Holiday Shopping 2009
This is really just my end-of-year media batch ordering. Hopefully the weaker retail condition in Japan this year will result in bonus bucks in the bank after all is said and done. (CDJ referral links incoming–)
Macross Frontier Galaxy Tour Final in Budokan BD - If you want a taste of how epic Tanabata Sonic is, this is probably as close as it gets. On the other hand, it captures only about a third of how awesome Tanabata Sonic was. It pains for to not being able to get a video recording of that, so this is a consolation prize. Divine from Random Curiosity has a detail breakdown of the DVD rip of this. By the way, it streets today.
Bakemonogatari 4 SE BD - Kana Hanezawa is simply my top newbie seiyuu pick. Yes Toyosaki is quite entertaining all around, but she doesn’t do anything for me. Also, somebody screwed up episode 10. Did I tell you how much I hate Aniplex for making the OP singles available only via the BD/DVD specials?
Nana Mizuki Live Diamond x Fever BD - It comes with a poster if you order from the right places. That probably doesn’t include Amazon Japan (which is where you should be buying all this from, IMO) and it definitely includes CD Japan. But what the hey, Live Diamond is the first Japanese big show I attended and I’m sure it’s worthy of some commemorative purchase. The problem still comes down to “will someone please frame them for me“? And “have I purchased enough commemorative goods already”? By the way, I still have a copy of Tanabata Sonic program book, spanking new.
In terms of music, I am always some sort of a KOTOKO fan. In recent months/year I’ve kind of fallen off the track, but it’s always my hope that I’ve Sound will take their vocalists far outside of Japan. Their music has enough traction to do so I think, as cheesy as they can be at times. At any rate, there’s no reason to not support KOTOKO’s anime tie-in. Her new CD isn’t too bad either.
If I had to pick an anison artist to highlight this year, it would be Marble. They really broke out 2 years ago and since then they’ve been rolling. I really like their new sound (in contrast of their more indie days). Their latest CD is a charm, and I don’t know why I haven’t gotten it yet. Their last “new” album is praise-worthy as well. It also doesn’t help that I pretty much watched every show they had a song for…
I mentioned it previously, so to update, the Makoto Shinkai tribute CD (or better put, the TENMON x EMINENCE CD) is listed now for preorder. I think it will be available also via Eminence’s online store, so that would be the smart place to buy it if you’re in Australia. I might wait a bit until Eminence announces their sales plans first, who knows… Oh, there’s more detail about the CD via zzeroparticle, with a list of the arrangers involved with the project. It’s interesting to say the least and there will be more info coming down the pipe soon.
Since it’s the end-of-year batch buy, ALL CLAMP Calendar 2010 is going to be the weapon of choice for 2010. I’m really wary of those Megami-ish, A2, 7-page calendars, even if they’re easy on the eyes and don’t make life complicated. Well, I guess I am still a CLAMP fanboy on the inside, on some level. It doesn’t help if every other year, they put out some art project that looks like a calendar. This one is probably a straight-up desk calendar however.
Man, that’s a lot of crap. I guess that strong yen is going to be a killer, huh. This is probably not even all of it. And I need to figure out how to order all this stuff…
N-list Self-Diagnostics
Mentioned here via Ani-note–basically, your favorite anime say something about you. No brainer. But it’s fun. And I’m in the mood to write some no-brainers.
As corollary, any kind of list which exercises the arbitrary selection process (eligible for copyright?) is probably saying more about the entity that makes the list than the list itself. Which is to say most top-n-entity survey lists are pretty dumb because it’s put together by a mob of people. Or it’s probably worth pointing out that your #2-5s say more about you than your #1!
I’m due to redo my top-10 lists anyways, so here’s a glimpse.
Personal favorites:
- Nadesico (Mainly just the TV show)
- Magic Knight Rayearth (Season 1 mostly)
- Excel Saga (Possibly the only Nabeshin show I truly loved)
- Millennium Actress (It formed a personal connection with me)
- Cowboy Bebop (It’s here because it’s an easy pick, and it includes the film, surely)
Even as I say this, only #1 and occasionally #3 pop into my mind from time to time. #5 comes in a lot in the context of Yoko Kanno, and while it has some mainstream appeal, it’s the only timeless context that is relevant to me on any sort of day-to-day basis. Because I would rather it look like:
- Manabi Straight
- Utena
- FLCL
- Simoun
- RahXehpon
I suspect if I didn’t watch anime in the 90s, it would have looked a lot more like that. Well, wait, I might have dropped RahXephon and FLCL because those shows work more powerfully if you have context in terms of other anime you have seen, although they are both quite potent by themselves.
There’s room for more play, for example, top 5 favorite anime films:
- Millennium Actress
- Utena the movie
- Whisper of the Heart
- Porco Rosso
- 5 Centimeters per Second
I think it’s sort of self-evident what kind of second-gen fan I am. Need more help? Favorite comedies:
- Full Metal Panic Fumoffu
- Excel Saga
- Karekano (This is more a glimpse of how I think of this show than any statement about Karekano being funny)
- Ebichu (Just had to)
- Azumana Daioh
Favorite artsy-housey tee vee (getting really specific here):
- Koi Kaze
- Haibane Renmei
- Yamamoto Yohko
- Witch Hunter Robin
- Earth Girl Arjuna
To-Heart and Hidamari Sketch would almost qualify…
And that’s a wrap. So much exhibitionist tendencies satisfied in one single post. Yea, I’m kind of not in a mood to write. It’s like I poured all my motivation into 3 tl;dr drafts talking about the same thing in three different ways, but I don’t feel comfortable posting them orz. Forgive me for boring you with a post that I normally wouldn’t do.
Sora no Manimani
This is the kind of anime I’d buy, but only if it’s something that doesn’t make me regret getting. As in, it’s good material to pick up on my next trip to Japan. In a Book-Off or something.
Then again, I think this has Miyuki Sawashiro’s most moe role this year, and the DVD-only episode is suppose to be a nice cap to that side story. I hope they go beyond the prequel material. It’s not likely to disappoint.
So why Sora no Manimani? It’s a show that promotes astronomy along with this group-feel-good plot where people’s relatively trivial problems (for the most part) pop up and is subsequently dealt with. If there was anything that irked me, it was the episode where this character has to handle extreme temperatures. I mean, people do not behave like this when they’re freezing.
Oh, it’s somewhat educational too. The home-brew planetarium episode, for example. Or Saturn.
Sphere’s opening theme song grows on you, for sure. And too bad, I didn’t know any fansubbers who credited their members along with their astrological signs. That would be the way to go, because everyone who got credited in the show had their signs showing.
On another seiyuu note, Sora no Manimani scores yet another decent Haruka Tomatsu supporting role. I’m still honed in on her in Asura Cryin’ but this is a nice diversion. Unfortunately, Saori Hayami’s Sayo-senpai didn’t really stand out, which might be appropriate if at all notable.
Overall, it’s a cute but forgettable series that will at least play with your emotional chords. I should just watch everything gofu draws. It’s not a bad guide to what’s worth watching if all you can do is 3-4 shows per season.
For more reading:
- Hinano approaches from the relationship angle and is accordingly disappointed. Note that the manga is ongoing, and the last episode even says as much about asking the mangaka to…well.
- EO from THAT has an approach similar to mine, but what scored was Oumi taking it almost all. the. way. OAV please! I guess the same applies with RP.
- But you can’t beat it when it’s personal.
- And practical.
The Anime Infomercial
This post is about me talking about things I don’t really know, but it all came together and made sense anyways. It’s the kind of information that some industry insiders take for granted and don’t explain anywhere, but obviously I am not one so I can only say so much, with probably a low level of confidence. But at any rate, I hope the conclusions draw themselves so I don’t have to pop some rhetorical questions. Wait, who am I kidding–
The discussion originated from digitalboy’s post about context and late-night anime consumptive mode(s). There are a variety of issues that the post covered, but during the subsequent comments and meta-comments, JP (who works for some television media conglomerate) outlined the following. See below, repeated, with some added notes. Also please note that this post diverges from the main points made in digitalboy’s posts so you can probably ignore that.
[A]merican tv setup: cartoon network pays twentieth television/fuzzy door productions X dollars for the syndication rights to air each episode of family guy Y times over Z years. They pay for this because those 11pm airings get good viewership. Tv licensing contracts almost always define an exhibition as airing a title/episode a certain number of times in a day. so if the deal says cartoon network can air each episode of family guy say, 36 times over 3 years, it really means they can air each episode more like 108 times over 3 years. by running that 3am slot, it costs them nothing and hell, based on the audience maybe the ad rates are better than if they were just running BILLY MAYS HERE FOR OXYCLEAN
[J]apanese tv setup: schoolgirl milky crisis production company pays specific UHF stations X dollars to buy Y weeks of airtime at 3am. Unlike cartoon network, these are local stations. If you don’t live in an ever-dwindling area of japan, these will not air on your tv, period. [Less so the case nowadays.] so you can’t even “be up randomly at 2am and turn on the tv and see it”. some shows buy ad time on cable/satellite stations, rather than UHF stations, but the MSO [short for cable companies] penetration in japan is MUCH lower than in america (less than 20% in japan!) so that is not an equal comparison. [Not that it matters, but the factoid is.]
[I]n the cartoon network scenario, fox has made their money, and cartoon network really only has the opportunity costs of airing something else in that slot to lose. In the schoolgirl milky crisis scenario, terebi kanagawa got their money, but schoolgirl milky crisis production company has everything to lose because they still need to make money on this somehow!
First I apologize for framing a fairly casual illustration in a serious manner (wait, this blog is not SRSBZNS, but w/e). It is definitely out of context (some). So let’s just focus the meat of it–the nature of television station running programs that it finds profitable.
BILLY MAYS HERE FOR OXYCLEAN is coincidentally capitalized, and for good reason–it is key to understanding. The reference points to infomercials, which stands in for paid programming in the general sense of the term, not just for straight advertisement. The point is, really, late night anime in Japan is generally paid programming. Speaking personally I don’t quite know the totality and full implication of what a committee-owned-and-produced anime production means until I had the time to piece all of it together the past couple years. Generally a production group is made up of a handful of companies–holding companies investing in the show, merchandising companies, publishers and record labels and media companies, and TV companies. That’s not really unusual. But the purpose of this conglomerate is to produce an advertisement. This is why they would pay TV companies to air the stuff–so people would watch it, and buy the stuff related to the thing they saw. This is contrary to the other types of shows (that we’re more familiar with) in which a (usually smaller) group produces content, and then sells TV syndication rights to broadcast companies, and these TV stations make their money back from the ad revenue.
Basically, when your favorite anime studio gets hired to put out something, they’re guns for hire. It’s a bit like when EA pumps out some shovel-ware game based on a movie, except it’s a tad backwards chronologically. The realization singlehandedly answers questions like “why manga is usuallyalways better?” and “why are there so relatively few original anime?” It also answers why anime caters to niches of niches, like moe. And why non-pornographic eroge adaptations exists.
The corollaries come thus (and some links that are good reads):
If paid programming in the form of anime is where it’s at then what are the alternatives? Do nobody in Japan watch late-night TV? (That is not porn?) I mean, I sort of wish there’s some write-up on the business end of channels like Animax or AT-X, which are the two premium cable/satellite TV channel that have a ton of the “late night” anime content.
Reading about late night anime on Wikipedia, the second question is also natural: If paid programming fill gaps where viewership numbers are too low to support purely ad-based programming for TV stations, why are these viewership numbers high enough to support this kind of brokered programming? I mean how much money can UHF anime bring in? So why do they produce it? I guess between AT-X and Animax there are a lot of late night TV anime that people enjoy, so one reason is simply that TV companies are serious investors of this stuff, for some kind of added value beyond the business mechanism that was described above. Also, that Square-Enix manga thing that was posted recently explains a lot as well, in that anime works quite well as ads for manga. I’m not sure if any particular Square-Enix title typifies the late night anime profile (Kuroshitsuji?) but the points on Saki and comedies are well taken.
This is a problem with “mainstream” complaints about content, for obvious reasons I guess. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, maybe that’s for the best.
The late night anime article goes as far as to say that this method of anime broadcasting is partly why direct-to-video anime is on the down low, because the effect of distributing anime via paid programming is similar in terms of overall risk. Risk in a simple sense is determined as function of a cost in production or in losses and a probability of realizing that loss. While how profitable an anime is doesn’t drastically increase no matter what time slot you air it in (but it could decrease) as that’s a qualitative measure (crap anime is crap amirite), the risk decreases if:
- you split the cost between different people, so hopefully nobody is left holding the bag and gets knocked out.
- you lower the cost by limiting exposure–late night paid-for slots, etc. And as implied by the wiki article, it also lowers the number of sponsors you need to split the cost effectively.
- you target a niche to produce for, and reduce the need for $$$ super fancy visuals and long development cycles, etc.
- …and there are other stuff you could do.
But of course, in the end people still have to buy their Strike Witches or Bakemonogatari DVD/BD to make the paid programming analog to direct-to-video work, at least for publishers of anime. (Also that doesn’t mean anything to adult anime since you can’t really broadcast that.) It’s just that invariably people will also buy the other merchandise, too.
On the flip side, because financial risk is low, the financial burden from creative risk taking is also low logically. By the same token, that would foster more creative diversity in late night anime. That also allows some bad shows to achieve some economic feasibility. But to me, failure is mother to success, right? I think we can’t have great anime without crap at the same time.
There is probably going to be a follow up to this post, so I guess stay tuned.
Time of Eve Writing Contest
Yug’s cafe is not the Time of Eve!
I ended up not deviating much from the original–
In trying to answer the question, I thought of some ideas of what the Time of Eve cafe could be. At first I thought it is like an online BBS where people can ignore their identities (even at time obvious) and see each other eye to eye. The cafe also could be a bar, like American TV show “Cheers” or the manga “Bartender”; Nagi is a bartender. A colorful cast of characters come together in the story, despite their conflicts and affiliations. The interaction between them is fun to watch and a highlight of the show.
At the same time, the cafe is a figurative Petri dish, a social experiment. Both the special rules regarding treating androids equally and the automatic door that lock or unlock on pre-determined rules seemed purposeful beyond protection of privacy of the cafe’s patrons. Some of the scenes during the episode looked as if recorded from a surveillance camera from inside the cafe, adding a third-person perspective.
Still, if I had to pick a single answer, I’d say the cafe is a home. For Rikuo and Masaki, the cafe is where they can be true to themselves, ironically something they can’t do at home. When we think of a home, we think of a place where we feel we belong, that shelters us from the elements–both weather and society. The Time of Eve cafe shelters Rikuo and Masaki from the pressures of social norms and allowed them to explore their curiosities and past troubles. It seemed fair that while the cafe isolated Rikuo and Masaki from pressure, Masaki and Rikuo also did their part to follow the rules of the cafe and in the end, protect their way of life within the cafe from outside influences.
Just a reminder–the contest ends November 1. Read all about it here.
Before there were blogs and net pundits, there were the usual audience-creator interaction. Like, you could mail in a postcard saying something, or a survey or some such. We know the Japanese do this (Excel Saga episode 2 anyone?) but there’s little to nothing like that for us gaijin types. I mean, a legal way to simulcast stuff really opens this door, don’t you think? I hope some marketing people really take advantage of this, it could be a good idea.
