Some years back, Panasonic had an ISP business in Japan called hi-ho. They had a series of bizarre, addictive, animated commercials that Eric and I enjoyed watching. I remember Eric wasn’t even a teenager yet, so it had to have been a while ago. This one has a winter theme.
Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit is about a woman warrior who has been hired to protect a boy prince sentenced to death by his father for being possessed by a water spirit. Hey, Stephen King story summaries sound silly too!
This series is another one that looks particularly good on the Panasonic video projector. We’re disappointed, however, by the DVD box set of Mushi-shi, which suffers from the excessive video compression required to fit seven episodes on a single disc. The original release had only four shows per disc.
Greetings from the Dunkin’ Donuts in Winchendon, MA, where around the corner is the end of a dream. Tokyo Game Action was Andy McGuire’s dream of turning a vacant bowling alley into a video arcade that was so good it would be a destination for serious gamers — and for Eric it was.
Nearly six hours after the auction began to liquidate all assets, it’s still going. I’ll post more about this later from home.
Eric and his cousin Kate are somewhere here in the Hynes Convention Center, where we’re attending Anime Boston. The Hynes has a very good free WiFi network, as I just found out.
Unlike last year’s Anime Boston, I have only good things to say about the registration process, because it was 3 hours and 59 minutes shorter! Yesterday, as pre-registered attendees, it took all of one minute for us to get our badges. Dealer space has been doubled, making navigation much easier, and there are lots of well-trained volunteers. Bravo, Anime Boston organizers! Thank you.
I’ve been hanging out in the video rooms, partly to check out the various projectors. One of the Animes being featured is Kino’s Journey, which Eric had us watching a couple of years ago. Here’s a shot of the room taken with the Acer netbook’s webcam.
Rotoscoping is an animation technique that’s been around since 1914, when it was patented by Max Fleischer. It’s done differently today, of course, but the underlying idea — taking live action footage and making it look like a drawing — remains the same.
I can’t think of an instance where the Disney studio used it while Walt was alive (the integration of live action and animation doesn’t count), although film was often used as an animation guide by Disney artists. Disney was wise to stay away from rotoscoping, because, like anything, it can be overdone and/or misapplied as was the case with Ralph Bakshi’s mostly awful version of Lord of the Rings.
The distinctions between comics and cartoons and live action movies with digital effects are now so blurry as to be indistinguishable. In the future will still picture comics even exist as anything other than a niche, and for movie storyboards?
The Peanuts Motion Comics I talked about a couple of posts ago were done in Flash animation that obviously required no live action for reference. (They’re fun, by the way, and were based on 1964 comic strips that were some of the best material Sparky Schulz ever wrote.) Marvel Motion Comics are done in a similar way, but they’re much more detailed, of course, and they display the darker tone that everybody now associates with Marvel Comics.
The first serious full-length movie to go all-out with Flash animation is Waltz with Bashir, which is brilliantly realized, but was obviously based upon live action source material, despite claims to the contrary that I’ve read. I’d also suggest taking a look at the clip from “Men in Black” (not the Will Smith movie) that I posted a couple of years ago.
As I said, rotoscoping and its variants can be overdone. The ad agency that produced the new series of Charles Schwab commercials seems to have jumped on the Flash animation bandwagon, but it’s a misuse of the tool. This creepy image is supposed to make nervous investors feel more confident in a brokerage firm? Yuck!
Last summer I did a post on the anime called Emma. The second season is now out on DVD, and we’re watching it. Tonight we spotted a moment in a show where a ledger is being shown, but then we realized that instead of being an accounting of financial transactions, it’s a bunch of Beatles song titles. I’ve tried to make them legible in this image.
