tall and wide book, mostly black on the outside as the name would suggest. The dust jacket features a Black Rock Shooter picture on one side and an image from Steins;Gate on the other. The actual cover is almost unadorned.

BLK - Huke Art Book Front Cover

Here’s the front cover.

Part of what I love so much about this art book is how it cuts to the chase. It is the absolute antithesis of something like Type-Moon’s 10th Anniversary Phantasm, which I reviewed in my last post. While the text of the art book is in Japanese, there is so little of it that English speakers will be practically unaffected. The entire book is filled with nice, big, beautifully created and printed pictures. It looks wonderful, and would make an excellent coffee table book for even non-anime fans to look at. 

The first section of the book is dedicated to Black Rock Shooter; you even get an image of the figma included in the limited edition to ogle, if you so choose. The second section is filled with Steins;Gate pictures. The color palette in the second part is much brighter, as is the content in general. You’ll find a few bikini and maid pictures in the Steins;Gate section along with the more serious entries.

The third section is filled with miscellaneous images. There are quite a few pictures of soldiers and some girls that look as though they belong in Black Rock Shooter. There is one bloody image that has been censored, though I can’t tell if that is somehow part of the artist’s statement or the result of executive meddling. Following this miscellaneous section is an index of all the images in the book.

Overall, it is my kind of art and my kind of art book. Huke’s style is dark and wistful, and the way that BLK is presented only serves to draw out his talent. The only complaint that a fan might have is the lack of identification for each picture.

The figma action figure that comes with the limited edition is quite nice as well. For those of you who don’t know, figma has been leading the market in high-quality Japanese action figures for a while now. This particular figma is a depiction of Black Rock Shooter, and comes with many small, interchangeable parts. It is pointy, and while durable by the standards of action figures, unsuited to all but the most mature of children. Black Rock Shooter’s sword has a bunch of manufacturer text on the back that isn’t the most pleasant, but otherwise she will make a fine addition to any collection. Even the box that the figma comes in is nice enough to be preserved. I personally prefer immobile PVC figures, but BRS’ stand and flexible joints will allow you to pose her in all manner of ways if that is your wish.

BLK and its figma are undoubtedly very well made; the real question is whether they are worth the money to you. I would recommend that any fan of Black Rock Shooter, Steins;Gate, or dark, whimsical art in general at least get the regular edition. More dedicated fans may wish to invest in the limited edition so as to get the figma.

 

 

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January 21, 2013

Type-Moon 10th Anniversary Phantasm Review

By cenimoran

Sorry for the long wait between posts. Type-Moon, the company behind some of my favorite franchises (The Garden of Sinners, Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero) recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. As such it released an art book compiling images, comics, and interviews from several of its shows: Type-Moon 10th Anniversary Phantasm. The book is available for around $70 on Amazon, and at more or less comparable prices at other sites like J-List. This is an import, and you will find it shipping directly from Japan at most online vendors. And, as a consequence, the entire book (barring the cover and those random bits of English interspersed within) is in Japanese. Normally this isn’t a problem for most art books, but as 10th Anniversary Phantasm is quite the grab-bag of content, it will adversely affect those who aren’t proficient in reading Japanese.

IMG_0384

The art book, naturally, reads from right to left. It comes with a nice dust jacket; the actual cover depicts, in amusing fashion, chibi versions of many Type-Moon characters. The first chunk of the book is dedicated to about 97 (by my count) nice pictures from various franchises, in no particular order that I can discern. Each picture has a little line of text (mostly in Japanese) giving its date and origin. There’s quite a variety of stories represented, from Canaan to Fate/Unlimited Codes and even the yet-to-be-released Girls’ Work. The trade-off is that each franchise only gets a few pictures, but Saber fans are in luck: she appears in so many iterations of the Fate series that you will find plenty of pictures centering on her here.

The second section, titled “Pieces of Type-Moon,” basically summarizes the stories of these franchises. The text will be incomprehensible to those who don’t speak Japanese, but even English-speakers can appreciate the neatly laid out charts and images in this section. The next section shares the results (which are hardly surprising) of a character popularity contest. Following this is a long section, titled “Creators and Voice Actors of Type-Moon,” which contains long interviews with eleven people (including Kinoko Nasu, the mastermind behind Type-Moon) and shorter profiles of many other members of the staff. Then there are a few pages showing a bunch of the merchandise that Type-Moon has produced over the last decade, enabling fans like myself to bemoan how much cool stuff we have missed out on buying over the years. That, or how empty our wallets are because we have bought these wonderful items.

Following this is a series of ten images of Saber, drawn in quite the variety of art styles. Then you have a “gender-bender” section where the artists of Type-Moon draw, yes, alternate versions of (mostly minor) characters. The rest of the book is an interesting mixture. There are more large pictures, images of merchandise (including several posters), a string of comics, and then…well, the book devolves into je ne sais quoi. If you wanted to read about what Type-Moon has posted on Twitter, here is your chance. But it ends well, with more comics and a “preview” of what Type-Moon will be working on for the next ten years.

The devoted anime fan has so much to buy! I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this art (or “material”) book over, say, the Blu-ray version of Fate/Stay Night, but if you have money to burn, then go for it. 10th Anniversary Phantasm will be a delight for the Japanese-speaker, and it still contains plenty of content for those of us stuck speaking English.

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January 9, 2013

Maoyu Episode 1 Review

By cenimoran

The winter 2013 anime season is lurching into gear, and frankly the pickings don’t look all that great to me. You have the poorly titled “Mangirl!”; “Encouragement of Climb,” a show about…mountain climbing; a comedy title called “Cuticle Detective” that I will stay far away from; and other assorted cutesy or idiotic shows. Of course, some fine anime like Shin Sekai Yori and standbys like Naruto Shippuden are continuing into the new season, but I want a little freshness–in more ways than one. Is there any anime willing to shed the clichés of its genre and warm a jaded fan’s heart?

“Maoyu” seems up to the challenge. The title of the series is a little strange, but with my limited knowledge of Japanese I would guess that it fuses “demon king” (mao_ o_) and “hero” (yu_sha). This fantasy series premiered on Crunchyroll on the 4th of January and is available here. To be honest, the episode title is also odd: “You will be mine, Hero. I refuse!” This at least seems to show that Maoyu won’t take itself too seriously.

The episode begins with some straightforward narration about a war between humans and demons. A band of human heroes has pushed into the demon realm, but their leader (THE hero) separates from his comrades to go fight the Demon King alone. Surprise, surprise, he discovers that the Demon King is actually a young, attractive red-haired woman and that the war isn’t what it seems to be. It’s one step towards tearing down genre conventions, albeit a very small one. I don’t think such a revelation would catch anyone off guard so early into the series.

Maoyu: The Demon King

The Demon King. Terrifying. Simply terrifying.

The main characters bear some mention here. The Demon King is two things: very crimson and very busty. I’ve watched hundreds of anime, and through that time have seen plenty of ridiculously well-endowed female characters. That said, I just didn’t expect to find something like that here; it prevents me from taking her character as seriously as I could have. If Asuna from Sword Art Online had been jiggling every five seconds, for example, the series would have lost a lot of its emotional impact. The Demon King’s personality appears fairly tolerable, however: she is a bit naïve, but determined to see the world. She immediately displays intense affection for the Hero and has apparently been expecting his arrival for a long time. By the end of the episode they are basically married. Oh, and her horns come off, making her completely indistinguishable from a human.

“Hero” himself is, well, a generic fantasy hero. I don’t like his character design. Something about those brown eyes irritates me, but his personality also seems tolerable. If the intro and various scene shifts throughout the episode serve as clues, Maoyu will have a fairly large and diverse cast of characters. Juggling so many can be hard without plenty of time to work with them, but we shall see how the writers do. Those characters that I did notice seem fairly hackneyed as far as anime goes, the three witches in particular.

Maoyu: The Hero

The Hero. I don’t know if he’ll ever get a regular name.

The intro is a standard J-Pop song with all of the usual imagery highlighting various characters. The ending is much more exotic: a slow-paced song reliant on ambient sounds and ethereal vocals, similar to the ending of The Last Exile. It plays alongside images of what appear to be a book of fairy tales or something similar, depicting characters from the series. This is what gives me hope that Maoyu can manage to throw in some serious fantasy as well as romance and comedy. The episode makes mention of some economic and social factors that could be interesting to see as well.

The animation is very nice. Character designs are standard, but the backgrounds look like marvelous watercolors (at least in some scenes).

Overall, Maoyu starts out trying to throw a wrench in the traditional “hero versus great evil” fantasy plot but is already being weighed down by stereotypes. I would at least recommend taking a look at the first episode. The series, if executed well, has a lot of potential.

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December 31, 2012

“Girl, Illustrated” Review

By cenimoran

If you’re looking for an art book containing a broad range of bishoujo (“pretty girl”) characters from various artists, there seem to be two good options: Girl, Illustrated: Japanese Manga, Anime, and Video Game Characters, and 100 Masters of Bishoujo Painting. The former is going at a reasonable 20 USD on Amazon right now; 100 Masters is rarer and more expensive, probably costing you at least 50 USD. As far as I can tell from my internet browsings the two books are very similar, but for now I only own Girl, Illustrated and will focus on that in this review.

The book is about 10 by 7 inches and comes in softcover with a dust jacket.  The book’s actual cover is a simple green and white. The picture on the dust jacket (which is included inside) should give you some idea as to the maturity of the content. With so many pictures (around 500) from so many artists (about 100), you are bound to run into some images that are more risqué. By the broad standards of anime the images are fairly mild, but you might want to take a closer look if, for whatever reason, you were considering getting this for a child.

Girl, Illustrated Front Cover

Here’s the dust jacket.

The art book is written in both Japanese and English. This makes it an excellent tool for those learning Japanese, as the text contains a good mix of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. I noticed a few typos, and the translation into English generally seems more literal–some entries were difficult to understand. That said, these errors are minor compared to the book as a whole. Far more annoying is the fact that a big space is inserted after each apostrophe (like this: I can’   t). No doubt a quirk of the font they used, but it becomes distracting after a while.

The first 37 pages of the book contain (besides the table of contents and an introduction) a section detailing the ways that bishoujo characters have been used to revitalize regional economies. This includes a few interviews and several pictures as well. It’s an interesting topic to read about, but it seems out of place in the book as a whole. I wish that, if the creators truly wanted to add in a broader range of information about this art style, they had added additional informative sections. That would have helped to break up the rest of the book a bit.

The variety of pictures is quite large and divided by the artist. Each section (two pages per artist) includes a little table with name/pseudonym, some general information like age and gender, email, “comments,” and the source of their inspiration. The comments section is what proves hard to understand at points, and for many artists it seems to boil down to: “I do _____ style/genre of art right now and want to broaden my horizons into _____ style.” Not that that’s a bad thing, but it seems as though the artists were provided with too little space to convey anything meaningful. Some have nothing at all to say.

I watch a lot of anime and have several art books, but to be honest I rarely pay attention to the artists involved. As such, perhaps it’s no surprise that I fail to recognize many of the names in this book. The main artists that I was familiar with were associated with Key (of Clannad fame). There aren’t any well-known characters that I can see either (except for one Clannad picture, I think); if you want more familiar works, Heroes and Heroines: Japanese Video Game and Animation Illustration is a better choice. Overall, however, the works in Girl, Illustrated are well drawn and interesting to study at length.

As my art book collection steadily grows, I am always on the lookout for new buys. Post any recommendations or general comments below and I will surely reply.

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