Eugene Woodbury, best translator of the Juuni Kokki novels, occasionally blogs about other things.

On Plastic Little, and strong buttkicking but still sexual women in anime, vs. a minor presence on TV and near absence in modern movies.

The geopolitical sophistication of My Zhime/Mai Otome.

Geeks in love, rambling over to Japan's temporal closeness to its feudal roots, and un-fossilized tradition.

I've seen the end of the second Youko arc like four times, and I still wanted to applaud. And I'm not the only one who finds it surprisingly dense, in the good sense of "so much has happened surely this was 40 minutes, not 20?" Though as someone noted, in a sense nothing *happens*, action-wise; it's all talking or declarations or arrests. But awesome talking.

House: in process of being sold. Barring nothing going wrong.
House contents: sold to bookstores; taken away for auctioning; left behind for presumed next owner to pick over and have hauled away; taken away to long term storage; being FedExed to me. As of just yesterday for the last, and I came home today to find a delivery note on my door. That was fast!
Me: in need of a couple months of twelve-hour sleepnights. Funded for next year, and assigned to C/assembly language rather than "teaching HTML and Excel to the unwilling masses".

( After this, the deluge )

Just watched Laputa. Pretty good. Thoughts:

It's Gort!
Who attacks places that can make Gort? (This is later answered.)
It looks like Cagliostro! And now Nausicaa!
Gee, even when his heroines look different, they end up looking alike.
Oh no!
Oh, okay.

Then I checked the "Behind the Microphone" special, which taught me that:
the English dubs still make me cringe
the English dubs sound like they had a different translator than the subtitles
James van der Beek aka Dawson of the eponymous Creek is Pazu and doesn't sound too bad, unlike who ever did Lucita.
Mark Hamill aka Luke Skywalker plays Muska

IMDB tells me Hamill's done a lot of TV and voice actor work. (Including in Nausicaa.) I guess his performance as Luke didn't launch him onto a great acting career.
IMDB also tell me Lucita was Anna Paquin. Wait, I like Anna Paquin! She's Rogue! Now I need to listen to Laputa and X-Men together and see if I'm right that dubbing is meant to sound horrible.

One nice thing about the anime "Karin", about a blood-making vampire: it features a complete happy family. Karin has both parents and an older brother and a younger sister and they all live together and they all love her and each other, more or less. For that matter, they all have important roles in the show.

Not that the common pattern of dead parents is unrepresented: Usui's father is missing (I forget why, maybe a runaway), Wiener's mother may be dead, and Maki's just don't show up that I can remember, but at least Karin has a full set. And no, I won't count the parents as dead simply because they're all vampires.

(Context: the observation that TV shows tend to one or both parents of a young protagonist dead or disappeared. Buffy's father was distant and eventually gone, then mom died. Roswell had a single mom and two single dads, though a couple of sets, one even seen. Dawson's Creek had a lot of breakage. Commander Sisko of DS9 was a single dad. Scrapped Princess started with dead parents. Witch Hunter Robin was an orphan. Noein had a divorced and distant dad. Card Captor Sakura's mother is dead. Tsuki-yomi had two dead mothers and a dead father. The list could go on.)

(Hikaru turned out to have a father as well as a mother but this was after three seasons and surprised us all.)

(We never meet Suzumiya Haruhi's parents. I just wondered what they could possibly be like.)

(Thinking of Sisko made me realize one practical reason for killing parents might be to cut on cast size and costs.)

Arrive at the end of You're Under Arrest. Put on glasses. Note my vision seems extra blurry, assume it's grease. Go into the corridor, heading for the bathroom, take off glasses. Note that the frame is loose and one of the lenses is missing. Return to case, find lens there. After several minutes, manage to put lens back in, close frame, and screw tiny screw with fingernail. Make note to go to a glasses store anyway for checkup. Hope they do that sort of thing.

My Neighbor Totoro: happy cute movie, of a couple of girls moving to a new place and their relationship with the big "troll" mountain spirit and a giant cat-bus. Japan has the funnest religion ever.

Nausicaa of The Valley of the Wind: Good, but felt very different from the manga, though color made many of the visuals more intelligible. I think the plot is 1/4 of the manga, plus some God Warrior stuff which ended up being very different by the time Miyazaki finished the later volumes.

Josh showed us a title picture of Warriors of the Wind, some horrible Disney edit-dub of Nausicaa wherein they tried to turn it into an action flick; the picture has three men astride a God Warrior head, with the actual main character relegated to the upper right corner. This is why Miyazaki films didn't come to the US for a decade, I'm told.

Halfway through the anime club showings, actually near the end of a couple due to short runs, so what do I think?

A while back I listed the anime I'd seen at the time, including Lupin III: Castle Cagliostro. I thought I'd said more about it at the time, such as that I wish I could have been there when anima_mecanique saw the Grand Revelation for the first time, but apparently not. I liked it, though I wouldn't feel safe in analyzing why from memory. And I won't have to rely on memory, because somebody doing marketing for the newly released special edition (link is to a press release) contacted me, based on the earlier LJ entry, asking if I'd help out with their publicity in return for a free DVD, which arrived today. I smell viral marketing, but between open disclosure and the fact that I did like it (and all the other Miyazaki I've seen so far), I don't care.

Review to follow when I get a chance to watch it. Any locals want to join me?

I will make fun of the press release: I thought the big secret was rather older than 500 years and the Renaissance, though the protection mechanisms might have been Renaissance. I note the release French and Spanish get dubs, but no subtitles, which I'd have thought would be easier. And here's a wikipedia link on various releases of the film.

More breadcrumbs! Pollan, Sen, Chinese fantasies, manga, anime, webcrap, games.

Warm, light rain... kind of nice. I'm leaving my A/C on though, since without the rain it's just muggy. And of course there's a lower probability of a rainbow and a higher probability of a raging thunderstorm.

I feel like listing the anime, or cartoons in general, I've liked.

Childhood Saturday morning cartoons:
Robotech (anime-inspired) >> Transformers > everything else. I really liked that things happened on Robotech, there was a plot and drama, people changed, even died. Transformers, I dunno, there was a hint of change, and I liked the ambiguity between "Robots in Disguise" and "Robots in the Skies" as Decepticons flew over.