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Hi!  Does anyone have a list of what new anime came out and is coming out in Japan this month?  I used to get the information from anime-daisuki.net but the web site doesn't seem to be working right now.

I'm a rather standard spoiled American kid myself.  Beyond the typical reactions trained into me by Hollywood, Grave made absolutely no sense to me.  Of course, I haven't seen it in a very, very long time, so my memory might be wrong, but I recall that, after I dried my tears and thought about it, the older brother simply struck me as terminally stupid -- he had money in the bank but somehow decided to not use it, and part of what created the tear-jerking contrast was that he finally used the money to buy the stuff he needed after it was too late.  Besides, why didn't he go looking for the Red Cross or some other charity organization, or why didn't any of the adults they ran into wonder where their parents were and take them to a social worker to find a foster family?  How can their own make-shift family be so mean?  They're just kids!  (And, here in America, kids are king.)  Beyond the obvious tear-jerking contrivances, beyond the visceral emotional level, do we really understand Grave?  Kids just do not starve on their own in modern-day US.  I imagine it's even more true in other, more socialized modern countries.

Besides, from what I remember, Grave was also a very slow-moving piece.  I agree that the directing was brilliant, but I think it really need to take the entire film to build up the emotional sympathies that resulted in the gut-wrenching climax.  I can't recall any five-minute segments that would stand on its own.

(stuff chopped)

BUGGER! I can never get the quote thing to work right...!!!!   :shock:

Your quote looks right.  If I quote your quote, it works.  (Demo above...)  Make sure that "Disable BBCode in this post" is not checked.

I thought about recommending Miyazaki too, but then I thought that Miyazaki might be exactly whom Zain meant when he said, "I don’t want something distinctly Japanese that no one in my class will understand."

It depends on the level of the class.  If it's more of a fun class, then sure, action scenes would be great.

If it's more of a serious analysis class, then I'd go with something from Kare Kano or FLCL.  (Anno is an absolutely brilliant director.)  Kare Kano and FLCL both have absolutely brilliant scenes that stretch the boundaries of visual storytelling to its limits, like the paper cut-out episode of Kare Kano, its emotion-evoking manga motion, or the comic book meta sequence in FLCL.  (I think that also makes it obvious what the thesis of the presentation should be too...)

Another fascinating director is Satoshi Kon, and one of the reality-to-fantasy morphing from Millenium Actress or Perfect Blue would round out a presentation on him rather nicely.

Both of those directors have produced anime in which the directing was noticeably brilliant, their direction almost becoming a character in itself.

Note that if you're purchasing these DVDs, they are fansubbed and probably not very well.

I strongly object to the use of "fansub" for commercial pirates.  The commercial pirates are in it to make a quick buck -- they don't care about the series at all and are not fans in the least.  That's why their subs suck so badly that even 13-year-old kiddie egosubbers could do better without trying.  Please do not confuse the commercial Asian (Singapore, HK, Malaysia, Taiwan) pirates with fans, and please never ever ever shell out money to the commercial pirates.  Never shell out money for fansubs either, for that matter -- true fansubbers know better.  Save your money for the R1 releases.  The Japanese DVDs often run US$60 for one or two episodes, will not play in an R1 player, and usually don't have English subtitles.  They're neat to get if you're very rich, have an R2 player, and understand Japanese... but apparently, even Japanese fans often wait for the R1 version to come out.

I wanted to wish Bandai the best of luck in court.  GO BANDAI!  http://www.animeondvd.com/news/pr.php?pr_view=376

ADV killed Boxtorrents a few days back. When anime companies start acting like the RIAA/MPAA, you know something's wrong with the world.

The world already went wrong when so-called fans felt they had a right to so publically propagate R1 rips on such a large scale, forcing the licensing companies to develop a process of enforcement.

I don't see a problem with a company protecting its intellectual properties.

What makes it hard for ADV is that I don't think ADV actually has any intellectual property.  ADV simply owns a lot of licenses and has purchased a lot of rights.  I'm not even sure if ADV's dubs really belong to them.

Even ADV makes fan cringe

No, it doesn't.  True fans rejoice rather than cringe when a title gets licensed, and the earlier the better.  Not only are American companies licensing titles faster these days, they're helping fund new anime in Japan before it's even produced.  In general, I get the impression that the American companies are trying very hard to bring fans what we want, and I salute them for it.  My favorite is still Right Stuf for their excellent job on the subtitling of His and Her Circumstances.  I think they really pushed the industry on that one.  ADV is also impressive with their attempts at all sorts of technical tricks on DVDs to try to get fans the information we want.  Both companies seem to really listen to the fans and care what we think.  Funimation seems to listen a lot to fan input as well, and I'm sure most of the others too.

However, I don't blame Bay Area fans for being bitter at industry this year.  Part of the advantage of having industry panels at anime cons is that we get the chance to give input into the anime being brought over -- when industry gave panels at Fanime 2003, I felt that they cared.  It's such a shame that industry made such a poor showing in 2004 -- they don't get the chance to show off the efforts they're going through for us, and we don't get the chance to give input if they don't show.  So, yes, I agree we have a right to be bitter that they chose PMX instead.  I hope they don't make that same mistake again.

(BTW, I don't bother listening to dubs, so I have no opinons on dubs.)

I thought Someday's Dreamers was absolutely beautiful and had a great ending.  I've seen one episode of Ai Yori Aoshi, but I didn't like it enough to see more.

However, for people who aren't closed-minded, the existence of both hentai and children's programming is an advantage, showing the versatility of the anime medium.  One of the results of anime being versatile is that people can and do make all sorts of shows with it.

People who are so vehemently against all anime will be biased against anime whether hentai exists or not.  If they're not condemning the sex, they'll pick apart the violence, the plot, the "unreality", the "childish" art, the fact that the characters aren't played by real people, the cultural contamination by the Japanese invasion, the demonic symbolism, the merchandizing opportunities by the evil money-making corporations, the subliminal efforts of Japanese Big Media to make American children worship the Japanese overlords in revenge for WWII, etc.  I've heard very many really strange anti-anime arguments... and "Japan is using anime as revenge for WW2" is no more valid than "all anime is about sex and violence".  And, really, live action is a versatile medium too, and there are even more examples in live action of anything "bad" they want to pick apart.

I find that a lot of anti-anime activists seem to be just very sad, sad people.  While I think that it's fine for them to dislike anime, some of these people seem to be so bored that they have nothing better to do than to argue vehemently from a position of utter cluelessness against someone else's preferred form of entertainment.  A "no thanks, not my thing" would be fine.  Those long tirades against anime simply show that the writer desperately needs to watch more anime.

;)

I heard alot of fansub groups have been getting screwed over lately and some fansub sites have been shutting down. I wonder why.

I know anime.mircx.com was shut down for carrying licensed anime, but I haven't heard of fansubbers being hit recently...  Do you know which ones?  A whole bunch of groups do licensed anime these days, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were told to stop as part of the anime.mircx.com crackdown.

Also, welcome to graduation!  A lot of fansubbers come and go all the time.  With graduation, a lot of fansubbers lose their bandwidth, lose their free time/money to pursue hobbies, and get jobs/partners/lives.  There's a seedy underside to fansubbing too.  Some groups break up because of personality conflicts and group politics.  In those cases, usually two more groups rise to take its place.  Or, the group coordinator would go missing and not renew the domain, which then gets stolen by name poachers.  Every once in a while (but not that often), I hear of fansubbers who give up in disgust because the political squabbles, competitive aspects, egotistic attitudes, and immorality of modern so-called "fansubbing" has taken all the fun out of it.  I vaguely wonder if AnimeJunkies had embarrassed some fansub groups to death with their attitude about Ninja Scroll TV.

In any case, I'm sure another batch of digisubbers will rise to take their place only for a bunch more to disperse again in another year or so.

I love downloading fansubs!

Yet all but one of the series you listed are now licensed...
If people like fansubs, they shouldn't support subbers who do licensed anime.
Doing so pisses off the companies, which may cause all fansubbers to get shut down.

Tenjou Tenge is also now licensed by Geneon.

(I'm 99% sure you can cosplay and volunteer at the same time. ^^)

I'm sure it depends on the costume.  I don't think that Ohmu custom would work very well with volunteering.

The con was at Foothill.  The hotel was the Sheraton.

Ah...  Thanks for the clarification!

1998 ? Sheraton, Sunnyvale, CA, 1700

Correction: Foothill College

Oh!  Thank you!!  (That makes a whole lot more sense.)  I wonder why the Fanime 2002 booklet said the Sheraton then...?  (Or did I read that wrong?)

And the first Fanime was at CSU Hayward in June for all you history buffs out there. :D

Neat!  Just for fun, here are some other ones:

1999 Mar 19-21 Santa Clara Convention Center / Wyndam Hotel, 2000 attendees
2000 Feb 24-27 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, 2300
2001 Mar 30-32 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, 3750
2002 Apr 26-28 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, ?
2003 Jun 20-22 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, ?
2004 May 28-31 San Jose Convention Center / Mariott, San Jose, CA, 5700 <-- Footnote 1.
2005 May 27-30 San Jose Convention Center / Mariott and Hilton, San Jose, CA

I was going to ask about the rest, but I had pulled out my program booklets to look up the dates and found a great article about Fanime History article in the 2002 program book:

1994 ? CSU Hayward, "almost 100"
1995 ? CSU Hayward, 350
1996 Feb, Foothill College, Los Altos, CA, 775
1997 ? Foothill College, Los Altos, CA, 1200
1998 ? Foothill College, Los Altos / Sheraton, Sunnyvale, CA, 1700

If people want to tell me how to fill in the question marks, that'd be fun.

Also, if anyone wants to tell stories of the early days or about their first cons or anything, I'd love to hear them.  Fanime is growing very quickly, and things have been changing to accomodate the growth.  Things that happened "back in the day" might not be able to happen in the future.  It'd be nice to keep alive the memories of past Fanime and Fanime lore.  Things like...  Armitage's slip... Chocolate Misu... Dieter and his funny impromptu monologues... things that happened on the dance floor or the cosplay... directors singing during live panels... and what is it with "horse" and "chair" anyways?

My story is from this year since I have a very bad memory.  One of the guests of honor was Hiroaki Inoue.  He gave a great talk about Japanese Sci-Fi books being the basis for a lot of anime.  At the end of the panel, he announced that he had a gift for us, and he pulled out this reel of film.  He went on to explain that the film contained Ah, Megamisama! when a pair of scissors appears in his hand.  As the audience started to line up, Inoue-san really started unrolling the film, cutting off strips of it, and handing the strips to the people in line.  I couldn't tell if I felt more honored to get a strip of that film or more shocked that the film reel was being destroyed like that.

EDIT Footnote 1:  From http://fanime.altimus-labs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2184&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=:

At the lowest end of the spectrum, about 5700 total paid fans attended. This number excludes children, special badges, and people who didn't claim their badge.

At the highest end of the spectrum, about 7400 attendees visited FanimeCon. This number includes guests, staff, and so on.

A bunch of the volunteers were really nice and helpful, but there was this one really weird one.  During pre-reg, as a friend and I were leaving, this guy with a green volunteer badge stops us and asks us to show him our badges.  I had already packed mine away in my backpack since we were leaving the convention.  I thought he was joking and just wanted to see the picture or something, so I tried to laugh it off, but he was apparently serious and harrassed us and admonished us that we should have our badges at all times.  Um, this was pre-reg, we were headed away from the pre-reg and swap meet, we weren't trying to get into any events, and we were trying to go home!  I finally had to stop, make a mess in my backpack by digging through it for several minutes to find my buried badge (it was inside the pre-reg bag which was under the program guide and all the stuff I bought at the swap meet), and finally, he let us pass so we can leave the convention center and go home!!!