Monthly Archives: April 2012

Apr 26 2012

Spring Season Anime Round-Up

We’re a couple of weeks into Spring season, so it’s time for some impressions again. Aki and I are still shedding tears into our Pepsi about there not being more Tiger & Bunny, but this season is actually turning out to be better than expected. Since we talked about ZETMAN before so I guess that’s a good one to start with…

We Are Disappoint

The worst fears I had about ZETMAN are turning out to be true. 13 episodes is too little, the pace is far too fast, and they’re changing things too much. I fully expected them to change something – that’s always the case with adaptations – but they’re making the story less dark. I won’t say more about the changes since Aki’s avoiding being spoiled about the manga story. There’s no time to build any characterization at the pace they’re going, and Aki is just confused and doesn’t really give a damn about any of the characters. Or the plot. If they’re even managing to build any plot, so far they’re going for the cool factor and nothing really clicks together. I’m mostly just feeling sad about what they’re doing to ZETMAN. The more I watch it the more I feel like I can’t really recommend it to anyone, and it’s a shame because it does look good and the action sequences are well composed. The opening song is very catchy too. I might end up watching this alone if Aki decides to drop it and read the manga instead.

And The Rest

The previous season, most of the stuff we dropped was because it just turned out boring or plain bad. This season seemed like the season of the ragequit because we actually started with a few of those! After the ill first impressions we found a title that is really worth checking for Taibani fans.

Space Brothers (Uchuu Kyoudai) – Hirata Hiroaki plays the main character: a thirty-something guy who gets fired in the first episode from his job designing (red) sports cars, wears too short pants that show his ankles, squashes his burgers and fails a lot. Sound familiar? Well, it’s not Kotetsu but the parallels are really amusing. We got no idea if Hirata got a bit of typecast here after his success with Kotetsu because he’s using a very Kotetsu-like voice for the role. The series is entertaining with a good pacing, even though the setting itself feels quite generic – the main character has to overcome a lot of obstacles to reach his dreams. I feel like I’ve seen a story like this many, many times before but it doesn’t really bother me. The other things outweigh it. Oh, and Crunchyroll is streaming it so you can watch it there.

We’re also happy that Noitamina is good again after a few seasons of stumbling. We were a bit iffy about Sakamichi no Apollon at first because the series compositor Kakihara Yuuko did an epic failure with Persona 4 the Animation, but so far it’s been really pleasant to watch. Tsuritama was automatically on our watch list because we’ve both got the hots for Nakamura Kenji‘s series – Mononoke is one of our all-time favourites.

The rest of our watch list for this season looks like this: Arashi no yoru ni, Folktales from Japan, Hyouka (this just started so we’re still undecided if we’ll stick with it), Jormungand, Lupin III: Mine Fujiko to iu onna, Eureka Seven AO, and Shirokuma Cafe.

It’s Not Anime But I Like It

Actually, there’s something we want to recommend this season: Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger – a parody on super sentai shows. Now, what makes this interesting for us is that Satou Keiichi did the character design for the show. Maybe we’ll get to see some dangerous underpants (with a surprise bulge) in it. Plus it’s really really funny, even for people who don’t normally watch tokusatsu shows. Give it a try!

Apr 23 2012

Stage Play Information From Ozaki

Executive Producer Ozaki Masayuki went on an info tweet spree again, this time about the upcoming stage play. Aki translated what he had to say:

About the T&B THE LIVE stage play casting #1: We’ve almost fully assembled the main cast. Our enthusiastic staff and the people at JAE did their best to choose the right actors. In addition to focusing on the appearance, acting skills and the ability to perform action sequences, we paid extra attention to the actors’ behaviour, voice, and the atmosphere they create around themselves to fit the characters’ imagery.

About the T&B THE LIVE stage play casting #2: We also considered choosing from the original anime cast, but due to the physical differences, this time we decided to build the team from scratch to create a play full of action sequences.

About the T&B THE LIVE stage play casting #3: The original cast of characters is full of people representing different races, so we also auditioned people who are not Japanese, but due to the fact that it’s difficult to include subtitles or a dubbing in a live-stage play, we preferred actors fluent in Japanese. However, I believe that the original feel of Sternbild – which is like a melting pot full of people of different races – was preserved well.

About the T&B THE LIVE stage play casting #4: We had two aims in mind: to fulfill the expectations of the fans of the anime, and to perfect this event as a live stage play, and we tried to do our best to balance it out. Of course, whether we achieved our goals or not is for the viewers to judge. After all, we’re still at the starting point.

About the T&B THE LIVE stage play casting #5: The main cast and the information on the play itself (locations and the schedule) is to be announced on the main TIGER & BUNNY THE LIVE site in May. http://www.tb-thelive.net/ Look forward to it!

(Sources: 1 2 3 4 5)

It’s nice how they are obviously putting a lot of work into the stage play. We really hope there’ll be a recording of it released on BD or DVD later. It’s not the same as going to see it in person, but this is just one of those cases of “it can’t be helped”.

Apr 16 2012

KING OF WORKS Sneak Peek

The official site updated with a nice preview of the upcoming KING OF WORKS archive. The final look of the set might still change since this is a concept picture, but this gives a better idea of what you’re getting than just listing the things. And speaking of lists, here’s what the archive contains:

  1. Settings Collection (B4 size, 256 pages)
  2. Scripts Collection (B5 size, two volumes with 208 pages each)
  3. Original Illustrations Collection (B4 size, 144 pages)
  4. A box to hold all of it.
  5. Calendar (September 2012 to August 2013)
  6. Illustration of Kotetsu and Barnaby (no preview for that yet)

The total page count (without the calendar) is 816, and the price for all this is still the same as before, 5,880 JPY.

The Japanese fans are calling KING OF WORKS a “definitive blunt weapon”, and it’s going to be quite a hefty package. For comparison, this pile of books has 768 pages and it weighs almost exactly three (3) kilos:

Apr 14 2012

Review: S.H.Figuarts Rock Bison

Bandai has given TaiBani fans a lot reasons to lose sleep and battle for their favorite Heroes in action figure form with the S.H.Figuarts line. The line so far has seen the releases of Wild Tiger, Barnaby Brooks Jr., Sky High, Darkness Bunny, Wild Tiger Masakazu Katsura original color version, and Rock Bison. Rock Bison was the third figure released in the Figuarts line back on December 17, 2011. His pre-order window opened on August 1st, and like all Tiger & Bunny merchandise it sold out in a flash. Unfortunately, I missed out on Rock Bison’s pre-order date and woke up to see the usual “Sold Out” next to his figure. Lucky for me, I was able to hunt down and obtain him a couple of weeks after his December release over at Mandarake. Now, let’s see if my hunt for Rock Bison was worth it.

Continue reading →

Apr 11 2012

Videos of Morita Masakazu at Sakuracon 2012

Last weekend was Sakuracon in Seattle, and Morita Masakazu was a guest of honor there. We got an email from Joan, one of our readers who went there. Here’s what she wrote.

I’ve been an avid follower of your site ever since the beginning and a big fan of Tiger and Bunny, so when I found out that Morita was going to be at Sakuracon, I was super stoked.

I managed to take quite a few video files, and would like to share them with you guys and the rest of the Tiger and Bunny fans.  I’m still slowly uploading videos at youtube, as they’re quite large HD files, but I figured I should link you guys to the part that pertains specifically to T&B.

(I actually asked him the question!)

I hope you enjoy!  The rest of the videos will be uploaded to my channel by this week.

Regards,
Joan

Thank you, and again thank you for sharing these videos!

Joan’s question was about ‘an interesting story during the recording process of Tiger and Bunny’ and Morita seems like he could keep talking about it forever. Here are the videos: