You watch it, you rate it!

Rin ~ Daughers of Mnemosyne~
Action / Mature

Animation: A
Story: A to start... fell down to C- towards the end
Dub: Didn't watch
Sub: A+

Rin is a step in the right direction for anime. It's a show aimed at mature audiences and it gets treated as such. There is lots of blood, lots of killing (some character dying multiple times in quite violent manners), sex, nudity, hermaphrodites, and everything else you see lacking from an anime market that is saturated with this moe shi t like K-ON and Lucky Star.

I really liked how all the violence was portrayed. There were scenes of people with their abdomens sliced open for all too see, people getting shot in the head at near point blank range, and limbs being shot and chopped off in great detail. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of overly senseless violence, but if someone is about to be shot in the head or in the case of Rin in one of the episodes, shot through a freaking jet engine, I expect to see blood. Bloodless attacks and shadow silhouette deaths can go to hell.

The one huge thing that I didn't care for was the HUGE time period this 6 episode OVA went over. It starts sometime in 1990 and goes all the way to 2050 or somewhere around there. We went from Mimi going from a 50 mhz computer with a 300 mb hd, to her just waving her hand and a little pda like hologram would just appear for it. Given the length of the OVA, this just made the whole series seem like it was taking HUGE quantum leaps into the future.

Overall: Buy this! It's something different from the watered down 'action' that most series are today. You wont find steam, special Japanese regional light physics, bloodless deaths, watered down gun fights, or cover crows here.

UP Next: I really don't know. Maria Holic Came in today. Along with Nabari No Ou. To Love RU set 2 is waiting... so is Inuyasha (yeah lol stfu kthx) ssn 3. I was also rewatching bleach too.... ugugugughghghg I don't know. I have to be up in 6 hours. I'll figure this crap out later.

Detroit Metal City
Live Action / Music

So I discovered something interesting today. My tv can apparently read flash drives and movie files off of said flash drives. Curious to see how it would work / look, I copied DMC over to it and spent the last 2 hours or so thoroughly enjoying my compressed fansub.

Considering the video file was compressed to about 25% of its original size, it looked pretty damn nice... though since this isn't an anime, I find it pointless to rate how the picture looked .

Overall, I really enjoyed the show. The music / concert scenes were AWESOME. Go look up Satsugai on youtube. Good stuff.

Overall recommendation: Def worth a look see. I'd probably buy it if it ever got released officially in the US. Viz has a habit of licensing shows that it holds manga licenses for, so I'm hoping I'll get lucky with both the anime and this.

Some quick ones for a few movies I've watched recently.

Golgo 13: Queen Bee

Stonehearted assassain who has lots of random sex and then kills people.. yeah that's basically the story. Avoid. It's garbage.


Battle Royal High School

A boy in a leopard head costume needs to defeat the whole high school karate team in order to quit. He does this with no problem. He then gets possessed by some evil being from an alternate dimnsion who got trapped inside of him because of some big breasted fairies evil plot.... enter a bunch of random space time cops that are orbiting the earth, and random trans-dimensional phasing, and you have a lot of stupid crap that would only entertain me after I've smoked at least a kilo of pot (at which point I'd be surprised if I even remembered how to turn on my tv). Avoid. The only thing this show had for it was the attention to detail when it comes to gore.

I'm on disk 3 of 4 for nabari no ou (thanks for cancelling the blu ray release funimation). It started off kinda nice but holy fvuck its gone down the toilet. I've literally spent the last 6 or so episodes watching a character slowly die... with another character going all gaga gay for him...... bleh maybe I'll go watch inuyasha after this... oh well. Full nabari 'review' will be up by tomorrow.

Nabari No Ou
Ninja / Action

Animation B+
Story D
Dub B+
Sub B+

Enter Miharu. A 15ish year old boy who has some secret ninja power in him that can do basically anything that he damn well pleases. The only problem is Miharu is a worthless apathetic worm who does not want anything.

Gah this series so mediocre... I just forced myself to finish it over a course of 2 nights. I think my brain melted.

Overall: Don't waste your money. Not nearly enough action and too much stupid dialogue.

Next up: Maria Holic. I'm two episodes in as of now, and so far it's fine. Let's see if japan can keep its streak of ruining shows at the very end though.

Maria Holic
Trap / comedy / episodic nonsense

Animation: B-
Story: C
Dub: N/A Sub Only release
Sub: B-

No consistent story, bad corny jokes, and lack of fanservice pretty much ruined this show for me. Some characters are just flat out retarded, while others are just plain annoying. The only reason the sub was rated a B was because of Maria's voice.

Character designs are pretty cute for the most part. Maria is one of the more attractive traps that I've had the pleasure (?) of watching. He also has a female twin counterpart too.... it's kind of weird.

Overall: Not really worth buying. Nothing in this series really stands out too much. Maria is a cross dressing psycho, and Kanako is a flaming lesbian in an all girls school. You'd think you'd get an interesting original story from that, but it just falls flat on it's face.

Next up: Yokazuka quartet (or something like that)

Yozakura Quartet
Supernatural / Action

Animation: C+
Story: C-
Dub: N/A Sub Only release
Sub: C+

I must be on a bad streak of watching crap lately. This was another series I just couldn't get into. The show was lacking any good comedy and good fanservice, which would be OK as long as the action was good.... but it had none of that either. Lots of bloodless fight scenes galore. At one point, one of the main characters gets smashed by a lizard the size of a Menos Grande and comes out of it with a few scuff marks on her cheak.

There were some retarded episode plot arcs that dealt with the Mayor of the town finding a stray dog, feeding it and loving it, only to scold it one day and have it run away after which it got possessed by some cat eared possessed **** boy. Sounds retarded on paper? Try watching it.

This series, probably due to it's short 12 episode length, also fails to explain quite a bit of backstory too. How did **** catboy get possessed in the first place... how does a tuned demon come back from 'tune land'..... why the hell was some old man hiding a weapon that could have finished this when the troubles first started in his underwear drawer....

I really am beginning to dislike the 12 episode series. They always seem to do space time leaps over backstories and decent explanations...

Overall suggestion: Boring and at times annoying. One of the characters has the ability to summon pretty much anything. She frequently summons machine guns where she proceeds to REPEATEDLY shout ARARARARARARARARARARARAR (or something along those lines) for a good 20 seconds which a bunch of badly animated bullets move across the screen. I wouldn't even bother renting this either...

Next up: School Rumble. I'll probably review it by season.. or maybe I wont finish it at all. I'm getting tired of forcing myself to finish bad series -.-

Took a break from school rumble to watch the Blu Ray edition of Ponyo that came in today.

Ponyo
Fantasy / Ghibli

Animation: A+
Story: A
Dub: A-
Sub: A+

While not one of Ghibli's best works, Ponyo is stll without a doubt a very very good movie. The movie (according to the jacket it came in) adapts The Little Mermaid, but makes it awesome and cute!

The animation is seriously gorgeous. In the opening 5 minutes, you see a scene where there are at LEAST 50 independantly moving creatures moving on the screen at the same time. Just to give you an idea of how much time and money was invested in this shows art and audio, let's do some calculations.

According to a website I saw (Not a reliable source but good enough for this comparison), The average 30 minute anime costs between 8-10 million yen (110,000 dollars per episode approx). This averages a production cost of about $3,600 dollars a minute.

According to Wikipedia, Ponyo had a budget of 34,000,000 and a run time of 100 minutes. Do the math.

$340,000 dollars a minute

Overall: A must buy. It's a cute story, which should be enough right there to encourage you to get off your asses and buy it, but the art/visuals are what really brings me to loving this show.

This is how anime should be. Now we just need Ghibli to do a remake of Crest of the Stars with this level of art, and I can die happy.

up next: Still watching school rumble. On to episode 2 of the second semester. So far, there have been some moments were I have nearly hurt myself laughing out loud, but most of the humor is starting to fall flat on its face... and the constant retardation of the characters when it comes to each others feelings is getting annoying.

ETA to completion: 1 week if I keep having to work these BS shifts