Oh my days.
Okay, let’s just cut to the chase. What exactly is the Otaku: man up hashtag all about? Good question.
It’s about a few things. It’s about a flimsy, non-existent manifesto. It’s about a pointless, ill-conceived philosophy. It’s about angry, knee-jerk rational debate. But mostly it’s about BOTH shits AND giggles.
‘But wait!’ you say, ‘There’s a manifesto?’ Yes. Yes there is. A completely non-existent one:
A few days ago Scott Spaziani kindly invited me on to the first episode of his Otaku in Review podcast to discuss the best, worst and most overlooked anime shows of 2009 – something I’m really grateful to him for, not just because it was a lot of fun but because it also got me out of having to write one of those ‘review of the year’ posts. Yeah, I know. I’m a lazy bastard.
Last week I had a brief look at Madhouse’s Devil May Cry anime series based on the popular PlayStation game franchise – and time permitting I’ll still be taking a more in depth look over the next couple of weeks – but my first impressions were pretty strong. It’s a dark and brooding show art-wise, that still manages to maintain a sense of humour while packing in all the stylish demon killing and violent bloodshed of the original games. It might not break any new ground in terms of originality or innovative storytelling, but that’s not really the point. Big guns and even bigger swords – that’s the point.
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.
Something a little different today – something not directly related to anime or manga – but something I’m pretty sure you’ll agree is pretty damn cool.
First off I’d just like to say a huge thank you to everyone that read my list of ten anime films you should see before you die – the response has been phenomenal – not just the number of people that read it, but also those that took the time out to get involved in the following discussion at Reddit, Stumbleupon, Twitter as well as here on TMB. Some people loved my selections, some people thought I was well off the mark, but it was clear that there was no way I was going to be able to avoid putting together another list, this time of TV series and OVAs.
