No I'm not dead... it's worse.

I have been in actual MBA grad-school here in Tokyo since the end of summer and what not. I actually haven't slept since then other than the few times from passing out over accounting records from exhaustion. If you're wondering, the school is called "Hitotsubashi" and if you're still wondering, then just google it. I'm now a member of Josui Kaikan, and will be attending the awarding of the Porter Prize. So yeah, I've been busy.

So in the world of anime, blah blah blah some stuff happened and yeah whatever. Listen people, Japanese Graduate University takes up all your time and then makes you borrow more from people you know and makes you its bitch. There was lots of stuff I wanted to post about, but just couldn't. There is lots of stuff I want to subtitle and get out there, but it's gonna take some more time. That's just the way it is. On the up-side, My campus is right next to Shogakukan HQ here in Tokyo and I go over there to study their business model sometimes. It's amazing what just dropping this school name can do.

So yes, there shall be posts again, but not until after finals. @_@.

地震, 地震, everwhere a 地震

OK, so 3 earthquakes in 6 days and all of a sudden these signs are everywhere around Shinjuku.



Yeah, that's just what I want to see the morning after my alarm clock was replaced with my apartment doing an impersonation of a martini shaker at 5am. Something that reminds me about the current anime based on the end of the world magnitude earthquake that the news keeps telling me we're overdue for.





Also, the Tokyo Toy Show video is not as awesome as to be acceptable to our standards.... (that may mean what you think it means), so it's coming from another source. Stand by.

Naruto 10th Anniversary video game preview

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The next episode of Tokyo Mirror at Animepodcast.net will have game play footage of the upcoming Naruto Shippuden Game: ナルト : 龍刃記.

Tokyo Toy Show Preview

A bit of a preview:

One may die

So the other may live.

Well it’s not that messianic, but it seems official that the Akira live action film is totally DOA as of a little while ago. I think I can participate in the collective sigh of relief with much of the movie watching community to know that “Akira” will not go the way of Speed Racer, Dragon Ball, and Street Fighter, and descend into the collective utter crap-fest that is the cinematic evolutionary branch of “Hollywood Re-make.” Such a feeling however, must be tinted with a shade of regret for what might have been. Could an Akira live action be a good movie? Sure it could. Would it have been? Almost assuredly not. The only way to make it a good movie, would be to re-make it, shot for shot, with as much of the original story intact as possible. What would have happened though, is the inevitable “new vision” or “updating” or “tweaking for a new audience” that would have run roughshod over any actual script/technical advisers they had on the project… if any. I could see an ending where some Caucasian looking Kaneda modding his motorcycle A-Team style with rockets controlled by a PSP or some shit, for a final showdown with Tetsuo who doesn’t have psychic powers or a disgruntled anti-social youth culture mind set, rather he’s been taken over by some A.I. which runs all of future-mega-tokyo-robot-land and slowly turns him into a cyborg which allows him to do shit like fling garbage trucks at Kaneda while rolling down a highway all i-Robot style as he rides on his future-bike to the center of the city to finally free his kidnapped love interest who was invented for the movie and is played by played by Kristin Kreuk. And they wonder why people don’t bother going to movies anymore. Thank you “Legend of Chun Li.”

But whenever the noodly appendage closes a door, the great Flying Spaghetti Monster opens a can of awesome somewhere else. Futurama is finally getting the Family Guy treatment and is getting some new episodes made. I like Futureama a lot, but after feeling so fucked over (not as bad as “who is Cartman’s Father fucked over, but fucked over none the less) by the Family Guy “DVD Movie” (that shit was so bad I actually gave it away in front of a Best Buy to prevent someone from buying it and wasting their own money), I didn’t get that into the Futurama “movies” even though they were cleaver, a fun watch, and animated just fine. But, I am happy about this new development and hoping for Hulu distribution, even though from here in Tokyo I have to keep going to new lengths just to get around Hulu’s international filtering bullshit (FYI it works better if you… wait, no they’ll probably find out about that just that much faster if I spill the beans here). I know what you’re thinking and don’t even start.

The resurrection of Futurama is a positive outcome of an otherwise dismal development of producers being terrified of new and creative ideas in Entertainment, aka “Hollywood is out of Ideas,” which is so awesome when you see smart new films like “The Hangover” beat total shiat like “Land of the Lost.” It’s not that I want to see movie theaters go away, but they are the single only collective group which still enables the MPAA and their stifiling of the creative process. Labels and studios would gladly leave those fuck-wads in the dust if theater box office receipts dipped low enough to make them less relevant. The fact that the MPAA is a private and not a government organization will allow movie makers to drop their participation in the “voluntary” rating system without a single bit of interference.

But the “out of ideas” disease is unfortunately in full swing here in the land of Otaku culture as well, as we get ready for more reboots. One which I am particularly loathe to see is the Azumanga Daioh manga republication. It’s the same story… drawn again. This time however the art is disturbing much more on the Yotsuba side of things. Now artists can get better and one look at the early atrocities of Kozuke Fujishima when compared to later works, show that this is an almost universally good thing (except for Rumiko Takahashi who has gotten worse, and Masamune Shiro who went from meh to awesome to crazy). Not in this case however, where the signature style of what made Azumanga Azumanga are gone, only to be replaced with what looks like lazy practice drawing. The notion that time and money are going into something we’ve seen before and not something new. You can see Azuma’s poor excuse about pulling a George Lucas on the series on his personal site here (Japanese). Look for the new and improved Azumanga Daioh anime to have the airgun replaced with a walkie talkie in the matsuri scene, and for the character of Tomoe to be played by Jar Jar Binks.

If it sells books then great, but if the story is the same and the art has less detail, then I’d rather have something I haven’t read before.

Paris is Burning

See it before it's declared Obscene.

The case of Christopher Handley has ended not unexpectedly, with results that put commercial artists, manga collectors, and everyone with an internet connection in the cross-hairs of a potential witch hunt perpetrated at the discretion of the self appointed people's puritan protectionist police on the front lines of what they like to call “the culture war” but what most of us who live here in reality call “you’re too old and can’t handle things in the outside world now go back inside, you’re missing ‘The Factor.’”

The guilty plea in this case is very much the worst possible outcome for members of the public, much worse than if he had been found guilty by a jury. Oh sure, the sentence is reduced and he isn’t facing the same severity as he would have if he had been convicted which is a real possibility since from what I hear he had some stuff nasty enough to make the admins over at Encyclopedia Dramatica look like members of the Bristol Pailin abstinence movement. With an uppity District Attorney waving federal charges and threatening the worst if he has to show grandma on the jury those nasty pictures and how poor little Chris’s ass has no chance of coming out of this unscathed, to expect a real fight was probably too optimistic looking back. So he may have received the best legal advice for his own individual case, but in reality it was the worst decision that could have been made. Because a guilty verdict has something that goes with it which a guilty plea does not: a chance to appeal. Appellate courts are great arenas for this kind of thing to be sorted out when it comes to legal vaguery being taken too far, and are now something that Handley will not have access to unless he can prove he was unduly influenced into taking a plea. My entire education in legal matters comes from watching every season of Law & Order 5 times and reading Fark way too much, and even I can tell that this guilty plea legitimizes a law which has “unconstitutional” written all over it. In the past, obscenity legislation of this type was used to criminalize possession of novels, and would always depend on the interpreting the meaning of “obscene” which means different things to different people, and therefore has no place in legal regulations of any kind. I don’t know what leverage they had on this Handley guy, but his guilty plea is really going to screw the next poor sucker they decide to make an example of (I am thinking a police raid on a furry convention).

So now we have a person, being treated like a criminal engaging in a criminal act with a criminal instrument, only it’s not really that, and somewhere someone is abusing an actual child, not a drawing of one. I am sure the police originally thought that they were going to find actual child pornography that this guy had, and when they didn’t, they decided to go for it and punish this guy anyway because cops aren’t about to use up their time and miss out on the reward of putting someone in jail, you can’t expect them to really be capable of proper behavior in legal matters. The blame for this most recent erosion of constitutional rights has got to land 50/50 on the idiots who actually wrote it, and Handley himself for selling out on a very important duty to set a legal precedent. When what is legal or not comes down to a matter of opinion, even if that opinion is a popular one and generally accepted, it is still opinion (I’m not taking about what is legally considered “expert” opinion). Since assessing the age of a cartoon character is both subjective, and technically impossible it can not be the basis for enforcement of a law. How old is Bart Simpson? He was in 4^th grade in 1987… so was I, yet I can buy beer and he can’t. You know why? Because he’s not real he’s an abstract concept, a fictional character. If I draw him getting shot, I won’t be booked for murder, and although the equivalent of this case’s imagery is unpleasant to think about, criminal proceedings for “abusing Bart Simpson” are just as ludicrous as a murder charge.


For further reading on some of the specifics of the case, Matt Thorn has compiled a linked list to not only some of the actual court documents in the case, but other opinions more informed than my own. Which you can find here.

Thanks to Sirkowski for not only pushing the boundaries of epic win in his delightfully offensive Miss Dynamite series, but also for clearly illustrating that when all that separates a sketch of regular internet jiggle, from part of a felony criminal enterprise is a word bubble, then there’s something wrong with the law.

Last warning about the NSFW thing... I mean it.


Click here for boobies.

If you live in Iran, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, The People’s Democratic Republic of (North) Korea, Sudan, Bangladesh, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or The United States of America (what’s wrong with this list?), you’re now a criminal.

www.sirkowski.com (contains pr0nz) and www.missdynamite.com (contains less pr0nz.) Dude if I can ever get the right kind of funding I am totally coming to you regarding a 3 hour animated feature.

This is a slightly more ballsy version of the original inspiration, a similar piece also on Sirkowski's site in the gallery section (link), credited to tekena1200.

Is Paris Burning?

The departure of CPM and the new “anime” world order (no, not those three).

So CPM exit stage-whatever can come as not really a surprise, since if you just look at their sales and acquisitions, and combine that with the fact that they were a home media company, and not a media-media company (I’ve written about that set of cosmic rules too many times already). I am actually surprised that this took as long as it did. Next on the block, I’d put Media Blasters, since they’re already being sued by Color West Inc, in what I can only assume is going to be a growing list of bills that don’t get paid. Rather than imploding, I see them moving to a much cheaper city/state, and dropping a lot of anime in favor of live action cult schlock. That scenario is no guarantee though, and they very well might go the way of the dodo within a year. Is this “early retirement” for CMP’s master and commander? It could be… but after talking to the JOD himself at this year’s TAF, there might be something to come from this yet. Time will tell, and the market will either be there or it won’t.

Next on the agenda is this thing. I can’t say anything about it… I want to care, I really do, but after the crap that was BGC 2040, and the swine flu celluloid abortions of both Dragon Ball and The Legend of Chun Li, I just can’t get excited about this project at all, no matter how much I love BGC. This live action project has some things going for it, and some things against it. So far, Hollywood isn’t involved, but this is a neutral aspect, since if they are going for a combined Western/Asian cast, you’ll probably want to have actors that can actually act… and if you’ve ever seen a Japanese or Korean movie with gaijin actors in it before, you know that it all too often looks like they just grabbed someone off the street. So if they want good actors, a Hollywood Studio might work its way into the project, and then the story, designs, and everything good about the concept will die right there as they demand changes for the post 9/11 American consumerist SUV driving movie theater audience that somehow manages to pump money into pieces of pure cinematic shit like Ghost Rider or Wanted. Seriously, who pays money to watch these things? Well as time goes by, we’ll see if this is even real (remember in 1999 there was all that “live action Ninja Scroll” talk… still waiting on that one).

So the holdouts are running out of ammo, and the Russian winter is closing in on the anime market as we know it. Some big boys will still be left, but most things are going to fundamentally change. It is the rebuilding of the decimated landscape and the form it will take which is going to have far reaching effects for years to come. In the absence of any kind of Martial Plan for the new way of doing things, there will be a few major directions we can see from our very early vantage point;
A new, old-world-order, where properties are rarely licensed and domestic productions continue to follow the American dumbed down style with few notable exceptions like Avatar and Teen Titans and so on. Previously, this kind of thing was spoon-fed to a captive audience, when fansubs were available to only an intrepid few who knew how many VHS tapes could fit in a Tyvec priority envelope. With fansubbers out there now doing their best to devalue a license the moment a show hits the air and take money away from the creators and rightful owners, it will be interesting to see if that ongoing will effect the popularity or potential of domestic American animation (once it pulls its head out of it’s ass and stops making pure shit). Or will we have a new version of media delivery which allows anime producers to circumvent the losses they currently incur with fansubbers devaluing their licenses, which will allow them to make more money to make better titles, and also actually take the American market into account. It is interesting to hear American otaku audiences complain about a lack of input and effect on the Japanese production companies, when it is this same otaku audience that is blatantly consuming the product while at the same time pumping exactly $0 back into the system. It’s a big market, but an unprofitable one, so why should producers cater to it?

There are a few factions that are racing to get their version of the next step in Anime market evolution across the finish line first. With dubbing into English now seen as more of an option rather than a requirement when courting a large enough American audience, the rules of the game have definitely changed. That’s why I would watch what Crunnchyroll (and other services like it that may pop up) does pretty closely. They have a shot at something, but it’s no slam dunk.

Omake:
Quick trip to FUKUOKA... it's a happenin' place.

These times they are a’ changin’

The Fall of Cartoon Network; More Network than Cartoon.

A large entry in the “we saw this coming” category for 2009, Cartoon Network has finally let their mission statement die a horrible death after languishing away for a year or two on Terri Schiavo life support. Cartoon Network has decided that animation is not really where it’s at, and has announced plans to decimate both their regular programming and Adult Swim lineup. Now, while Adult Swim had long since been killed by the likes of Squidbillies, Giant Baby, Assey McGee, Tom goes to see the poop, Saul of the Mole Men, Super Jail, and all that crap (I never thought a show on Adult Swim would be so bad that I’d long for the return of Stroker and Hoop), this represents a real sift in the overall direction of the channel, much more so than a bit of live action here and there. The only channel out there right now that could provide animated content for audiences over 5 years old (save for Nick’s Avatar, but that’s over and done with) is now on it’s way to being “not so much.”

Along with Sci Fi jumping on the dumbing-down "marketing genius" bandwagon, CN is going to get the same type of ratings they had before (since it has more to do with who’s free at what time of day rather than the actual content that will effect viewership) but may end up spending less money here and there. What is truly detrimental about this development, is now there will be a much more limited venue for commercial animation as a viable entertainment product. So unless the actual animation pulls in some noticeably higher numbers than the live action crap that is on every other channel, we might see a format change coming up for the now-in-limbo “Cartoon” Network.

The departure of CN chief Jim Samples, due to the fact that people in Boston managed to show the world how retarded they are back in January of 2007, has left the door at CN wide open to business school zombies who can’t think for themselves, and we are now going to suffer the results. CN will now be run according to some dimwit business formula taught in college business courses by fast talking advertising execs that needed extra income so they connived some university board into letting them teach courses. It may be for the best, if animation continues tosuffer due to the economic situation, live action might help keep the actual channel alive - but it will never be the same. Although it is possible that CN will rebound and go back to what worked, I am not optimistic.

Tokyo Omake:

More helicopter flyovers caught on camera from my apartment balcony.
Can anyone identify what kind of craft these are?


Other Updates,

GIANT GUNDAM:

Anime News Network has reported that there will be a life-size 1/1 scale Gundam constructed and put on display in the Odaiba area of Tokyo, in Shiokaze park in an article here. The article however doesn't mention specifics, so here are some of the details.

According to Green Tokyo, the Gundam will be unveiled on July 11th and stay up through August 31, and according to progress reports the skeleton legs are up as of now.

The Gundam sculpture will displayed in Odaiba's Shiokaze Park (潮風公園) just north of the Tokyo Maritime Science Museum. It is accessable via the Yurikamome monorail line (NOT to be confused with the Tokyo Monorail) at either the Daiba station on the north end or Fune-no-kagukukan station at the south end of the park.

This amazing exhibition is something that I and hopefully some of the rest of team あ!PoN will be covering for those of you who can't make it over to Tokyo.

(Artist Depiction)

Welcome to the layer cake

Where anime fits in the scheme of things.

In a few words, not high on the ladder… not high at all. Here in Tokyo, the makers of Crayon Shin-chan (or Shinchan as Adult Swim watchers simply know it) have been pouring on the promotion pretty heavily for the new shows that are coming out. This show is still one of Japan’s most popular anime series. Now I know some otaku out there are going … “what about Gurren Lagann and all the stuff I like?” Well, no, check the list. The kinds of titles that are “huge” in the fansubber world can not even come close to generating the kind of regularity of viewership that the popular-in-Japan animated series pull in every week, and Shin-chan is one of them. For a little more current info on what I’m talking about, check out the sidebar (top-bar actually) to the most current numbers.

This has been one of the major stumbling blocks in unifying the Japanese domestic market and the rest of the world. When the Japanese government announced that it was giving $4million to a Russian firm for a Doreamon project, I can imagine one third of AWO saying “do they really need that for something like Doreamon? Is that even still around?” um, from those of us in the real world: YES!!!!! It’s because of Japan’s own conceptions of what their strong IPs are that they decide to fund what they fund.

So Asahi TV has been hyping their broadcast of the new Shinchan like there’s no tomorrow. This promo has been playing for a few weeks now on the channel, and lots of web promotion and tieins. They even hauled that gaijin that does the enka who’s really popular now. This is where shinchan’s parents turn into animals and all this funny stuff happens.

So, what are viewers of Asahi TV treated to when Friday April 17^th rolls around? Figure Skating. Yep, the 2^nd most popular anime in Japan, got bumped for figure skating not once, but twice, because why? Well some programming genious thought that instead of Friday, they would air Crayon Shinchan there… where it got bumped for Figure Skating! Again!

Now, I was really planning on watching this show and then I decided to check the interwebs for information about what’s going on? Asahi TV’s Shinchan website has this big button on it, which indicates that if you click on it the TV schedule will be displayed. So in doing so, I was presented with a big screen that said (English equivalent) “CATCH SHINCHAN EVERY FRIDAY AT 7:30 ON ASAHI TV!” …So I am thinking, maybe there’s some extra things in the smaller notes of the section, where I found nothing but the same thing reiterated again.

So the only conclusion to draw, is that TV Asahi preempted Shinchan and never bothered to even put out a bit of info. In fact, that “TV Schedule section” of the website is now living somewhere else.




So the sad fact, is that yes, us anime fans must not forget where the programs, industry, and the fan’s impact is according to mainstream media. Which is not awesome enough to not have it canceled for figure skating. Now are more people actually watching figure skating than Shinchan? No it’s probably around the same, BUT what’s not the same, is the rates that TV Asahi can charge for advertising during Figure Skating, along with the added pressure from the sponsors of the actual event (those signs on the side of the rink get a LOT of airtime, and don’t think JAL isn’t putting pressure on someone when that happens.

Today is another Friday, and my Japanese TV Guide is telling me that Shinchan is going to be on (and I plan to record the show on my cellphone, which you can do in Japan were everything is from the future). What will be even more interesting will be to find out if viewers will be shown the bumped episode, or the one in the original schedule? We shall see.

Paying for my sins.

This post is filler content.

Oh yes dear readers, after a quite literally sobering moment in which one realizes that they may indeed be running out of chances to turn their life around from the mess they’ve worked so hard to make it, I had a visit from an old nemesis of mine, one; Sal Monella. Now me and Sal don’t go way back, I’ve only encountered this scourge once before, less than a year ago when I unfortunately ended up passing him on to two other people. Sal has this ninja like ability to hide in the most unexpected places (Damn you import store!).

Long story short, I am now coming off of being incapacitated. It was a quick battle which had me claiming epic victory much faster than the last time (which had taken almost a week). The reason you may ask? One Mr. Jack Daniels you may be thinking? Contrary to popular belief, he can’t really help you in this situation, he’ll just make it worse. No, this ongoing situation was brought to a quicker (though no less painful) end, by one Yakult-san. So Samurai Yakult, I salute you.



In the mean time, there wasn’t much to do but gaze out the window while in-between rounds of microbial combat. And that’s when I noticed that Jack friggin Bauer was here in Tokyo at their missile command. Now living across the street from a missile launch and control site in heavily populated Shinjuku Tokyo was not something I was going to expect to happen. So I thought it was even cooler when 9 helicopters started making the rounds above the building the other day, accompanied by black unmarked cars with the gumball emergency lights swarming through the area. This was pretty cool.

Stay tuned.