Moon girls and flower girls.
Jul. 6th, 2012 05:55 pmFirst of all, allow me to be the umpteen millionth person on the internet to squee about the new Sailor Moon anime that will air in 2013!!!!! For the record, I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:30 this morning to watch the streamed announcement on NicoVideo, because I had a hunch that the promised "special surprise" would be an anime announcement.
BTW, anybody reporting on twitter or elsewhere that the new Sailor Moon anime is "for adults, not for kids" is blatantly wrong. Or they misunderstood what was said during the NicoVideo announcement. The new show is promised to "appeal to adults who grew up with the original," but it will still be a kid's show. So in other words, it will be just like the My Little Pony reboot: clever and layered enough to appeal to adults who grew up with the original series, but still very much intended primarily for little girls.
In other news, the Montreal Fantasia Festival (one of the largest fantasy/sci-fi film festivals in North America) is rechristening its animation prize as the Satoshi Kon Award for Achievement in Animation. That's a pretty awesome way to honor Kon, especially considering that Perfect Blue and Millenium Actress had their world premieres at the Fantasia Festival in 1997 and 2001, respectively.
Speaking of good stuff! I somehow found myself volunteering at a local anime con this afternoon (not my fault, blame my co-worker!) and ended up watching the first four episodes of Hanasaku Iroha. This is a show that some people on my flist were gushing about when it aired last year, but I never got around to checking it out because a) the opening song was so terrible and b) the publicity artwork made it look like the main character was another Honda Tohru clone whose defining personality trait would be relentless cheerfulness in the face of adversity, but without any of the accompanying depth and complexity of Honda Tohru Original Flavor, since most Tohru-type clones end up being annoyingly shallow waifu-type moeblobs. I also knew that the serieswas based on (ETA: actually, the anime is an original production, the manga was the adaptation - sorry!) a manga that ran in GanGan Joker, a magazine which is defined by moe-moe-blargh manga desperately trying to grasp for a sheen of depth/respectability when really all they want to do is wallow in moe-moe-blarghness. Since the Hanasaku manga was serialized in the same magazine alongside such esteemed (*cough*) peers as Zombie-Bitch Sakina, Inu x Boku SS, and the worst of the Umineko manga adaptations, I didn't expect it to be very good, and I didn't expect the original anime series to be very good either.
Turns out, I shouldn't have judged a book by its cover, or a series by the company that it keeps. Hanasaku Iroha is really, really, really good. Gorgeously animated, genuinely funny, genuinely moving, and with a fantastic cast of characters. Ohana, the heroine, is a completely different character than the type that I thought she would be. And I totally love her. I can't wait to watch the rest of this series.
Hanasaku Iroha is still available streaming on Crunchyroll. So if you're one of those skeptics like me who passed over it last year because it looked too much like the average boring moe-moe-blargh fare, you should definitely check it out. The series is not at all what it looks like (and certainly not at all what it was marketed as). I'm glad that I gave it a second chance.
That first opening song is still irredeemably horrible, though.
BTW, anybody reporting on twitter or elsewhere that the new Sailor Moon anime is "for adults, not for kids" is blatantly wrong. Or they misunderstood what was said during the NicoVideo announcement. The new show is promised to "appeal to adults who grew up with the original," but it will still be a kid's show. So in other words, it will be just like the My Little Pony reboot: clever and layered enough to appeal to adults who grew up with the original series, but still very much intended primarily for little girls.
In other news, the Montreal Fantasia Festival (one of the largest fantasy/sci-fi film festivals in North America) is rechristening its animation prize as the Satoshi Kon Award for Achievement in Animation. That's a pretty awesome way to honor Kon, especially considering that Perfect Blue and Millenium Actress had their world premieres at the Fantasia Festival in 1997 and 2001, respectively.
Speaking of good stuff! I somehow found myself volunteering at a local anime con this afternoon (not my fault, blame my co-worker!) and ended up watching the first four episodes of Hanasaku Iroha. This is a show that some people on my flist were gushing about when it aired last year, but I never got around to checking it out because a) the opening song was so terrible and b) the publicity artwork made it look like the main character was another Honda Tohru clone whose defining personality trait would be relentless cheerfulness in the face of adversity, but without any of the accompanying depth and complexity of Honda Tohru Original Flavor, since most Tohru-type clones end up being annoyingly shallow waifu-type moeblobs. I also knew that the series
Turns out, I shouldn't have judged a book by its cover, or a series by the company that it keeps. Hanasaku Iroha is really, really, really good. Gorgeously animated, genuinely funny, genuinely moving, and with a fantastic cast of characters. Ohana, the heroine, is a completely different character than the type that I thought she would be. And I totally love her. I can't wait to watch the rest of this series.
Hanasaku Iroha is still available streaming on Crunchyroll. So if you're one of those skeptics like me who passed over it last year because it looked too much like the average boring moe-moe-blargh fare, you should definitely check it out. The series is not at all what it looks like (and certainly not at all what it was marketed as). I'm glad that I gave it a second chance.
That first opening song is still irredeemably horrible, though.
