my constant anime ingestion continues…so i thought i’d do a follow-up post about whats been piquing my interest. im still sifting thru my collection too. my supply is far past my ability to consume…yar! must…watch…faster.

toradora! | ya…still going. up to episode 21 and its still a good series.

sekirei | if you like boobs the size of small children, this is your anime. mildly brainless, but the fight scenes are well animated. otherwise nothing exemplary.

fate/stay night | i’d seen alot of figures for fate/stay all over akihabara, so i thought hmm…a series with this many devoted figures (that weren’t all in skanky outfits…*cough* witchblade) couldnt be that bad. and yea…whats the opposite of suck? oh right…awesome. this series is awesome. really well written and animated.

tetsuwan birdy | voted anime with the best gravity-defying outfits…her clothes are glued to her! but besides that tho, its still a pretty good anime. story could be a bit under-explained at times, but i suppose thats ok since its just the first season (season 2 is currently ongoing). its also by the creator of patlabor, so it couldnt be that bad. and regardless of the near-limitless opportunities provided by the premise (boy killed, has spirit implanted in hot female aliens body) and the aforementioned glued-on outfits, its not even the least bit ecchi. like, not even a little…i was surprised (and ok, just a little disappointed). oh, and its by a-1, who also did kannagi mentioned in the last anime post. yea, theyre awesome.

code geass | holy shit. just like…watch it. both seasons too. brilliant story. im man enough to admit i cried a little. even the stupid pizza hut product placements couldnt blemish this series the slightest.

xam’d lost memories | still watching this series, but its pretty good. its by bones (eureka, full metal alchemist), which means at the very least the animations top-notch. its definitely got a miyazaki-vibe to it too…with the production design, characters, etc (one of the female protagonists has more than a passing resemblance to nausicaa).

edit | just finished it. what the fuck just happened?

koihime musou | looked like brainless fun with girls fighting each other in ancient china. ill get around to finishing it sometime…

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one thing i have been doing however for a while is getting back into anime. i was more or less out of the loop for a while…i think the last series i got was noein. but i4 sort of got me back into anime (inadvertently) when he gave me macross frontier. since then i’ve just been rolling thru series after series. some really good, some fucking terrible. seriously theres panty shots everywhere. apparently every single female character can only wear mini-skirts now (and in some cases, dont even wear pants)…who knew? i’ll also freely admit to digging the romance comedy genre. i know, i just damned myself…

stuff i’ve watched recently…

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and now for some entertainment! for me, theres always been something wrong with fat white people cosplaying. dont get me wrong…i think its great anime cultures as prevalent as it is here. i just really never wanted to see what cloud looked like if he were 50 pounds overweight and ate deep-fried twinkies for breakfast.

anyhoo…anime expo 2006 is in affect! not-as-cute fat white people cosplaying japanese characters ftw! but hey…when it works, it works.

its kind of odd…this time last year i was buying asian cinema left and right because of a lack of anime. now theres a noticeable lag in asian dvds i want, and concurrently a significant number of anime series i now want. how does that work? so having just gotten back my federal tax returns, i fig’d that it was coo for me to go out and get meself a new anime series. (woo!) so i got around to picking up last exile from otaku den, a (relatively) new series from gonzo, the studio that made blue submarine no.6. last exile takes place in a world called prestale, where two dominant nations, anatore and dusis, are at war with each other. their battles however take place in the sky, between giant flying battlecruisers, vanships (aircraft), and riflemen who fire broadsides reminiscent of naval battles. two vanship couriers, claus and his friend and navigator lavi, get caught up in the war when they take on a “cargo” of a little girl named alvie, who is being pursued by a third arbiter party…the guild.

while ill admit to being a sucker for airships and industrial-era designs, the whole story, design, and execution of last exile is just absolutely coo. the look of last exile is both familiar and original…much of the design takes cues from a broad range of influences, including turn of the century 1900’s, weimar germany, napoleonic france, and everything in between. they even have chocobo racing! chocobos yo…i swear. the storys coo too, but thats a given. im just nearing the halfway point, and the story is still picking up (with no indication of slowing down…)

> official last exile page (dead?)
> last exile info page

after having finished off the slightly inconclusive anime series neo ranga last week, i moved onto this new series last nite…haibane renmei. id read about it in the past, partly because its from yoshitoshi abe of lain and neia fame, but mostly because its an anime about angels. well…kind of. but anyone who knows me probably knows i have this odd predilection for all things angel-related. the story begins with a girl…rakka, who dreams shes falling from the sky, and then finds herself emerging from a cocoon. she meets a group of haibanes, “angels” with wings and halos who cant seem to remember their past or even their own names (theyre named for the dream they have. rakka just means “falling”). but they all live in a walled town and go about their daily lives with the other non-haibane denizens of the town.

odd premise, and ive only gone thru the first disc. but the series is pretty interesting, and a smidge quirky. case in point…haibane arent “borne” with a halo, theyre given one when they first emerge. rakkas doesnt want to stay over her head when she first gets it…so they jury-rig a head piece to keep it in place til it does. it then causes her hair to stick up from static electricity, and she later finds out that the “mold” they made her halo from was also used as a pancake iron by another haibane, hikari. hehe. im not sure what direction the anime will take…knowing abe, it will take a definitive turn for the contemplative. but im already taking to the series. thumbs up so far. ill hopefully finish off the series by next week, since its a rather short series.

> haibane renmei