Older Anime

I've been rewatching Allison to Lillia recently after it came up during discussion in the Summer 2013 thread.  It's a 2008 anime based on the novel series Allison and its sequel series Lillia and Trieze.

The series is set in a world with one huge continent that is divided in two by mountains and a river.  To the East is the Roxche Confederation, to the West the United Kingdom of Bezel Iltoa or "Sou-Beil."  The peoples of the East and the peoples of the West have a long history of hostility and conflict, with the last major battle fought a mere ten years before the beginning of the series.

The initial protagonist is Wilhelm Schultz, a bookish seventeen year old boy with a photographic memory and a talent for sport shooting.  He intends to spend a peaceful summer in the vicinity of the school where he resides, but his plans are interrupted by the arrival of his brash and tomboy-ish childhood friend Allison Whittington, a newly minted pilot of the Roxche Air Force who decides to make a stopover at Wil's school while delivering a new trainer biplane.  She and Wil encounter an elderly local man who claims to know the location of a treasure that can end the war between Roxche and Sous-beil.  The old man has a reputation for telling tall tales, but when he is whisked away in a suspicious manner Allison decides to pursue the kidnappers across the border into Sous-beil -and Wil gets dragged along for the ride.

Allison to Lillia is a series I kind of like and one that I wanted to be great.  Unfortunately from what I've gathered the anime does not entirely do the source novels justice.  For one thing it glosses over the fact that Roxche and Sou-Beil speak separate languages.  In the books Wil and Allison were bilingual but not all the characters they met were -the ability of particular character to understand or not understand a language was sometimes important.  The anime's attempts to tone down the source material's violence also result in a number of ridiculous scenes.

In spite of this I still rather like the earlier parts of the series.  From what I can remember, it was largely the later parts of the series  (which I haven't finished watching this time around) that brought the show down.  It might not be entirely the source material's fault as it may be a matter of adaptation, but the second arc seemed to get pretty ridiculous at times.  The fact that the "new generation" of characters didn't seem to match up to the old ones didn't help either.  Lillia in particular seemed like a weak replacement for Allison as the series' female lead.

I'd kind of like to see a more mature and faithful adaptation of the series with a different art style and higher production values, but I doubt that will happen any time soon.  I'm not too hopeful I'll see an english translation of the original novels any time soon either, though a translation of the manga adaptation of the first story arc is available.  Its actually quite similar to the anime in some ways but there are some notable differences.

For the aviation buffs it may be interesting to try to identify some of the planes in the series.  I've managed to identify some of the aircraft in the series, but not all of them (plus there are a few that seem quite different from any real world type I can identify).  Here's a list of a few of the real world aircraft that planes in this seem to have been based on:

De Havilland Tiger Moth
Grumman Goose
Fiesler Fi-156 Storch
Sikorsky S-42
Fock-Wulf FW190D
Dornier Do 18
Heinkel HE 111

There's also some interesting firearms that show up at times in the series, including one that I think was based on the unusual (by modern standards) Steyr M1912 handgun.

Finally got around to watching the second instalment of the Last Exile franchise: Fam the Silver Wing. It wasn't bad, wasn't spectacular either and it certainly had some major flaws, but I enjoyed it well enough. I also got another dose of Range Murata's work, which is always a good thing.

Honestly, I think the biggest problem Fam had was, well... the original Last Exile, which was significantly better. Problematically, though Fam is centred around a different set of lead characters, including the titular Fam, some of the cast from the original also have a major role to play, so you (or at least I) are constantly being reminded how much better the first season was. That the old cast were generally turning up to essentially be awesome most of the time, often to their accompanying first-series soundtrack, really wasn't helping matters.

That said: I was glad that they actually used existing characters to tie the two series together, gave them a proper role, rather than just cameo appearances... and didn't nerf them (completely) in favour of the new crowd. Instead, they let them be as good at their jobs as you remember them being.

Yes, I was not as hooked on Fam as I was on the original (still bought the R1 Blu-ray box set). There is evidently a "bridge" manga that covers the journey of the Last Exile with the original cast aboard back to Earth.

One of the things that I've been doing lately is writing reviews for an anime website - it's a bit of beer money in the downtime between seasons. I recently reviewed the re-release of Patlabor: The Mobile Police , which is celebrating its silver anniversary this year.

I downloaded the Japanese Blu-rays of the original OAV series and have been considering buying the new R1 BRD release.

Area-88.. I liked the series but wish it had continued longer. As Star Trek eventually learned, wars take time to resolve, not just one episode.
The OAV is older, you can tell by the way the era planes are represented (and not just the animation), and is more true to the manga I'm told. It was really good in spite of being slightly darker than the series.

I own the TV seres and the OAVs, but only seen the OAVs - which were very well done on a technical level.

The addition of Kitri was a nice touch in the series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfq3pNYWJ9c

It's a good point.

*Ultra manly fanboy squeal*


Martian Successor Nadesico was probably the first anime I ever spent actual money on, and probably the one that got me properly into anime... and now the whole English dub (which is excellent, by the way) has been put up on YouTube by Manga Entertainment... which saves me walking across the room to find my DVDs  



Best. Day. Ever.

.... You realize that you've entirely ruined whatever plans I had for watching for the next while, yeah? I never got the chance to see MSD... and one of the channels I found when looking it up also had El-Hazard and Dirty Pair, two others that I managed to miss out on.

Officer_Charon wrote:.... You realize that you've entirely ruined whatever plans I had for watching for the next while, yeah? I never got the chance to see MSD... and one of the channels I found when looking it up also had El-Hazard and Dirty Pair, two others that I managed to miss out on.

El-Hazard is bloody amazing.

That being said, the best version of the story is the manga version.

Mike Toole on ANN recently ran an article about The Criterion Collection and anime, noting that they recently released their first animated film on DVD - The Fantastic Mister Fox (which is fantastic, by the way). The only previous animated release by Criterion was AKIRA on LaserDisc in 1993.

While NIS America has done a good business with "Collector's Edition" DVD and Blu-ray anime releases (I have around 25 releases at $100 a pop) and Funimation and Aniplex are getting in on that action now, as well, but none of them are at the level of a Criterion release.

The closest we've gotten to a Criterion-level release is Bandai Visual's Limited Collection releases of the Patlabor movie and Patlabor 2 under their Honneamise label. I own the Manga UK releases, but did not know there was a special edition. Fortunately, a pallet of them was discovered a few years back and this has allowed the price to drop from the $90 list / $60 average to more like $10 average. So I snapped up both sets on eBay for ~$20 and plan to throw them into the player later today since this month is the 25th anniversary of the release of the original film.

HAL | ハル

After a tragic plane accident, a robot is sent to a small Japanese town to help a person who just lost a loved one. While trying to heal a melancholic heart, the past of the couple is unearthed.

An original theatrical work from June of last year and released in the US by FUNimation. Personally, I found it overrated (based on the review ANN gave), though I agree with them the “twist” ending was about as lame as anything M. Night has done of late.

Visually beautiful, but otherwise average. It’s short at 50 minutes, so one might want to give it a try.

Wound up tackling today with a mild hangover so, in lieu of doing too much productive, wound up binge-watching Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Not sure that was entirely the best plan.

Nonsensical plot and ending: check. Bounce: check. Pop-culture references: check. Plethora of boob and penis jokes: check.

Yep, this is definitely Gainax. (vid possibly slightly NSFW... because Gainax).

Uhh... wut?

It's basically an omake mashup of all the type moon works turned into a real show

crazyidiot78 wrote:It's basically an omake mashup of all the type moon works turned into a real show

is also really funny, it takes what are fairly absurd plot lines( Fate ,Tsukihime) and turns the insanity dial up to 11 !

If you are a samurai fan and or an action comedy fan I recommend rurouni kenshin




I did a review here on my blog
 you have to scroll down a bit to get it

http://chrismeharg.blogspot.com/2015/03/hiking-ramen-and-resolutions.html

I'm currently watching Princess Nine an old baseball anime from 2002.  Seven episodes in and its not bad, a sold 3 out of 5.

Full Metal Panic! To Get New Anime Adaptation

So, apparently that's happening, which is nice. With a bit of luck it will carry on from the end of TSR. I tried the light novels to get the rest of the story but, I don't know if they were actually poorly written, if I didn't get along with the light novel style, or if something was simply lost in the translation, but I gave up.

Me and a friend on the subject of new FMP!

ME: Maybe they're doing the Hollywood thing and recycling old properties.
Friend: Right, what'd be next then.
ME: I dunno, Death Note 2 maybe?
Friend: Oh right! How's that supposed to work?
ME: Mmm, the shinigami decide they want the world for themselves and systematically go about manipulating the world in a bid for humanity to destroy itself more efficiently. Ryuk and a few shinigami decide that this shit ain't cool because no humans equals no fun and thus Ryuk recruits Light to lead them into the world with the offer of him being reborn.
Friend: They already have that, it's called Bleach.
ME and Friend: BWAHAHAHAHA!!