Spacecraft Snaps Saturn

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is now within range of Saturn, and the results are some amazing upclose photos of the ringed giant. To see the latest shots go here:

Cassini-Huggens: Mission to Saturn and Titan

The American Anime Awards

Over at Japanimator there’s a great little rant on the “American Anime Awards”:

American Anime Awards Award Japanese Anime. Wait. What?

“I’m still trying to riddle this one out. On February 24th, the American Anime Awards were broadcast on The Anime Network and IGN.com. According to the AAA site, “To be eligible for an award, anime or manga must be available in the U.S. during 2006.” Now, please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that just about everything released before 2007? “Available” is a pretty broad term. Regardless, only four of the twelve categories have anything to do with actual animation, with one category for “Best Comedy,” (FLCL…what? Azudai wasn’t even nominated) one for “Best Feature,” (Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children…NOT A SINGLE MIYAZAKI FILM WAS NOMINATED) leaving only two, “Best Short Series” (FLCL, again) and “Best Long Series” (Fullmetal Alchemist…nope, Eva wasn’t nominated) to pick up the slack for the roughly 42 billion other titles. There was only a single slot for “Best Manga” (Fruits Basket), with the rest consisting of American voice actor awards, packaging and music.”

It’s funny but he’s saying pretty much what quite a few of my fellow fanboys were thinking. But at the same time I think the local industry here needs some encouragement to produce a higher quality product. So my suggestion would be this:

I think it would be much more interesting if instead of having fifty million catagories you just have one single “Best in Show”: one for movie, one for a tv show and just one for a manga. This way the award would mean something instead of being a general pat on the back to everyone in the industry.

Next I would eliminate the “People’s Choice Award” factor to the show. In fact to judge the show I’d invite professionals from the Japanese animation industry to judge how their work is being translated. Then to top it off I’d invite some American pros who are known in their own right, like say a well known director like Quentin Tarantino or a well known comic book artist like Frank Miller. Having these high profile folks would raise the credibility of the show and make winning mean something.

Although getting to the core of things, the very concept of the show itself may be flawed. I tend to find that the hardcore fanboys who LOVE anime are tracking what’s going on right now in Japan via torrents or YouTube. By the time the shows air on the Cartoon Network for this audience it’s already over. And while folks watching the stuff on the Cartoon network are also fanboys, they aren’t the hardcore types who’d vote or even care about who won an award.

So in the end it’s the hardcore fans who determine what’s popular because they’re up on things and tell their friends what to check out. In fact I’m now hooked on Bleach because I heard about it on a podcast, but wanted to watch it on my couch instead of downloading it. So in a way that podcast mentioning Bleach is what gave it “an American Anime Award” for my valueable leasure time.

Mars on a Cloudy Day

As the European space probe Rosetta completes it’s final orbital maneuvers, it has taken some amazing photographs of Mars, showing all sorts of amazing detail like Martian clouds and weather patterns. Shown above is an image image which was acquired on February 24th from a distance of about 240 000 km from the surface of Mars.

You can find more images here:
Beautiful new images from Rosetta’s approach to Mars

Vizzavi

This is a new series of commercials for a ringtone service in the UK called Vizzavi, what I like about this series is that 3D animation has a very nice “puppet feeling” to the look of the character designs:

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Wonder Festival 2007

There’s a great photo gallery at An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla covering Wonder Festival 2007, which is the biggest figure and model convention in Japan. The convention is filled with all sorts of fanboy goodies like giant Godzilla models and creepy life sized anime figurines. Seen above are models from the classic anime series Space Cruiser Yamato, shown are the Comet Empire and a Dark Star Nebula warcraft.

Horn OK Please

“Horn OK Please” is a claymation film that was a collaboration between animators in India and Northern Ireland. The film was produced last year by Flickerpix Animations, and it follows a monotonous day in the life of an Indian taxi driver named Lucky. Lucky’s goal is to earn enough rupees to buy the air-conditioned taxi of his dreams. I love the attention to detail that was put into the set designs for this project:

There’s also some other interesting work on the Flickerpix website worth checking out:

flickerpix.com

Futari ha PreCure

Yawn! Yeah, of course we play baseball AND battle evil space aliens at our Junior High School:

Here’s a quick intro to Futari ha PreCure from Hitoshi Doi’s anime page:

“Futari ha PreCure (Pretty Cure) is a set of fighting magical girl stories featuring a pair of junior high school girls. There are three series, PreCure (2004), Max Heart (2005), and Splash Star (2006). In all of the series, the magical girls have to fight to save earth from evil alien enemies. Most of the components of traditional magical girl anime can be found, such as long transformation sequences, magical items, cute pets, magical phrases, and magical attacks. However this anime has some of the most violent contact fighting scenes among magical girl anime. There’s quite a bit of sports involved too.”

And for your hardcore fanboys the official website for Futari ha PreCure (ふたりはプリキュア) is:

toei-anim.co.jp/tv/precure/

Minilogue: Hitchiker’s Choice

This entertaining music video was created by doing animation on whiteboard. It’s for the elctro music group Minilogue, for their song Hitchiker’s Choice:

The animation was created by Sweden based ljudbilden & piloten.

Shiina Ringo

This new funky goth lolita commercial stars Japanese singer/songwriter Ringo Shiina and is for a health drink called “Kibun Tounyuu”:

Here’s some background info on Shiina:

“Shiina Ringo (alternately Sheena Ringo and similar spellings) somehow steps around the industry archetypes. In fact, it’s hard to say who Shiina Ringo is. We’ve seen her as a lost teenager going against the grain, a racy nurse with an interest in her female patients, a bride with a smile as bright as the pistol she holds to her head, even a jazz-hungry flapper. With a wink and a flash of skin, Shiina Ringo has proven to be many things, but it always comes down to her incredible music.

There is no way to classify Shiina Ringo’s work other than that it is her own. She flits between and merges together genres in ways never thought possible, so much that she really has a genre all of her own. It doesn’t matter if it’s jazz, rock, or some bizarre combination of the two, she will make it work and you will like it. She experiments with her music and her voice; she whispers, rasps, coos, and screeches her way through playful lyrics and arrangements in a way only Shiina Ringo can.”

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Pucca: Violent Love

I love the job that Disney done of turning Pucca into an animated tv show. They managed to stay true to the strong graphic look of Pucca without giving up the comedy and storytelling required to make cartoons fun:

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Cartoon Renaissance Mashups

At worth1000.com there are the results for a Photoshop competition to kitbash cartoon characters with classic Renaissance paintings.

Les Shadoks

Fans of the “cartoon modern style” will get a kick out of the well designed look of this 1968 episode of the French aimated series “Les Shadoks”:

Les Shadoks features quite a bit of offbeat philosophical humor, roughly translated the first principle of Shadok logic is “Why to make things simple when you can make them complicated? “

According to Wikipedia here’s some interesting bacground info on Les Shadoks:

“Les Shadoks was the invention of the seminal French cartoonist Jacques Rouxel (February 26, 1931 – April 25, 2004) and became a major French TV phenomenon in the 1960s. The Shadoks were bird-like in appearance (in the tradition of cartoon birds they had beaks with teeth), were characterised by ruthlessness and stupidity and inhabited a two dimensional planet.

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Speed Racer Inspired Commercial

This Speed Racer inspired commercial from Japan stars actress and singer Ueto Aya:

The Double Deckers

This music filled title sequence is from a 1970 British kids themed show called “The Double Deckers”:

I never heard of this show before, but the cast has every cliched character that you can think of, there’s a smart kid called “Brains”, a drum player called “Sticks”, and of course an sad overweight child whose taunting nickname is “Doughnut”. And of course no show would be complete without a little girl called “Tiger” who has (you guessed it) a pet tiger doll also named “Tiger”.

The plot of the show is that “The Double Deckers” are a group of seven young adults (aged 9 to 16) living in London who hang out and play together in a converted doubledecker bus. The bus serves as a club house for the kids. The token American character is the drum player Sticks, and the lone adult regular was Albert, a street cleaner.

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The Shortchanged Space Station

In the below article John Glenn gripes about the International Space Station being overlooked. I agree with him, but I think it’s part of a larger issue, which is that NASA on the whole has been shortchanged these last few years. It’s unfair to cut the budget for the program but then keep adding goals like going to Mars. From where I’m sitting both the space station and the Mars project are being shortchanged. You can’t do big government projects like NASA on the cheap, unless you don’t mind the bad press from dead astronauts:

Glenn: Space station getting shortchanged

“The country is not getting its money’s worth out of the international space station, John Glenn said Tuesday, the 45th anniversary of the day he became the first American to orbit the Earth.

Diverting money from the orbiting research outpost to President Bush’s goal of sending astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars is preventing some scientific experiments on the space station, Glenn told an audience of about 300 high school students and space enthusiasts at the COSI Columbus science center.

“To not utilize that station the way I think it ought to be utilized is just wrong,” said Glenn, 85, also a former U.S. senator. He said he supports the president’s moon and Mars goals but not at the expense of the space station, which is only two-thirds complete. NASA and its international partners, including Canada, Japan and Russia, hope to finish the space station in 2010, but no decision has been made to extend its operation past 2016.

Glenn, a Democrat who represented Ohio from 1975 to 1999, said the station shouldn’t be abandoned, especially after costing taxpayers billions of dollars. “We will not even begin to realize its potential,” he said.”

The Day that Hollywood Stood Still

Is there nothing else left for Hollywood to ruin? Running in and out of rehab is nothing to be ashamed of in Tinsel Town, but coming up with a new idea for a film must be some sort of unspoken sin. Anyway it looks like the classic science fiction film “The Day the earth Stood Still” is set to be ruined, I mean “reinvisioned” by Fox:

The Day the Earth Stood Still Being Remade for 2008 – Confirmed!

“Apparently Box Office Mojo, the best website for all things box office earnings, has updated their schedule for summer 2008 and included a listing of The Day the Earth Stood Still to open on May 9th, 2008 (one week after Iron Man). The original is a sci-fi classic 1951 movie about an alien and a robot that land on Earth to try and save the world from being destroyed. IMDB doesn’t even have a listing for this remake, but Box Office Mojo claims it’s being produced by Fox, fast-tracked for a spot in 2008′s busy summer.”

Here’s a trailer for the “classic version” of the film:

Pinky & Perky

It’s always amazing to me to discover all sorts of lost gems on YouTube. My latest discovery is an old BBC show called Pinky & Perky which features two singing pig puppets that sound quite a bit like Alvin and the Chipmunks. The show ran from 1957 to the early 1970’s on British television and featured cover versions of many pop songs of the day. And as with any kids show there was a ton of merchandise associated with Pinky & Perky, everything from toys to books to records.

The following clip features host Jimmy Thomson (who also had a few roles in various episodes of the Benny Hill Show):

Below: Pinky & Perky annuals from 1962 and 1969.

Yui Aragaki Commercials

This is a cute series of commercials from Japan for a recruiting service which stars Yui Aragaki:

Here’s some background info on Yui Aragaki from Wikipedia:

“Yui Aragaki (新垣結衣 Aragaki Yui, born June 11, 1988) is a Ryukyuan Japanese model, actress and seiyu. Born in Naha, Okinawa, she was nicknamed Gakky in 2001 by Ayako Enomoto. After seeing an audition notice for the junior fashion magazine nicola, Yui applied and won the Grand Prix award for the audition. After that, she became a nicomo (nicola model) and because of her fashion sense and logical personality, gained many fans. In 2004 she put her modeling in nicola on hold to expand her current career into gravure, appearing on variety shows, and acting. In 2005 she officially graduated from the magazine. The same year, she was in the TBS drama Dragon Zakura. This began her entrance into the acting world and she has gone on to appear in other shows since. Even though she has graduated from nicola, she still appears in the magazine occasionally.”

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Roman Album: Neither Roman, Nor an Album

Above: On the left a pin up poster from the “Be Forever Yamato” Roman Album from the 80s, on the right the cover from the “Samurai Champloo” Roman Album from 2006.

I ordered it as Christmas gift for myself, but it only showed up in my mailbox today well over a month after other people had opened their goodies. I freely admit that it was a bit of a guilty pleasure, and despite my being a creative professional whose work does touch upon animation there was in fact no “real reason” that I needed the object in question. But upon opening the box my heart felt inspired again, and I remember why I had gotten into it all.

The little treasure I’m talking about is a Samurai Champloo Roman Album. Now of course most anime fans have heard of Samurai Champloo (although at this point they’re all mostly watching Bleach) but only a small handful of the Japanimation faithful know what a Roman Album is, or why they’re so special.

To start with a “Roman Album” is neither Italian nor a music album. To be honest I have no idea how they got their name, but Roman Albums date back to the 70s in Japan when anime was going through it’s first major boom. Along with this boom came a glut of merchandise for Japanese otaku to buy, everything from model kits of your favorite robot to the first generation of magazines that only covered anime.

It was during this era that the Roman Album was born. To start with a Roman Album is a softcover letter sized paperback book of about 100 pages. Unlike a magazine, a single Roman Album is done on only one specific television series or movie. The first few pages of a Roman Album were always packed with dozens upon dozens of shots of almost every major scene from the anime production being covered.

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Superman Sells Sugar Smacks

Young man if you spill those Sugar Smacks you’re fired:

Portable Second Life

Bandai has just announced a new gizmo called Human Player which allows you to create a virtual Tamagotchi of yourself. First, you take a fifty question personality test (called an “Ego-Gram”) which assigns you one of 22 personalities. Now you’re set to have fun with other Human Player owners:

Mmmmm, I wonder what she’s thinking? And here’s a nifty video which gives a nice demo of the product:

Found via Trends In Tokyo.

Cute Cat Commercial for Contacts

Oh sure all the other website keep showing that same video from YouTube with that cat who can play the piano! But for some reason I found this commercial from Japan (directed by Ochiai Makito) to be much cuter:

The commercial is for a company (eyecity.jp) that seems to be selling contact eye lens services.

Bionic Eyes Becoming Real

To oldtime fanboys who grew up with the “Six Million Dollar Man” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” the concept of bionic eyes will seem old school, but in a nice twist-of-technology it looks like the concept is starting to become quite real according to this BBC news article:

Trials for ‘bionic’ eye implants

“A bionic eye implant that could help restore the sight of millions of blind people could be available to patients within two years. US researchers have been given the go-ahead to implant the prototype device in 50 to 75 patients. The Argus II system uses a spectacle-mounted camera to feed visual information to electrodes in the eye. Patients who tested less-advanced versions of the retinal implant were able to see light, shapes and movement.”

This research for this was presented at the AAAS Conference by Mark Humayun who is affiliated with the National Design Center for Biomimetic Nanoconductors. According to thier website they are doing some interesting work:

“The premise of the artificial retina project is to take images from a glass-worn camera and convert it into patterns of electrical stimulations that would excite the remaining retinal neurons and when transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve result in restoring useful visual cues. In so doing, the artificial retina would by pass the loss of the photoreceptor function. The critical questions in the development of the artificial retina lie in how best to electrically and mechanically interface the implanted electronics with the remaining retinal neurons (e.g., retinal ganglion cells).”

Obituary: Canadian Animator Ryan Larkin

Sadly I just heard the news that talented animator Ryan Larkin has just passed away:

Canadian Animator Ryan Larkin Dies

“Laurie Gordon, Ryan Larkin’s producer, manager and good friend expressed her profound sympathy today at the passing of legendary Canadian animator Ryan Larkin. Larkin died peacefully in his sleep, Wednesday, February 14, in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec following a long-term battle with cancer. Larkin was 63.

Most recently, Larkin was working with Gordon on an animation film “Spare Change” about his experience as a panhandler on the Main in Montreal, Quebec; it was going to be a comeback project for Larkin. Gordon will continue to work on “Spare Change” in Ryan’s memory. Details can be found at www.ryanbango.com.”

Here’s a wonderful gem of a film he animated in 1965, titled “Syrinx”:

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