According to anime!anime!, Fumi Yoshinaga’s shoujo (and just-barely-not-BL) masterpiece Antique Bakery, about a troupe of colorful characters who run a bakery, is being made into an anime. It’ll be 12 eps long and run this July.

I hope it’s well-done, and I hope people won’t be complete morons and assume it’s yaoi. It DOES have a gay character, and because Digital Manga Publishing released it in English it generally gets shelved with the yaoi, but there’s only hints at any actual couplings; it’s really just an excellent character study of its four main characters.

HEAR ME PEOPLE? It may still not be your kinda thing, but don’t write it off too fast!@#$

Perhaps Japan is realizing that a lot of its newer series are the same rehashed moe crap, because they’re returning to beloved and badass series like Slayers and Trigun.

Though since the Trigun movie has been blathered on about for years without actually going anywhere– I’m not going to hold my breath.

Still, the Moon Phase blog notes that the 14th volume of the Trigun Maximum manga features a dust jacket pronouncing the movie to be a Vash vs Wolfwood original story and announcing that it will come out in 2009.

…Still not holding my breath. NOT THIS TIME, MADHOUSE.

Ahh, Slayers– the series of novels by Hajime Kanzaka that follows the diminutive sorceress Lina and her companions, dumb-but-loyal Gourry, wanna-be mysterious swordsman Zelgadis, overly-enthusiastic justice fighter Amelia (to name but a few) which has been developed into a manga, three TV anime series, two OVAs, and five movies.

A Japanese blog post by kouryakukan claims that the April issue of Dragon Magazine– the same magazine that the novels were originally serialized in –will include information about a brand new Slayers TV season.

Why Slayers? Why now? Why NOT? Slayers is better than pretty much every fantasy (of the D&D type) I’ve seen in recent years, from Night Wizard to Prism Ark to Kyou Kara Maou to Seirei no Moribito to Scrapped Princess, etc.

But we won’t know for sure until the issue of Dragon hits the stands, which won’t be for another day in Japan (it’s the 28th there; the ish comes out on the 29th).

UPDATE: A friend just sent me a link to what is supposed to be an interview with Slayers creator Hajime Kanzaka in which he talks about the new series. Assuming the interview is legit (and it probably is, unless someone’s putting on a major hoax), the new anime will feature the same staff as in the past. I can’t read enough of it to tell if Megumi Hayashibara will return as Lina, but I can’t imagine that they’d do it without her.

Blah blah blah, Bandai Visual USA + sola, $49.99/disc, three episodes per disc, June 10th, no dubs, etc.

Does anyone else think BVU is really moving to the (relative) mainstream of anime? I mean, look at their past titles: Patlabor, Gunbuster, Demon Prince Enma, Wings of Rean, Super Robot Wars, MS Gundam IGLOO, SOS! Tokyo Metro Explorers, Galaxy Angel– all space, mech, sci-fi, adventury, kinda “big” series.

And now look at their most recent license: Harukanaru Toki no Naka de, Shigofumi, True Tears, sola. The first two have some adventure and stuff, but none of these are “big” titles (yes, I know sola was voted top anime of ‘07 on Yahoo! Japan, but I just can’t take that very seriously), and True Tears in particular is an absolute slice-of-life romancey thing. I guess what I’m trying to say is, all of these recent licenses are of moe shows, which is so different from what BVU has done in the past.

Now, True Tears and Shigofumi were both produced by Bandai Visual Japan. But sola is not– which may make it the FIRST title ever to be released by BVU that is not related to Bandai Japan in some way. The closest would be HaruToki, which was only distributed by Bandai Japan. But everything else Bandai Visual USA has was either produced by Bandai Visual or by one of its subsidiaries like Freedom was done by Sunrise and Super Robot Wars is based on games made by Banpresto.

Well, we’ll see if this means anything. Just thought I’d point it out for you industry-watchers. :)

After I got a comment from DiGiKerot, I went and poked around some more sites– specifically the Japanese wikpedia entry for sola –and they list Bandai Visual (Japan) as one of the production companies. The English sites just haven’t caught up to it yet (and it’s not mentioned on the official Japanese site either). So, so much for that! Sorry for the red herring. ;)

I don’t know how many of you have been following TOKYOPOP’s OEL manga Return to Labyrinth, a sequel to the 1986 Jim Henson Muppet/David Bowie flick (I picked up the first volume and thought it was just okay, especially the art). But I just heard on the Muppet News Flash that TOKYOPOP is now working on an anthology of short stories set in the Labyrinth world.

Now, this is a project I’m much more interested in (I’m wary of sequels, as a general rule). It’ll be a series of one-volume manga, each of which focuses on another character or element of the world. One will even feature the backstory of how Jareth became the Goblin King (created by Jake Forbes, who is writing Return to Labyrinth). Some stories will be prequels, some will be sequels, and some will take place as side stories within the original Labyrinth timeline. I assume it’ll have a collection of different creators, both writers and artists. So this I’m kinda looking forward to.

According to ComiPress, VIZ is releasing the first live-action Nana flick for a very short run at the ImaginAsian Center in Los Angeles (March 21-27) and at the ImaginAsian Theatre in New York City (April 4-10). I’m not going to be near either city in those timeframes (nor around the dates of the press screenings, which are a couple of weeks earlier), so I’m afraid I’m just screwed on that front. ♥

SO! You people in LA and NYC, I demand that you ALL pile into your cars/trains/subways/etc and go to these. If they’re huge enough we may yet get to see a wider release. (I can’t believe VIZ isn’t going to run it in their hometown of San Francisco. Lame!)

Did anyone care about the Oscars this year? Yeah, I thought not.

Meanwhile, Variety reports on the Tokyo Anime Fair’s awards. Top prize– Animation of the Year –went to Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone.

Pretty much all the other prizes went to foreign works, interestingly– from Taiwan, Poland, Iran, South Korea, and France. The exception is the two Notable Entry (Student) prize– Takashi Kato’s Clockwork City took one of the two awarded.

Neither Sony nor Warner Brothers are companies who make the bulk of their money selling anime DVDs to North American fans. And yet, both of them are releasing anime these days: Sony’s Blood+ release is finally on the calendar, and Warner Bros is releasing Appleseed EX Machina now.

Each has made some…interesting choices when it comes to these releases. Let’s see how they stack up.

SONY: ANN has received reports that the first episode of Blood+ is a bonus feature on a couple of other Sony discs, notably Loch Ness Terror and 30 Days of Night (the latter is a vampire flick; the former a low-budget horror B-movie). Grade: I’d love to see anime advertised to a more mainstream audience, but this is a great first step. B+.

Warner Bros.: According to Anime on DVD, Warner keeps having errors in their press releases and packaging. Apparently a poorly-worded release caused a scare that the movie might be released without Japanese audio at all (which turns out to not be true), and the Blu-Ray disc packaging also has a misprint as to what type of audio the Japanese track is (it’s Dolby Digital 5.1, and claims to be Stereo). Not a big deal to me, but still pretty lame. Grade: A whopping D (at least it turned out to have Japanese after all.)

So I was searching around for Ookami to Koushinryou images earlier and instead came across this. Apparently a game based on the series is in the works, for Nintendo DS.

The cool thing about it is the genre: renai and peddling simulation. AWESOME. I want to PEDDLE MY LOVE to a strange pseudo-pre-Renaissance Europe.

Apparently it also comes with a Horo character song CD, a Horo poster, and Horo’s pouch. Definitely want. May 29th! Whee!

There is absolutely nothing to see here.