Takayuki Hamana talks about the research trip he took to Germany to gather reference material for Wellber no Monogatari (and gives some platitudinal comments about the show’s contents).
Via Anime Insider: Takayuki Hamana (July 2007)
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Author Archives: torisunanohokori
Via Anime Insider: Beck’s US Voice Cast (July 2007)
An article on Beck which includes a several-page interview with VAs Mike McFarland, Greg Ayers, and Justin Cook.
Via Anime Insider: Manga and Plagarism (July 2007)
An article which notes some of the plagarism accusations flying around the manga industry, a topic which still comes up today.
Some claims are probably more justified than others; I mean, of course Takehiko Inoue modeled Slam Dunk from his knowledge of the NBA, but is it really violating intellectual property to use photographs as reference material?
Via Anime Insider: Lance Heiskell (July 2007)
Funimation’s One Piece brand manager Lance Heiskell talks briefly about their plans to rerelease the series.
Via Anime Insider: Kari Wahlgren (July 2007)
Short Interview with US VA Kari Wahlgren.
Via Anime Insider: Drama CDs in the US (July 2007)
An article detailing Bandai/AAA Anime’s release of some Haruhi Suzumiya series drama CDs in the US.
Fun With Numbers: The Big Range of Big Underestimates in Oricon Weekly Manga Totals
One thing I can’t say enough is that data should be interpreted with a healthy amount of caution and second-guessing. This is especially true for manga charts, when a combination of ridiculously high weekly thresholds and the desire to have fast data on the effects of currently-airing anime can lead to some very incomplete and erroneous interpretations of the facts.
I’ve already done a few case studies on how Oricon and publisher claims can differ for series where the publisher boasted of some particular print total (usually in an insert on a volume of the series or a magazine). Those cases are enlightening, but not necessarily general, since there’s a heavy element of volunteer bias involved in which series get their totals reported. Recently, though, I found a fairly large list of distributor claims of print volume totals (via Shuppan Shiyou, see post #99 here), which contains latest-volume printing data for over 100 series published in 2013. It still isn’t totally general, but is at least a tad more representative of manga at large. In order to get a better idea of how much Oricon underestimates the “average” series, I took the weekly-charts total for a volume and compared it with the given print total for the same volume. The results of this comparison (which can be found here) highlight some large and inconsistent discrepancies between the Oricon figures and the official publisher totals.
Midseason Update: This Summer in To Heart Quotes
I love To Heart: The Anime, straight up. I love it because of the anime, period; I’ve played only part of the game, avoided the blatant cash grab that was Remember My Memories, and straight-up ignored anything related to the name with a 2 next to it, because why would one take characters that good and replace them? I maintain that it is a rational love for a great product – it averaged 10k in an era where far fewer series did per year per total number shows produced, and is one of relatively few TV anime to boast a page on sakuga@wiki – but ultimately enjoying a series past a certain extent is an emotional thing. I’m not going to try to convince anyone else that they have to love it, but I am going to talk about it for a bit more before going to the season-summary capsules that motivated my latest rewatch/quote-mine experiment.
Anyway, there are so many scenes in this series are gravity-defyingly good. I could spend a whole column just listing them off, but that’s not this column’s angle, so I’m gonna keep it to two. First, there’s a linked pair of scenes from the first and last episode where characters resolve a bit of internal anxiety in a way that shows clearly on their faces in a surprisingly small number of frames:
And a scene where two amateur martial artists are fighting a bout that’s half even and half one-sided, but not decisively so:
The above were the two scenes I felt survived the pull out of context the best. As minimalistic as it was, To Heart was also a very visual show, and so finding quotes that worked for every show I’m watching this summer was a bit harder than grabbing those clips, but the show’s dialogue isn’t exactly shabby, just frequently dependent on context. That said, I was able to get enough to go by, so if you’re at all interested in a combination of quotes from a [phenomenal] 1999 show I love way too much and my opinions on a bunch of shows that are airing right now in September 2014, read on.
No-Name Banknotes: Under the Dog’s Encouraging Success
29 days ago, on August 8, 2014, Creative Intelligence Arts launched a kickstarter for an original Masahiro Ando/Jiro Ishii anime project, Under the Dog. Yesterday, that project reached to reach its $580,000 funding target, and currently has an average of $68/backer from 10,486 total backers as of this writing. The success of this particular kickstarter, one of 5 anime-related ones that I am aware of (not counting anime sols projects), is obviously a good thing for the makers, and is also an encouraging sign for the future of anime crowdfunding.
Before I start, I should note that I didn’t fund the kickstarter because it didn’t seem like something I would watch if it existed today. I’m not going to be a poser and say I was a super-huge fan of this when I wasn’t. Academically, though, the project carries a few interesting implications that are really permutations of one big thing – it lacked a lot of advantages that previous such projects have had.
Manga/LN Chart Archives Updated
Just a quick heads up that my chart archives for both manga and light novels have been updated through the month of August.
Animetics 