Celebrating Makoto Shinkai with New Video Transfer?
I’m sure you’ve seen enough headlines about this, and the critical acclaims Shinkai gets with his works.
But I’m just pacing through CrunchyRoll’s Byousoku 5 Centimeters feed now, and funnily enough the speech-like pacing of Oukashou made streaming that 480p video casually easy. It gives you a lot of places to hit that pause button so your buffer can catch up. And take a lot of screen shots. Maybe I should post them tomorrow…[maybe I will even update this post.]
Reading the Anime News Network thread, some CR guy reported that they have a new transfer of the movie. That was enough to get me interested. Let alone the new Bang Zoom dub…I don’t even remember what ADV’s dub sounded like. I guess I can always try to sneak that in tomorrow. Sufficed to say the new dub isn’t bad; I watched it all dubbed. But I probably won’t again ever, chance to choose willing.
Of course, 5cm is as beautiful in every inch and every second as I remember it to be. I don’t get to stand up and walk up to my TV like I can with the Blu-Ray version of 5cm or Beyond the Clouds, but I’ll live. This is a great deal for free (as in beer) and free (as in speechregion).
Oh, I guess I still need to watch Beyond the Clouds on CR sometime within the next 18 hours. Yea, time’s running out. This particular version of 5cm will go away. 5PM PST was it?
Looks familiar? (Gosh, I think that old cap was from a DVD rip. I don’t remember. And don’t let this prettier image fool you, I think it just has fewer jpeg compression artifacts from being recompressed.)
I am definitely impressed by the supposedly new mastered video and audio(?) for 5cm. Enough to do this post. Granted, it’s still a streaming video so the bitrate can’t compare, but this is hands down the best quality video on CR that I’ve laid eyes on.
If you care about the supposed fesitivities, visit the Shinkai Day HQ, or check this guy on Twitter. They party it up on IRC and Ventrilo and what not. Nuts.
Year in Review: She’s Going the Distance, a Great Feat of Strength
Going to mention a list of 12 lists of 12 items each. So a nested list. All 144 items. Annotated for the most part. Don’t ask me why I use these pronouns the way I do…
Happy Figure Doujinshi, Regretful Figure Purchase
It’s hard to bundle up irrelevant topics into one fell swoop, so I’m not going to try.
First thing first–Happy Soda’s Super Rats is somewhat of a photographer, going at it in his home studio and snapping away. While what I may heap upon him seems little more than empty praise, I think the value of what fancy words I have for his work-product is at least as much as the $25 I spent on it.
The specific work product, beyond his figure blog, is a self-published photo book of some of the select photos he took over the course of his figure reviews. I would like to think he covered a wide variety of selections as far as picking out pictures to put in the book. But as much as the book features high rez figure porn, the book contain Super Rat’s arrangement, notes and random focus on different figures that tickles his pickles. YMMV on that one.
Besides a few amateur-ish flaws, there’s not a whole lot to say about the book. If you like the pictures on Happy Soda, then getting this so-called doujinshi is not going to disappoint. If you like figures of anime/game/whatever girls in various states of undress, then you will probably like both.
The doujinshi is made available from Lulu, which is a print-on-demand vendor with plants in Europe, US, Australia, and elsewhere I don’t know. Not sure about exactly where. This means you can get it with a fairly low shipping cost in much of the world outside the US. I got the book from them relatively quickly and the cost is reasonable for this sort of thing. The paper quality is fine although I sort of hoped the cover material is a bit better.
Again, the book is not perfect and it’s easy to look at it and come up with a dozen ways to improve it. But, it delivers what you expect, so it is a good thing.
Regrettably, the book is on sale from October 21 to October 28, so you really have no time left to make this purchase. Well, it’s his loss, although it’s not unusual for really popular doujinshi to go on multiple runs.
[You can grab a PDF of it as preview (it’s not 100.00% the same as the paper product, but it’s close. Speaking of which, the shot with Haruka’s lower half in the book had less of an effect than seeing it in 4-page quadrants as a PDF). ]
The second bit I wanted to talk about is 5cm/s. This topic keeps coming up not only because it’s worth talking about, but it just happens to be something so thought provoking that despite the relatively few people who got to see it, a higher percent of the viewers had to vent? And venting we did. People wrote a lot about it way-back-when. All the more it seemed appropriate that a word can simply nail it to the wall.
The third bit, going back to figure and regret, is this hasty purchase. Granted the experience itself was/is valuable (first time ordering from Kid Nemo), it reminded me why I ought to stick to his drawn stuff and not falter towards the flame that is Tony Taka’s luscious character designs, rendered in three dimensions.
As you may know, Kotobukiya has been doing some limited distribution runs in the United States. This means North American retailers can get their hands on figures at a large discount since they skip over the “importer” middleman entirely. A $65 Elwing figure can be had for $45. Yeah, you can get a bad case of regret if you got that $65 figure instead.
What’s amusing is I knew all about this in an indirect way. I just didn’t do dilligence before I pressed the confirm button. So now I will rely on what makes Kid Nemo different than many other retailers–not its higher price point, but supposedly existant customer service. We will see how it turns out!
A Date with 5 Centimeters Per Second - Part 2
Oh, hay, it’s June 16. Remember to say hello to this bloke for the rest of us in a few days? With a heavy, large stick nicknamed Envy? (Srsly, you UK fanboys ought to hang out and get it on more often. Enjoy your Shinkai.)
The months preluding to summer are rather busy; finding an appropriate Sunday evening to spend with the film was not easy. The warm air assaults outdoor travelers adjusting to the changing season but I’ve adapted rather quickly for a change. Perhaps a typical day walking the farm-lined country road of Tanegashima was not unlike the day I spent watching Baseball, doing errands, singing praises, and watching the struggle of Takaki Tono on a film-tuned HDTV running the BRD version of the film, 5 Centimeters Per Second. I had to feel comfortable about it, after all.
This time around I actually spent two hours watching both the Blu-Ray and DVD region 1 versions of the work, as I was joined by a co-conspirator who required subtitles. The re-tuned TV, as previously mentioned, is a Sony KDS 60A2000, to these specs. And sure enough, the opening scene in Okashou no longer pounces my visual senses like a sour Warhead. The interplay of the intermittent sunlight through the trees really stood out in the few scenes that offered the said visual magic. The scene when Akari pets the downtrodden Chobi was particularly exciting, which was a new find. (Well, as exciting as 5cm can be.)
The same goes for the surfing action; Sumida’s dark complexion remained both in her dusk-creeper mode and when she’s paying tribute to the ocean gods via her stretching exercises. The seaside glitter worked the same wonder as the twinkling stars–which now twinkle properly as she climbed the grassy knoll for the nth time.
It was also fun to just look at random things–the anti-theft mirror in the convenience store scene was a good example. The contrast between the lit train and the dark, snowy night was still appreciable but the night wasn’t as dark as I remembered. On the other hand, the train rides with the sun up was a little less exciting as the animation skipped out on some of the shadow animation coming in, at least some of the time.
It was like having a blown-up version of the pictures from Sora no Kioku in your living room, measuring 60″ from the diagonals. And having the ability to just hit pause and walk up to it was pretty awesome. I know I did that for a couple scenes. Like the shot from Okashou, entering the classroom in the morning–noticing the bags hanging from the desks and chairs, and reflection from the ceiling lights–it was sweet.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure it was all good. For example, the scene where Sumida’s sister admired her successful ride along the grassy shore was a little too windy that the grass can’t keep up? Or the simple character animation of making a paper plane…maybe Sumida needs to take notes from Alto Saotome. The simpleness contrasted with the elaborate details that confronted the viewer every five seconds, perhaps for the better, but I’m not sure.
Anyways, I enjoyed it, again. I have to apologize that there’s just no good way for me to make screen caps, so that promise may never be fulfilled. Instead, maybe it’s about time that I made a promise with a place beyond the clouds next?
Beyond Shinkai
So in a couple weeks, Makoto Shinkai will have his film and interview in London. Poor sods stranded over this side of the pond, like us, can probably take this opportunity and do something else while Shinkai moves on to a new chapter in life as an expat.
“2nd_Life (茗记)” is something that might be it. You can watch it on Youku, or watch it on Tudou. Chinese-based streaming video sites don’t work super great on my home connection, but they do work. YMMV.
This 6-or-so minutes long indie animation is produced by some PRC studio called L-Key. It’s in Chinese with Chinese and English subs. You can also find the soundtrack in mp3 as well as a WMV link (it didn’t work for me) for the video. Coming from a Shinkai fan’s perspective the similarity is clear, but there’s at least a modicum of originality in the expression that makes it credible, at least a little.
Big thanks to Iwa ni Hana for pointing this piece out.
Speaking of which, there’s this other piece on Iwa ni Hana about She and Her Cat which is just delightful. Can I go squeee now? You should go pay the blog a visit.
