Category: Animé

The Pillows Rock Boston!

After yesterday’s nightmare four-hour wait to get registered at Anime Boston, today’s live concert by the Pillows made up for it. For Eric this was the highlight of the weekend, for sure. The Pillows were first mentioned way back in this post when the blog was only a month old.

Carol and I heard some of the show through the doors, and we were able to sneak in for the last two songs. The hall at the Hynes Convention Center is huge! It seats 5,000, and before some of the audience left early to beat the crowd to the merchandise table, the place was totally packed.

I managed to record the audio to the last minute of “Ride On Shooting Star,” the Pillows song that’s at the link above. This is how it sounded from outside the hall, with all of the doors closed. The show was plenty loud, and with Eric sitting in the eighth row, it was a good thing he wore ear plugs.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/MAR/pillows.mp3]

Anime Boston 2008 Purgatory

Today we waited in line four hours to register for Anime Boston! Four hours! And we were pre-registered. It’s been 35 years since I attended my first fan convention, and I’ve never waited even half that long to get a badge. I won’t get into the details of exactly how registration is being handled, but it’s completely bogus. We left the Hynes Convention Center after 8 pm, and it appeared that people were still waiting in the registration line!

The Return of Eric’s Anime Pick

If I were to select one Anime title to show someone as an introduction to Japanese animation as it’s done today, it would not be something by Hayao Miyazaki. It would be Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. I consider this film to be an exemplary work of the highest quality and artistry, exploring elements of science fiction, fantasy, technology, politics, romance, and friendship, with deftness and subtlety. I blogged about it many months ago, but the pre-Flash video embedding no longer works, so I’ll have to do a fresh transfer of a choice scene.

Shinkai’s follow-up to Place Promised is 5 Centimeters Per Second: a chain of short stories about their distance. Eric has wanted me to blog something from it for a while, and now that the DVD is about to be released in America, I will. The final part of the movie includes this musical montage of flashbacks. Seeing it shouldn’t spoil your enjoyment of the movie. I transferred this video from the Japanese DVD.

[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/FiveCentimeters.flv 448 252]

MADtv On Japanese Korean Soap Operas

With the Writers Guild of America on strike, TV is full of re-runs, of course. Last night I caught a MADtv show that featured TV parodies, including a hilarious take on what they say are Japanese soap operas. However, Eric informs me the writing is in Korean, and cast member Bobby Lee is Korean-American. Anyway, six months ago I featured the Japanese romantic comedy Train Man, and I can see elements of that in this parody.
[flv:/Video/DEC07/MADTV.flv 400 300]

Wherego Ergo?

We’re finished with the anime series Ergo Proxy. The ending was pretty good, with the usual grand speeches and battles and massive explosions.

One of the change-of-pace Ergo installments had a mocking parody of Walt Disney in a scratchy black and white movie, gesturing like Hitler.

[flv:/Video/OCT07/ErgoDisney.flv 448 252]

Long before Ergo Proxy, even before Astro Boy, the first anime to reach America, one of Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil cartoons made fun of Disneyland.

[flv:/Video/OCT07/Beanyland.flv 400 300]

Ergo, Ergo Proxy?

A couple of months ago I posted Ergo Proxy as Eric’s anime pick. We’re still going through the series, and the last few installments have been really good. I’ve blended a bit of one of them into the prologue of the next episode to highlight the contrast between them. Don’t try to make any sense of this!
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/ErgoProxyDoubles.flv 448 252]