Warning: Do not see this movie immediately before a longish freeway drive home. Doing so may result in speeding tickets and/or death by trying to flip off the freeway.

Also, epileptics may want to skip out.

Insert opening joke about LSD here! Yes, the Speed Racer movie is incredibly vibrant in its visuals, with plenty of slapstick and gags and goofy facial expressions that I’m willing to bet will be off-putting to some. It’s…dare I say it?…cartoony. Gloriously so.

If you go into this movie expecting some kind of deep, serious, or even witty film, you will be disappointed: Speed Racer is none of these things. However, if you’re the sort of person who can throw off all the elitist pretentions and just sit back and enjoy a fun, over-the-top action flick, you won’t have wasted your money– though I fear you IMAX goers may find yourselves getting a little motion sick in some of the scenes.

I didn’t think it was anywhere near as bad as critics seem to be saying, such as MSNBC’s Alonso Duralde, who I’m only mentioning because I do really like his suggestion that the film is like “pouring hot, melted Starburst candies into your corneas.”

It’s light on plot, and some of the dialogue is pretty iffy (”Inspector Detector suspected that…” Yeah, right). The bad guys are decidedly of the black-hat sort, although there’s a reason why the good guys’ helmets have racing stripes instead of being pure white– I’d argue that our hero Speed becomes even more aggressive and violent as the film continues. But there are a lot of fun references to the original show (such as the cameo from original Speed dub voice actor Peter Fernandez, the repeated refrain of the “go speed racer go-oooo” bit of the anime’s theme, and little brother Spritle watching a subtitled Japanese show) and there’s more than enough to feast your eyes on at any given moment.

Not to say it was perfect; some of Spritle’s antics are a little too predictable (like the candy obsession), and for all that Christina Ricci is amazingly hot, her performance felt a little too tongue-in-cheek, wink-at-the-screen at a couple of moments for me…though it’s nice to see Trixie get a couple of badass moments in as well.

John Goodman as Pops was a fantastic casting idea, and they throw you for a nice little loop with Racer X at one point as well. Korean pop star Rain is fun to watch in his role as rival/ally Taego Tojohkan (oh yeah, there’s a bunch of shady Japanese companies involved– this is cars, after all –and a Korean guy obviously might as well be Japanese, right?), albeit largely for his attractive face and that really awesome black-with-pink-streaks ‘do.

I think you may be sensing the theme here: Speed Racer will not weigh down your brain in any way, shape, or form, nor is it supposed to. If you even notice the plot, you may decide it’s just getting in the way of all the pretty, shiny things. But the pretty, shiny things are extremely pretty and shiny, so it’s a fun watch– especially with a group of friends and a really big screen. I’m afraid we probably ticked off some of the people in the theater with our little whispered MST3K channeling. Oops.

A well-written editorial detailing why anime sucks and its fans should have their reproductive rights revoked (or something) has appeared, and it’s always fun for me to read these, because the people who write them know so little about anime.

For example, this quote: “…stuff like Dragonball Z is nothing more than a glorified cartoon about trading cards.” Now, I don’t defend DBZ. I’ve always thought it was a crappy show. But “about trading cards”? There IS a DBZ TCG, but at least the anime was based on a manga that was developed on its own, as opposed to, say, a series that was developed as a toy line first. Or, you know, another one. Or another one.

Moving along…he then says that anime fans always bring up Miyazaki as a Deus Ex Machina to close down any anti-anime arguments. But you know, I wouldn’t– I’d offer up Paprika, by Satoshi Kon, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

The writer finishes up by chastising us for having a Miyazaki collection and a copy of Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend and encourages us to “get out of the house and meet some real, normal people with hair and eyes in proper proportion to their heads.” Like guys who waste their time trying to prove that all anime fans are “social outcast Neo-Goth types”? I don’t think so.

But you know, for a guy who talks about how gleefully he bought the Animatrix, and who has actually watched enough Dragon Ball Z to know how bad it is, and actually knows of Urotsukidoji, and seems to have seen Akira and 3×3 Eyes as well…hey, wait a sec. You’re one of us!

ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ♥

So. Borders isn’t doing so hot and Barnes & Noble is thinking of buying up their store fronts. This is bad for manga, because B&N doesn’t like manga. This is extra-bad for fans of mature titles and BL, because B&N REALLY doesn’t like them. In fact, I’d suggest that they only reason that they carry the limited selection of them that they do is to keep them competitive with Borders, so if they buy Borders…*cough* Yeah.

But wait! An idea appears! From none other than Yamila Abraham, who suggests that Borders find a way to turn itself into, primarily, a seller of graphic novels.

At first it sounds like just a happy manga fan pipe dream, but she makes the very valid point that bookstores have too much other product to really cover the fans, and so do most comic book shops.

Now, I think most Borders locations would probably be a bit oversized for just graphic novels, and I presume that they rent their space (i.e. can’t physically divide it into multiple stores and lease off the other spots), so perhaps they’d have to share it– perhaps with comic book shops, game stores, and other geek industry?

Or just regular stuff? Who knows. It’s a cool idea, but if Borders has money trouble I don’t see how they could do it unless someone invested a bunch of money for them to do so. But hey, I can dream.

A fellow named Kirk Bangstad wrote up this article about how the growing interest in anime and manga has led to a ton of kids joining art schools to learn to draw so that they can make anime and manga.

Frankly, it’s an incredibly poorly-written article full of no new information, but I thought I’d use it as a stepping stone: any of you guys art students? My best friend went to the San Francisco Academy of Art University; her style isn’t very manga-like anymore, but I think it’s still part of where she started drawing. Anyone else inspired into art by manga and anime?

Okay, I know a lot of you are aware that Bandai Entertainment and Bandai Visual USA are two different, only distantly related companies that release anime in the US, but I keep coming across people who refer to “Bandai” as the hideous monster that charges $16 an episode.

So, here we go, kids: Bandai Entertainment vs Bandai Visual USA, the short version.

	Bandai Entertainment	Bandai Visual USA
Founded:	1998	January 2005
Recent licenses:	Code Geass, Lucky Star, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time	Shigofumi, True Tears, sola, HaruToki
‘07 DVD output*:	74	22
Background:	Bandai Entertainment Inc. started putting out DVDs under Bandai’s AnimeVillage.com label before being established as its own label in 1999. Like most anime companies in the US, BEI licenses series from a variety of companies throughout Japan, including ones that are not related to its parent company, Bandai Visual Japan. They also sometimes arrange to distribute titles for other companies in the US; for example, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is actually licensed by Kadokawa Pictures USA, owner Kadokawa Shoten’s US arm. They outsourced the production and distribution to BEI.	Bandai Visual USA is Bandai Visual Japan’s direct arm in the US, and as such the titles they release are all produced by Bandai Visual in Japan. Its output is much smaller than BEI’s, and all of its releases are sub-only. BVU has hit a lot of difficulty amongst anime fans because although they take on such fan-fave titles as Gunbuster and Super Robot Wars, their DVDs are very expensive– often on par with the prices in Japan. BVU seems to be broadening its offerings to include more moe series as well as their more typical sci-fi and adventure series.

* Total number of DVDs released in 2007.

Some of you may remember that Arthur Smith, the President of GDH International (parent company of Gonzo), provided some of the kindling that has set the fansub debate on fire throughout the innernubs. And at last, Smith himself has responded to the buzz.

He has one very valid point, that a lot of people assumed based on the ActiveAnime interview that he was doing nothing about the piracy problem when in fact he has been pushing for faster releases and even subtitled episodes from JP companies for some time now. But most of the rest? Honestly, I have to say that I think he mostly answered the straw man comments (for those not in a philosophy class, the weakest arguments / weakest versions of arguments).

He addressed why it takes so long to get shows to the U.S. from Japan, some of which is valid but the rest is mostly just corporate politics and back-and-forth mucking about. If the various companies’ system of dealing with each other prevents the product from coming out when it best suits the market, perhaps a new system is in order?

He also addressed the suggestion I (and many others) made about Japanese companies jumping over the heads of U.S. ones and releasing some materials directly. His argument against that went something along these lines: the U.S. anime companies made anime big with their efforts, and now we need to pay too much money for DVDs that come out too late.

Nuh-uh, sir. I won’t deny that the U.S. companies have done a lot and spent a lot of money to help make anime as big as it is today, but we don’t owe them back pay for that or something. Anime DVDs aren’t pro-rated. If they can’t come out with the product when and how the fans want it then their sales will suffer. I’m not saying that justifies piracy, only that it seems like a pretty silly way to run a business.

He DOES make the valid point that the U.S. companies are better equipped to get anime on TV, dub it, etc. But the system I saw most suggested (and suggested myself) didn’t preclude anime being licensed to U.S. companies for dubbing and television broadcasting– only from quickie subtitling. Which they’re not doing anyway!

So, there you have it. I’m not making any personal attacks on GDH or Arthur Smith– whose attempts to push forward ideas for getting anime out faster and better I absolutely appreciate. I am, however, pointing out that much of his defenses of the industry seem to rest on “this is how the industry is,” without mention of the fact that it doesn’t HAVE to be that way (particularly on the timing front).

Wow, that was long. Oh, and I almost forgot: double question marks and exclamation points do not look professional!!??

Original source: ANN

Warning: yaoi be discussed here.

But Yaoi Press president Yamila Abraham posted to her blog about an e-mail she got from a bisexual guy who is into yaoi and doesn’t like the “by women for women” women’s-only-club feel the subgenre gets.

At first I’m inclined to say, “well, it IS.” Not that guys aren’t ALLOWED to like it - anyone who says as much is an idiot - but the fact of the matter is it IS almost always by women, and it IS created with women as the target market. Right?

But Abraham notes that 25-30% of her web orders for yaoi come from guys, which is quite a bit more than I would have expected. I certainly know a handful of guys into the stuff, but not that many. However, she also says that she has never had a gay guy not like yaoi, and I have also definitely known a few who thought it was terrible stuff.

So yeah, torn. I’ll repeat that I think trying to exclude male fans from yaoi is really stupid. But do they have a legitimate complaint when people market a genre created almost entirely by women for women as such? I dunno.

Current Mood:  Annoyed

In the general run of things, I avoid dubs, on the grounds that they virtually always sound retarded to me.But since I started working at aO, where any number of dub fans hang around, I’ve been trying to be a bit more open-minded about them, y’know? So when a friend of mine sent me a link to some clips from the new Rozen Maiden dub saying that it was actually quite good, I checked it out.

…Oh…the misery… Read the rest of this entry »