Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 20, 2007

More Otakon News

OtakonNow that we’re just one month from Otakon, the announcements of guests and other things are picking up. A few more guest announcements came in this week:

  • Kenji Kodama - Director of Cased Closed (aka Detective Conan), co-director of City Hunter, and key animator for Great Teacher Onizuka.
  • Michihiko Suwa - Producer for YTV. He has produced such series as CityHunter, Black Jack, and Magic Knight Rayearth and has overseen the production of Case Closed and Inu Yasha.
  • Aaron Dismuke - Most famous for doing the voice work of Alphonse Elric in Funimation’s release of Fullmetal Alchemist (to go along with Vic Mignogna who was announced as a guest a while ago, who did the voice of Edward Elric). He also does the voice of Ion Fortuna in Trinity Blood.

Otakon has also added a list of industry panels, including:

  • ADV Films
  • Bandai Entertainment
  • Bandai Visual USA
  • Funimation
  • Gaia Online
  • Geneon
  • Gonzo
  • Harmony Gold
  • Media Blasters, and
  • Tokyopop

Summer Anime

I’m glad other people know more what’s going on in Japan right now than I do. 21 months into watching anime and I’m still largely trying to catch up with what has already been released in the US for the past 10 years.

I’m currently watching four and blogging one spring anime currently. I may add another show to blog in the summer, though expect me to write those reviews different than Nagasarete Airantou as I’m still learning the best way to blog series. I’m also only taking one new series because I’m still not sure how much I can handle at once yet, so I thought that taking it slow first is better than biting off more than I can chew.

That said, what new shows will I watch?

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What I Want to See: Air

AirAfter watching Kanon and enjoying pretty much all 3 Kyoto Animation series that I’ve either finished or are in progress of watching, I thought I’d add a fellow Key visual novel-based series produced by Kyoto Animation to the list of what I want to see.

Reading a non-spoiler description of it on wikipedia and Anime News Network, Air sounds a little more unusual than most visual novels that I’ve heard of, though I guess I’ll see.

I almost kind of find it humorous that the things with some of the best stories that I’ve seen are all ero visual novel games. I’m not sure if it’s because people who play these visual novels justify the ero part by saying “but it has a good story too!” or if people who play those games are secretly all mushy-mushy.

When watching or playing anime or anime-like visual novel games, very few have caused me to blubber, but all three either visual novel, or anime based of visual novels have invoked that reaction.

I’ll see if Air is similar in this regard as well. It has a good rating on Anime News Network, so that’s a promising start. Unfortunately I have to wait until mid-August for the first DVD to come out.