Catblue Dynamite (2006) is a single episode, 40-minute anime written and directed by Romanov Higa, the creator of other such CGI anime as Urda: The Third Reich. While attempting to shake her associate Bill for money he owes her, Blue, a part cat, part human hybrid, instead finds herself defending him from a group of mysterious masked thugs, who want something ridiculous, a Frank Sinatra tape that Bill recently came to possess.
Among its many ridiculous features, Blue wields pistols, swords, and pipes with her cat tail; fights upside down while hanging from her cat tail; fights to the accompaniment of disco music… and talks to ghosts. Because psychic cats?
Last post, you read a 27-page paper about the oddities found in the English and South Korean versions of Elysium. Would you believe that even more craziness surrounds this movie? You can read all about it in my latest post on the Extra Life website here.
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The next official Extra Life event is on November 5, but you can raise money whenever you want year-round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more and sign up!
I’ve been working on an article on one of my favorite case studies Elysium (2003), and finally got it polished enough to post it.
The CGI feature-length movie Elysium (2003) was created in South Korea and, like many foreign films, adapted and redubbed for an English-speaking audience. Strangely, however, the adapted film contains thirteen minutes of footage that don’t exist in the supposed original. Further, the South Korean film contains evidence of tampering and a sloppy editing job. This paper details the differences between the two versions of Elysium and attempts to explain what happened on the film’s journey from South Korea to North America.
Another article I wrote has been published on the Extra Life website. You can read it here.
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The next official Extra Life event is on November 5, but you can raise money whenever you want year-round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more and sign up!
I’m taking another break from Anime Abominations because Kingsglaive Final Fantasy XV has a release date!
Its association with Stage 6 Films makes me nervous. Stage 6 specializes in producing low budget movies. Starship Troopers: Invasion and Appleseed: Alpha, both of which were seriously lacking in story, are among its productions. Regardless of whether its story is as stupid as killing yourself to stop a giant spider robot set to destroy and already ruined city though, Kingsglaive will at least be pretty… and a new Final Fantasy movie is awesome.
Edit (8/3/2016): I read a little deeper into it, and it appears that Stage 6 is only in charge of U.S. theater distribution. Whew. There’s hope yet! The film is directed by Takeshi Nozue, a co-director on Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. A professional screenplay writer, Takashi Hasegawa, wrote the script, but “Hollywood staff” and Los Angeles-based Hydra Entertainment assisted in creating it. The film targets primarily an English-speaking audience. While the project began with the Advent Children team and Square Enix’s Visual Works division, which is dedicated to creating cutscenes, 50 companies would eventually contribute to the project, including studios in Hollywood, Canada, and Japan. I’m still skeptical, but this could be an interesting mix of western and eastern storytelling and artwork.
Funny Pets is a 12-episode series of six-minute short films that aired in 2006. According to its description, Funny Pets is about two aliens named Crescent and Corona who must adjust to life as pets of the airheaded showgirl Funny. Watching this series, however, you probably won’t pick up on most of that. This show is bizarre, and while the characters grunt and squeak, they don’t have dialog. Each episode is self-contained and most of the time ends with one or more characters dead because they accidentally killed themselves or one another. What’s amazing about this show is that even though the characters do completely stupid and bizarre things with no verbal explanation, you’re never really lost as to why they’re behaving the way they are. While it’s not the most entertaining or the best looking show out there, it has some great visual storytelling. You can find all twelve episodes on YouTube.
Anime Abominations will return next week, but in the meantime, here is an article I wrote for the Extra Life Community website with a comparison of .hack//Sign to .hack//Beyond the World.
Abunai Sisters: Koko & Mika was a series of ten CG-animated short films intended to promote celebrity models Kyoko and Mika Kano. Unfortunately, the show was so bad that it was canceled after the first two episodes aired and all the DVDs were burned (one wishes). Supposedly, only the two episodes that aired can be found online, and while DVDs exist, they are expensive. Its rarity is quite impressive, considering that it was produced in 2009. You can read more about it here.
I was at Sakuracon last April and was surprised to find among the fan panels Anime Abominations, an overview of some of the worst CGI series from Japan hosted by Jarvis Gray. Being a connoisseur of terrible CGI movies, I absolutely had to see this panel, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was by far my favorite event of Sakuracon 2016.
I thought I would share some of the series from the panel over the next few weeks. First is Urda: The Third Reich, a series of five, five-minute episodes about Nazis, time travel, and ridiculous action (for example, straightening a falling tank in mid-air by kicking a brick wall).
I saw Ratchet and Clank in theaters recently. There was a lack of Clank. He was there in the beginning of the movie, when he was rescued by and worked together with Ratchet, and at the end of the movie, when he decided to be buddies with Ratchet, but he seemed to disappear into the background for the middle of it. He was either riding on Ratchet’s back or following Elaris around. He didn’t seem to do anything or interact with Ratchet that much. Everything he could do (tactical?) Elaris could do and indeed did, making him fairly useless. The part of the movie where Ratchet and Clank would have the most opportunity to work together, when they’re carrying out their final plan to take down Doctor Nefarious, was cut out. Despite hardly ever interacting, Ratchet and Clank are suddenly best buddies at the end of the movie.
I’ve never played the games before, and perhaps Ratchet and Clank’s relationship and how they complement one another comes out better in the games, but in the movie at least, I wasn’t feeling the buddy vibe. It felt more like “Ratchet” and less like “Ratchet and Clank.”
