Long-time readers will remember me showcasing the work of Bristol based anime and manga artist Rory Doona on the site before – well, he’s back, this time with a few pieces he’s done for UK anime distributor Manga Entertainment.

To quote Rory: “Manga commissioned me to create a new mascot for their latest series of adverts…I drew inspiration from some of my favourite mascot characters like Miyazaki’s Totoro and Bastian Balthazar from The Never Ending Story. The mascot is also accompanied with a pink haired girl on his travels as well. Both as of yet do not have a name but I can pass on any good suggestions to Manga from your blog readers, what do your readers think they two characters should be called?”

Hit the comments below with your suggestions – click any of the images to see full sized versions. And don’t forget to follow Rory over on Facebook to see more of his work.

Layout designs on the Manga ads by Jelly Creative.

Matt Brown is the adoptive parent of Anime Dream, and has written for the site for eight years. He’s an RPG gamer turned anime fan who lives in Florida and dreams of escaping, someday. A programmer and language enthusiast, he devotes most of his energies to slacking off, raising laziness to an artform. He maintains a pocket-busting love affair with Japanese music. His Twitter personality is MattB_AD. In a very exciting post for me personally, here he looks at an anime set in my adopted hometown of Bristol.

Picture a boy of hardly more than ten years. If you are such a boy, this won’t be difficult for you. Like most boys, wide eyed and innocent, this one is oblivious to the dangers of the world. He has parents who love him and provide for him, so that he might spend enough time with his imagination to get his fill, before biology rears its ugly head. He is curious about his world, his own home, and everything in between.

Disaster strikes. While the adults take care of adult matters like evacuations and blind panic, the boy slips out into a field, where no living soul is present to witness the spectacle of light that he experiences – it is all his own. Our view of the scene changes, weightlessly circling the sky and his frame. We see the green grass above as our bodies float in the sea of stars. The planet’s laser defense system unleashes bolts of light into the heavens, and we see how insignificant we are, next to the cosmos.

Picture a girl of sixteen years. If you are such a girl, you know everything I do and more. She is independent, intelligent, mature beyond her years – unlike the boys her age. Her mother and father are both respected military officers; she will follow in their footsteps, and on to greater status and responsibility when her service for the security of the realm is sufficient. While in training, she meets a boy about her age who is, like herself, a dignitary. Unlike herself, the boy spent his childhood on land, and she in space.

Disaster strikes. Her first chance at combat disappears with an order to remove this boy from the action. As she ferries him toward their destination, the journey is fraught with challenges. The boy reveals his talent for getting into trouble in space, only to redeem himself on the ground, where her feet are less sure than they were in the heavens. He uses his frail body and still-boyish voice to protect her, and if she took a moment, she would realize that he steadied her steps all along. Maybe she already has.

As boys and girls become women and men, the volume of life’s background noise increases to the point where nothing comes in clearly. In the midst of pursuit for fame, fortune, family, or something resembling either, we search for the signal that would connect us again with that source of all happiness. To Hiroyuki Morioka, the gender of childhood wonder is male, and the gateway to romantic love is female. But in a sense, every one of us is both – the anima and animus. The work I’ve just described is Crest of the Stars, originally a three-volume series of light novels which open his Seikai (star world) saga. Morioka’s work shows us a romance that is worlds apart and galaxies wide, but starts with simple boyhood curiosity, and that feeling that proves elusive in adulthood.

Now we travel to England, and back a half century, give or take. You don’t have any trouble going back in time, do you? Science reigns in the town of Bristol – particularly atop a hill, in a small boarding house over a restaurant named Tenkai.

The building’s owner, a beautiful young woman who goes by “China,” is quite adept at the martial arts, which she uses in diffusing fights in her restaurant, and breaking down a tenant’s door to demand rent. The tenant is Professor Breckenridge, a scientist/inventor nobody’s heard of, yet. To appease his landlord, he demonstrates his latest invention – a space reflection lens! She astutely points out that it’s no better than a mirror, before finding that it’s more easily broken than a mirror. Breckenridge likes to spend money on parts instead of rent, and keeping China at bay isn’t something he can alone. Enter Jim Floyd, his assistant, whom he charges with “China management.”

China has a soft spot for Jim, which enables him to sneak parts past her to the lab upstairs. He can’t get away with tricking her indefinitely, though, so China management and inventions are intertwined for the greater good. From small gifts like a genuine moonstone ring, to a birthday message on the moon’s surface and more, keeping China happy enables outlandish feats of science in Bristol.

According to Kenji Tsuruta, China first popped into his mind as secretary to “a sort of scientific Sherlock Holmes.” As he struggled to pay his own bills, the image of China overlapped that of his landlord, and his Spirit of Wonder had its spokesmodel. If discovery is the fuel of wonder, then the spirit is that which fosters discovery. In Tsuruta’s romantic brand of sci-fi, woman is that spirit, and accounting for her desires is the only way to satisfy those boyish dreams.

In “Miss China’s Ring,” Jim and the professor manage China by using their inventions to make outrageous birthday presents for her. In another story, Jim devises a machine that creates a shooting star, so that China can make all the wishes she wants at a predictable time. The formula is pretty consistent: China lets things slide because of her feelings for Jim, and the inventions are fun for her, too.

Across town, a woman named Windy waits for her husband to return from an overseas trip. Her illusion of having him to herself is shattered quickly; when Jack returns, he immediately starts hanging out with her father Gordon, and his buddies, Cooper and Shepherd*, who fifty years prior christened their group as the Scientific Boys Club.

Their story is based on actual science…sort of. Unknown to Windy, the purpose of Jack’s trip was to steal the Mars globe created by Percival Lowell, revealing locations of the now infamous “canals” which Lowell believed were evidence of intelligent life on Mars. This globe, plus a book on ethereal current written by Windy herself, would help the club make their dream of traveling to the Red Planet a reality! It’s a fine idea, but they overlook one crucial factor: Windy. Jack has to stop neglecting his wife, or the whole project is doomed.

Tsuruta’s stories intoxicate. Within their underbelly is the notion that all curiosity can be satisfied, as long as one sees to the forces that govern life and work, and returns that which is given. The converse is also implied: that science is hard, and the people who do it deserve support from everyone. China wants to see the canals, and due to a quirk in Breckenridge’s space-reflection telescope, she sees what she wants. The science club, by contrast, discovers that Lowell’s canals theory is wrong and calls him a liar, despite the irony that their ship, the “Spirit of Science,” is ether-driven – another failed theory, that enjoyed favor prior to the discovery of the photon and its reconciliation with the wave properties of light.

We now know that Lowell’s canals are an optical illusion. Perhaps the most interesting failure of Lowell’s was his “Planet X” theory, which stated that there had to be a planet past Neptune that accounts for the peculiar orbit of Uranus. The data which formed the basis of his theory was wrong, but his work led to the discovery of Pluto. Tsuruta’s work paints the scientific process and its results, both right and wrong, as a virtue deserving of praise, and Percival Lowell is a perfect model for this sentiment. Not every scientist’s work produces a breakthrough, but their contributions are meaningful and often subtle.

When we look to the stars, we see the past of the Universe, and the future of humankind. Time limits our activities off world and slows our progress, because space is so vast. For the Seikai saga, Morioka created the concepts of space-adept “Abh” fashioned by humans (in their own image) for exploration, and a two-dimensional “plane space” to even the score between space and time, to allow us to conceive of deep space travel and its societal implications. Seikai amusingly follows Tsuruta’s Rule: that man will continue to accomplish great things if the woman in his life is content.

Seikai takes time to show us that in Morioka’s vision of the future, little boys will still look to the heavens and feel the immensity of space, no matter what humanity will have accomplished by that time. Spirit of Wonder reminds us that while most things do not remain in the realm of science fiction forever, we can always dream.

*Bonus points if you recognized “Gordon Cooper” and Shepherd as the names of American astronauts. Both Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr. and Alan Shepherd were among the seven astronauts selected for the Mercury program. Shepherd was the first American in space.

Notes on availability:

The Crest of the Stars novels were released in English by TOKYOPOP, and are still widely available. The Banner of the Stars novels are not available in English. All Seikai TV series and OVAs, save for the Banner of the Stars III OVAs, were released in R1 DVD by Bandai Entertainment. Crest of the Stars was released in the UK by Beez Entertainment.

The Scientific Boys Club story is only available in English as an OVA series, published in R1 DVD by Bandai Entertainment in 2003. Copies are still fairly easy to obtain. The Spirit of Wonder manga is partially available in English, courtesy Dark Horse Comics. Miss China’s Ring received an OVA adaptation, which AnimEigo licensed. Unfortunately, that license expired, and copies are difficult to obtain in DVD, although VHS copies aren’t too difficult to snag.

Long time readers will be familar with the work of local Bristol artist Rory Doona, whose anime and graf inspired work I’ve had great pleasure in showing on the site in the past. Well, today Rory dropped me an email about his latest project:

The series is titled descriptively “Girls, Guns and Clouds” which pretty much sums up the subject matter. Certainly my love for Japanese character design shines through again but the focus on many of the images is to hint at a wider story and world behind each image.

The full works will be available to view and buy online sometime next month, currently aiming for around mid October. More details of sizes, prices and format will be available come mid October, which we also hope to be the release date online. Thanks for sharing these with your readers.

I think you’ll agree they’re breathtaking – more info on how you can own some of these prints when I have it.

I’m off on my travels again – not Japan this time, but the sun soaked Socialist republic of to Havana. Ten days of snorkelling, rum, fat Cuban cigars and blissfully internet free chilling awaits me. As a result there will be no updates here for a while – and my ninja-like accomplice Flotsky will be moderating comments here – and I’ll reply to them all when I get back. Apologies in advance.

But just as I’m leaving this town, I thought I’d leave you will with a little bit of homegrown goodness. As if Rory Doona and a certain well known anime blog weren’t enough evidence that Bristol is the anime culture epicenter of the UK, here’s a fantastic bit of giant Mecha CGI work from local artist Justin Dowling. Enjoy.

truth tv – giant bipedal weaponised military unit from Justin Dowling on Vimeo.

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.

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.

More great images and some words from the man himself on its creation over at Rory’s blog.

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.

Sadly I had to leave before midnight due to old-sodness, so I didn’t see the final result of the painting, but I did manage to grab a few shots of the work in progress – see below, plus lots more on my Facebook album. Props again to the WoC for hosting a great night, and a reminder that if you’re ever in the area and have even a passing interest in graf or hip hop you owe yourself to get down there and check it out.

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.

Rory Doona

Rory Doona is an artist and animator from my adopted hometown Bristol, and is probably best known round these parts for his awesome work doing flyers for local club nights like Byte. Clearly influenced by the likes of Hayao Miyazaki and Kazuo Oga, the man is so talented it’s a little bit scary. Hit his website below and see for yourself.

rorydoona.com

David Surman

By day David Surman is Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at University of Wales, Newport, and by night he hands squeeky voiced Texan pre-teens back their arses on Street Fighter IV via Xbox Live. In between those two states he’s usually scribbling. Some crazy, fucked up shit. Check it out. And don’t worry, he’s cool. I’ll vouch for him. He even did the pic above of Blanka from SF just for this post. Isn’t that nice?

David Surman’s Scribblog
Twitter/DaveytheGravey

Kairi Chan

Kairi is a 20 year-old mangaka at Glyndwr University, where she’s doing a BA in Illustration for Graphic Novels. Wow. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an option when I was applying for any colleges anywhere. Anyway, she’s hugely influenced by manga and Japanese/Harajuku fashion and design, but most impressively for someone as early in her career as she is, she’s already creating a unique style for herself, especially in her vibrant use of colour. Her recent design for a laptop skin has been causing a justified buzz around the ‘net. Hit the links below for more.

skater-noxie.deviantart.com
Twitter/lolitakaikai

Think I’ve missed someone out? Think you should be here? Then drop me a line and let me know.

Another month, another Intrigue…

But a slightly special one this time, for me at least. Not only was it the launch party for the new D-Bridge album, but second on the bill was Belfast drum and bass deity Calibre. Anyone that knows me in person knows how my appreciation of the man’s production skills borders on the near obsessional, but surprisingly I’d never seen him DJ before, managing to miss his previous, fairly rare appearances in Bristol. Despite a heavy week and feeling pretty whacked out, there was no chance I was going to miss him doing a 2 hour set at my favourite night.

And getting in the club just after eleven, it was obvious I wasn’t the only one – with the place already close to rammed while guest DJ Tasha rolled out the warm-up set. By the time The Insiders themselves took control it was wall to wall in there, with Joe and Ben dropping their usual, precise selection of deep D&B, gulley b-lines and the occasional dubstep slo-mo breakdown. Anticipation for the headliners was visibly building though, with Calibre (featuring newly enhanced hair) and DRS stepping up at just after 1am. Even just a few minutes into their two hour set it was clear they weren’t going to disappoint; DRS chatting over Calibre’s signature mix of dubby FX, soundtrack samples and fresh jazzy breaks. Even with a perfect mix of previews from his new LP Overflow, unreleased dubs and old crowd pleasing classics, I was flagging by 3am, and am embarrassed to say I had to bail before D-Bridge hit the decks. Like I’ve said before, I must be getting old, but I’ll still be back next month…

Big thanks to The Insiders, the chilled as ever Dojo staff and everyone that made it such a buzzing night….as always…

I had an excellent Easter weekend, but since it ended I’ve had an evil motherfucker of a head cold, with mucus seeping into every part of already feeble brain, especially the parts which deal with blogging, apparently. Hence the brief and sporadic nature of recent posts, and why over the next couple of days I’ll be trying to catch up with events from over the weekend.

First up: on Saturday, despite recovering from Friday’s session at Intrigue, we managed to venture out to see the legendary DJ Derek. For those of you unfamiliar with Derek, the 60-something, white, ex-accountant is something of an institution in Bristol, being one of the city’s leading reggae DJs and hailed as a huge influence by the likes of Massive Attack. Not that he limits himself to just reggae – Saturday’s brilliant set covered soul, funk, reggae and even some house – all played off minidisc. Not someone that’s worried about the vinyl vs CDs debate, apparently. But then he’s not worried about mixing either; preferring to get on the mike and introduce each track in his distinctive, infamous Brizzle-meets-Jamaica patois, harking back to to the traditional sound system style of DJing.

It was actually my first time seeing Derek in Bristol (I’d seen him at festivals before), and also my first time at The Thunderbolt, despite it being within stumbling distance of my home. Seems like a nice enough place, suitably grimy with friendly staff and a decent enough sound system. Ace crowd too, slightly older than I’m used to in student-infested Bristol, but completely up for the beats Derek was dropping. Plus it was nice to find out where the local crusties, ciderpunks and BoHo MILFs all hang out…

Picture courtesy of Tomahawk, because I forgot my camera…