One of my favorite movies from childhood was Return to Witch Mountain, about two orphans (brother and sister) who seek to discover the source of their magical powers. Hmm. Guess I was into mahou shoujo early on, it seems. At any rate, Disney is doing a remake, which usually elicits a yawn (if not horror). What caught my attention though was that the girl is being played by AnnaSophia Robb, and the Bad Guy by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I was utterly enchanted with Robb’s performance in Terabithia and Johnson is just a genius of screen presence. Even if they butcher the basic plot, it’s still going to be worth watching.
Author: fledgling otaku
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live-action Bebop
Just saw this at AICN:
IF Magazine has learned that producer Erwin Stoff is developing an adaptation of one of America’s favorite anime series…. Cowboy Bebop.
“I’m developing COWBOY BEBOP for Fox, but doing it as a live-action film, so I’m working on that at the moment,†Stoff tells iF. “I’m really excited to be working on it, and it’s in the really early stages. We just signed it the other day.â€
“I have such an enormous admiration for its creators, that our first and foremost concern is going to be a real degree of faithfulness to the tone of the movie, to the mix of genres, and so on and so forth,†he says. “When I met with them in Japan, one of the first things that I brought up was the experience that we had on A SCANNER DARKLY, and how hard we worked to remain faithful to Philip K. Dick, and that was our big concern here.â€
America’s favorite anime series? I thought that was DragonBall Z… which also is getting the live action treatment, as I noted before. Of course there’s also that live-action Robotech coming up, too.
I’ll get really excited when they start casting for live-action Haibane Renmei. Others may be waiting for live-action Najica Blitz Tactics. To each his own…
Just curious, though. Suppose they were to do a live-action Haibane. Who’d you want to see playing Reki and Rakka?
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whale otaku rejoice
Given that otaku tend to be an obsessive bunch by definition, I find this rather convenient: an actual white whale.
A new white humpback has been sighted off Byron Bay on the east coast of Australia.
The newcomer, which was filmed by a television news helicopter, has excited marine scientists who think it may be related to Migaloo – to date, the only known all-white humpback whale.
Melville is surely grinning in his grave.
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Ponyo preview
via Don. It looks like a cross between Totoro and Spirited Away.
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I am the Wumpus
I just came across the Tales of the Rampant Coyote blog, written by Jay Barnson, an old-school gamer since the Ultima days. One of his posts really caught my eye, a description of the old game for the Commodore 64 called, “Hunt The Wumpus”. I LOVED that game. In essence, it was a logical puzzle. I’ll let the Coyote explain:
You started in a room in the cave complex of twenty rooms, each room connected to three others. In two rooms, there were bottomless pits. If you moved into those rooms, you lost the game. In two rooms, there were “Superbats” that would pick you up and drop you in a random room if you moved into them. And then there was the Wumpus.
You were armed with a few arrows that could shoot through five rooms (changing course as they flew). If they went through your own room (since they could circle around, in theory), you shot yourself and the game was over. If they went into the Wumpus’s room, they killed the wumpus and you won. Otherwise – if you missed the Wumpus OR walked into the Wumpus’s room, he’d get up and move (or stay in the same room). If he ended up in the same room as you, he’d eat you and you lost the game. You could also lose the game if you ran out of arrows.
You could hear the bats if you were next to a superbat room. You could feel a draft if you were next to a bottomless pit room. And you could spell the Wumpus if you were in a room next to him. So the game was basically a randomly changing logic puzzle where you’d try and triangulate the positions of your goal and the threats.
Oh, yeah. And it had no graphics at all. You had to draw yourself trying to figure out the topography of the map.
good times, especially when you got eaten by the Wumpus, because the entire screen would fill with blood (ie, the screen wiped solid red, which was about the limit of computer graphics at the time). It was a frustrating game, but it was great.
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New Internet Addictions
just discovered this via about a dozen separate internet vectors. Now I feel like watching Firefly – all of it – again.
What I really wish is that Joss Whedon would make another show. And that Nathan Fillion would be in it. And I wish it would be about something cool. Like superheroes. No! Supervillains! Like, a comedy. A musical comedy maybe. With Neil Patrick Harris. And since I don’t have cable TV, it would be cool if they made the show and then just put it up online. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Yes. It would be fully and unwaveringly awesome.
It should also be noted that the lovely, talented Felicia Day, whom I’d never heard of before today, is not just the love interest for the mighty NPH in Dr. Horrible but also the writer for The Guild, which will appeal to you if you appreciate gamer humor, or even if you don’t:
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unchi! (ã†ã‚“ã¡)
In Dennou Coil, Kyoko (age 3) has a penchant for running about, pointing at things, and exclaiming, “unchi!” (poop):
This is fairly accurate as far as a characterization of 3-year old humor goes. By that logic, the Himeji City Museum of Literature, in Himeji, Japan (near Osaka) was until May of this year the funniest place in the universe. This is because the museum, inexplicably, had an exhibit devoted to poop:
translation:
Everybody come and play! Come and look! We have poop books!
Rabbit: It’s poop time!
Gorilla: Come and see my poop too!
Elephant: Animal poop is here yo!
See it. Touch it! Smell it! Explore!
Can you guess what animals made this poop? (3 pictures)
Himeji Museum Of Literature, Special Exhibit. April 1st-May 18th
Head over to thomas’s post at Babelhut and see for yourself. It is in fact not only exactly what it seems to be, but in fact even more so than you think it would be. Fear the Japanese, indeed. Though it must be admitted that were this exhibit to come to any children’s museum in the United States, it would make more money than the mind can comfortably comprehend.
(It should be noted that I have blogged about poop before. I also have on occasion been fascinated with toilets. Insert bad joke about straining too hard here…)
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Samurai Jack in the end
This is a great mashup of the song “In the End” from Linkin Park. Really puts a tragic spin on Jack’s quest:
In many ways it is a kind of pessimistic story – after all, Jack routinely fails to return to the past, despite epic heroism. He really does try hard, but in the end it doesn’t seem to matter, at least not to the billions enslaved by Aku throughout time. However Jack is making a difference to the people in the future who he liberates from Aku’s reign, so perhaps that is the true measure of his destiny.
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Samurai Jack meets Wong Fei Hung
just awesome.
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Ranma and longevity
I am about a third of the way through Ranma’s sixth season now and I think I’ve identified what keeps me interested in the series even though others find it repetitive. That is, that the fundamentals of the character relationships are why we watch, so changing them would by definition ruin it. Steven pointed out a while back that Ranma is enmeshed in a web of obligations, from which there is no escape, so ultimately Ranma simply avoids resolution and proceeds on his own path, which is to continue to master and innovate in martial arts. The entirety of the character evolution is not what the characters do, or changes in their lives, but in how they feel, and on that basis you can differentiate the characters:
Primary characters: Ranma, Akane. The emotions towards each other do grow each season, though there is ultimately a plateau. There will never be public reciprocation of emotion from Ranma towards Akane as long as Ranma remains bound by his web of obligation, and Akane will never act on her (often transparent) feelings for Ranma due to her own sense of insecurity. Ultimately, they are both forced to wait. However we do see that they have evolved over time. I think by season 6 both are as far as they can go, which is fine because there’s still plenty for both to deal with.
Major characters: Ryoga, Nabiki, Kasumi. All have had episodes where they are the focus, and they have to act out of type and be challenged in a way that they didn’t expect. They do return to their usual behavior afterwards, but those episdoes do demonstrate that they have depth when required.
Minor characters: Genma, Tendo, Mousse, Happosai. All are one-note strings thus far, but it only takes one focus episode to graduate them to the Major status. Happosai did actually get a bit of treatment in season 5, but he is needed to play the eternal joker, so I don’t think he will ever escape. We have also had tantalizing hints of more from Moose, but thus far he hasn’t had his own breakout.
What keeps the series going is that they have a large ensemble cast to gradually graduate from minor to major, and balance that out with incremental evolution of the primary characters. The continuity between seasons (slow rate of change) is probably why the series retained its longevity without ever jumping the shark – there’s a formula, and the show sticks to it, with the innovation not from the basic structure, but rather the details. One example of how the series keeps things new is in the varied forms of martial arts tha Ranma encounters: french cooking, calligraphy, chess, race kart driving, etc. Some of these warrant more episodes than others to explore (in particular the Pate Fois Gras arc, which was brilliantly demented).
It’s interesting to see that the manga industry is worried about what happens when its audience in the US grows up. I think Ranma avoids this conundrum by simply staying the same, so that every new generation gets attracted to it for the same reasons. Whether or not you outgrow Ranma is immaterial; if you like it, you will probably keep on liking it.
