Reviews
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Blu-ray Review
Join us as we screw around with time in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Blu-ray review. The review is available here and in the reviews section. I pretty much summed up everything I wanted to say about the movie in the review itself, but here’s a couple of interesting trivia facts about this title:
- The movie is very loosely based on a novel by the same name written by Yasutaka Tatsui. It’s been out of print for ages in the U.S., but was recently published in the U.K. by Alma Books. Check it out if you want a different take on the same concept.
- If you look closely at the refrigerator in Makoto’s house you’ll notice her mom attached notes to it with the expiration dates of all the food inside. How weird.
- In one scene a girl is hit by a fire extinguisher thrown her way. If you pause the movie at the moment of impact you will discover that the fire extinguisher didn’t actually touches her. How weird #2.
Redline Blu-ray Review
The Redline review is now available here and in the reviews section. Subscribe to us on Facebook if you’d like to receive a notice every time a new review comes up.
Watching Redline was a bitter-sweet experience. The movie leaves so many background stories untouched and so many characters unexplored! The director and creator do confess in the movies’ commentary that they didn’t have enough run time to add more background, and that the Redline book (released in Japan last year) contains a little bit more details. But I feel that’s just not enough. Ideally it would have been great if Redline could have been a three hours OVA. Realistically it took Mad House seven years just to finish this one hour and a half movie. So realistically speaking it could have been great if someone releases a Redline manga covering the lives of all the racers before the Redline race. One manga volume per character could have been a nice treat. It would have developed the Redline universe as well as allow us to better understand the racers’ motives.
I’ll finish this post with a question that has been on my mind ever since I got my copy of the Blu-ray. How come, despite the remarkably high picture quality of Redline, Manga Entertainment chose to use a grainy looking picture with an ugly white line obtruding the image for the DVD and Blu-ray covers?
We may never know…
Angel Beats! Blu-ray Review
The Angel Beats! review is now available here and in the reviews section. I’ve had a hard time deciding how to rank this show. The show itself is great, but there were so many little annoyances around it! The Blu-ray menus were really bad, and for a while I considered lowering the series’ rating for the way Sentai handled it. In the end I pulled away, looked at the series from an overall perspective and decided to let it slide. Don’t let this great show slide under your radar!
Ouran High School Host Club Blu-ray Review
Finally! Watching 26 episodes for a weekly review is hard! There’s even a nice little video in the end! So I command you to go read the review even if you aren’t interested in the actual series! Just kidding
Have you noticed the upcoming review status bar on the right? I’ll be updating my review status there. That way the blog itself won’t be filled by “still watching X” or “expect the X review in two days” and so on.
Welcome to the NHK DVD Review
A new year brings with it a new review! The Welcome to the NHK review has been added to the reviews section. Here’s a direct link.
Welcome to the NHK was the first SD series I reviewed. As a rule of the thumb I won’t lower grades of series that have visual issues on modern HDTVs if they were created in SD and don’t have an HD master or upscale available. That is, unless they look outright awful today.
Here’s an interesting bit of trivia I found while watching the series that didn’t quite make the cut for the review: the three alien-like baby creatures Sato keeps imagining are refered to in the English credits as Hikikomorians. All three Hikikomorians have different voice actors despite the fact that the only audible thing they do on the show is laugh sinisterly or cry out in fear.
If you are interested in the light novel that inspired the anime series you might want to check Brian Ruh’s article on it. He also addresses the notion of hikikomori in general.
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie Blu-ray Review
The latest review is up. This time its the Cowboy Bebop movie. Read the review here or through the review page.
I really liked how Sony treated this title (note: the version I reviewed is a rerelease by Image Entertainment but the source was still authored by Sony). Although it is not really a 1080p release Sony applied some fine retouches to the Blu-ray version to make it more visually attractive. I hope someday a brave company will venture into Sunrises archives, dig up the old series and give it the same (or even better) treatment. It’s not a far-fetched dream either. Technically speaking, If FUNimation Entertainment can make an HD version of the original (super old) Dragon Ball Z series from scratch I’m sure Sony is also up to the challenge. And Because so much time has passed since Cowboy Bebop came out on DVD a new Blu-ray version has some serious marketing potential. Good series tend to resurface like that from time to time.
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