The Spring 2009 anime season marches on, and as always time is my enemy. Trying to keep up with the shows I am interested in is hard enough, let alone taking time out to sample the season’s other offerings. But sample I have, and here I present my findings on the first episodes of four shows that, while I may not follow them, you may want to check out.
Following on from last week’s look at Rory Doona’s promo artwork for the TOKYOPOP UK summer releases, he’s kindly given me his latest work for them – this time with a vampire theme. I think you’ll agree it’s fangtastic.
I’ll be here the whole week. Tip your waitress. Try the veal. You’ve been a great audience. Goodnight everybody etc.
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With the anime industry facing recession and accused of creative stagnation, a common recent tactic has been to take two well established genres and weld them together, often with questionable results. Satellite Studios‘ Basquash! pulls the same move, merging sports drama and mecha action to depict a futuristic world where basketball is played with giant robots.
I just got dropped a tasty treat from Rory Doona – who some of you will undoubtedly remember from my recent look at UK manga artists – a look at his promotional artwork for manga publisher TOKYOPOP. The piece is to promote their forthcoming UK summer releases, so Rory went for a summer beach vibe with a giant-manga-squid-attack twist. Kind of reminds me of the end of Watchmen (the book). If it had been set in Blackpool.
It had been far too long since the last time I made it down to Bristol’s live graffiti night Weapon of Choice, so last night I actually managed to get off my backside and represent. King Audel & Dirty30 were the resident live painters for the night, with music provided by – amongst others – Asaviour & DJ IQ and light hearted Bristol hip-hop crew Hairy Parents. If you haven’t heard of the latter then you need to go hit that link and check them out now – clearly UK rap needs more West Country accents to survive.
Just in case some of you aren’t already reading Daniel Thomas MacInnes’ sublime Ghibli Blog and had missed this I thought I’d post it here – UK paper The Independent has an interview with the world’s greatest animated film-maker Hayao Miyazaki. Its a great piece – as well as a brief overview of his work, he talks about working on the forthcoming Ponyo, and why he made the decision to avoid digital techniques in it’s production:
A must read for all Mamoru Oshii and Production IG fans – IG have just posted up a report – in English – from their recent press conference on the forthcoming Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai movie. Oshii isn’t directing this time – he just wrote the script – handing over the helm to Mizuho Nishikubo – a long time assistant of his on projects such as Patlabor 2, Ghost in the Shell and The Sky Crawlers. Both were at the press event, along with IG head Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, and on hand to answer questions:
One of the nicest things about running this site has been the number of people that have contacted me directly to chat about our shared interests. Perhaps not surprisingly a lot of them seem to be from creative backgrounds – graphic designers, artists, animators, writers, CGI modelers, mangakas – some from Japan, many from Europe and even more from the US. But today I want to showcase the work of three people from here in the UK whose anime and manga influenced work has really impressed me.
