Record Of Lodoss Wars is one of the most popular fantasy imports of recent memory, and it’s no wonder–over the course of the original 13 OVAs, we get to know a band of characters very well, and their exploits are not only exciting but occasionally thought-provoking and (dare I say it?) touching. There’s now a [...]
Have you ever once seen the power of music destroy an enemy civilization in American media? I can’t think of any shows that have done so, but anime has a huge catalog of titles that involve music being the driving force behind a culture’s power. Although you’d be hard pressed to track the phenomenon back [...]
Creativity is a hard thing to come by, and few shows have it. Plenty are action-packed, entertaining, exciting, and all together predictable. Then there are the DOA packages, where somebody tries something new but utterly fails because their ideas are just too far out there to understand. Sometimes, a mix of the familiar and the [...]
When you don’t absolutely love the next great thing in anime, sometimes it can be disappointing…even when the show is pretty good. That’s the case for me and Le Chevalier D’Eon, the latest offering from ADV Films. High levels of anticipation have surrounded the show, in no small part due to the involvement of Production [...]
Spooky noises, haunted houses, possessions…all are part and parcel of the horror genre. One could argue that the field of horror films has never had much promise, and that the only original one in the 1990s was Scream, which simply took the premise and added a postmodern veneer. The Japanese never saw the advent of [...]
Hayao Miyazaki is well known internationally for his films, which are really some of the best animated shows worldwide. Laputa is not one of his first films–it was released in 1986 in Japan–but it came before My Neighbor Totoro, which really got notice both in Japan and in the US. As Disney has bought the [...]
ADV Films is at it again. Back in 2000, they produced their first animated program, the amazingly bad Sin: The Movie. Four years later, they have their newest self-produced title called Lady Death. Unlike Sin, though, ADV Films makes no pretension of passing off Lady Death as a film in the anime [...]
In as short a description as I can muster, Manie Manie is The Twilight Zone of anime.
Although many anime have odd or strange elements to them, very few films go to this length to present new, bizarre worlds that defy categorization. So, at best, what I can do is describe the three segments that make [...]
Peanut butter and jelly. Bert and Ernie. Cake and ice cream. Whimsy and the apocalypse. Hmm…the last two just don’t go together the same way, do they? It’s stereotypical, but anime about the destruction of the world are usually filled with humongous explosions, carnage on an unprecedented scale, and somebody named Shinji whining about how [...]
While I definitely don’t love every title put out by ADV Films, I have to say that the spring of 2007 has been an especially noteworthy one for them in terms of “fantastic titles I’d never heard of before.” Coyote Ragtime Show has been a fun intergalactic romp, and Utawarerumono is an intriguing mystery set in [...]
