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Friday, January 30, 2009

DVD Review - License to kill

It's not really cool to kill people. However, if someone is a contractor, then they were made to kill.

"Darker Than Black" is a cool thriller about an independent band of psychic superheroes who are trying to save the world from corporate assassins.

At least that's what I've concluded. However, these superheroes are known as contractors. They obtained special psychic abilities from witnessing the mysterious appearance of Hell's Gate.

Some corporations hire these contractors to perform their own black market smuggling deals. However, another independent group of contractors is saving contractors. They take in contractors to prevent crime.

Their leader is the Black Reaper, also known as Liu Xiansheng. Although he acts like a college student, he's really a trained killer with electric wires as weapons. He's one of the fastest and toughest superheroes I've ever seen. He has three comrades. One is a human named Huang. Another is Yin, a girl with silver hair, who can track the movements of other contractors whenever her skin touches water.

And the leader of the band is Mao, who is, ahem, a black cat. He's a master strategist. However, don't ask me how a cat became the mastermind.

Liu probably works for a syndicate, but he's more interested in saving contractors from being taken in by the police. The first story arc, "The Star of Contract Flowed," involves Liu finding a mysterious girl named Chiaki Shinoda. For a while, Liu spends time as Shinoda's bodyguard, until Shinoda learns that Liu is actually a contractor who killed her boyfriend contractor.

In the second story arc, "A New Star Shines in the City of Dawn," Liu helps the daughter of a Tahara, a sole surviver of the Hell's Gate incident. The daughter, Chiaki, has the ability to shoot out fire. Her father tried to suppress her abilities by injecting the seeds of a plant from the Hell's Gate area into her wrist. However, he couldn't suppress her emotional angst and violent abilities too long, and now she's a crazy firebrand.

In the last story arc, "The Red Dreams of a Calamity Disappears to Eastern Europe," Liu captures a woman from MI6 and the Japanese police. The woman, named Havoc, has the ability to create interdimensional vacuums. However, Liu hinted at the end that Havoc knows the whereabouts of his sister.

This is sure a mysterious anime, where most of the details of the story don't rise up until the characters start fighting. However, Liu's has surprisingly conversations with women who were involved in the Hell's Gate incident. This anime is incredible for its deep dialogue involving scientific experiments gone wrong.

And the fighting is just so incredible. The characters wield unusual weapons. Liu is equipped with electric wires, which he shoots out at enemy contractors. His enemies also bear weapons, such as razor sharp whips. One of them has the ability to freeze anything he touches, and another has the ability to cause storms.

It looks like there is a much deeper plot behind this anime too. "Darker Than Black" is fast and mysterious, with all the energy of a spy thriller. Hopefully the plot will add up as well.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

DVD Review - Saving the Prince

"Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit" is still a brilliant series, with plenty of action and an engaging story about ancient spirits.

As we recall in the first DVD of Moribito, Balsa, the bodyguard, chose to defend Chagum from Emperor Mikado's samurai. Balsa took a serious beating, fighting those elite samurai in episode three. Fortunately, the herbalist, Tanda, is taking care of her.

With the second volume of Moribito, we learn that the shaman who visited Tanda was Torogai, Tanda's mentor. Torogai takes a spiritual peek, taking his face through Chagum's chest to examine the water spirit inside of him. Torogai then explains that Chagum's body contains the egg of a water spirit. If it hatches, the water spirit will revive the land every hundred years.

Balsa also contacts a slave holding company, the Blue Hand, to release slaves to confuse the imperial guard. Although two samurai still chase Balsa, Torogai summons a humongous wolf spirit to chase Balsa's horse off a cliff. The samurai assume that Balsa and the child died, but it was all a ruse to trick the samurai. Balsa and Chagum are still alive, and their horse is strong enough to climb up cliffs.

Thus, Balsa saves Prince Chagum and manages to fake their own death as well. It's an intense DVD with its own style of anime silliness as well. When the four samurai are trying to figure out where Balsa would escape, they meditate in order to predict where Balsa would move. They're so good and predicting her movement that they might as well be psychic. It's a humorous, science fiction-styled change of pace for a period-piece anime.

And I still have no idea how a horse could even climb such a tall cliff. Once again, this is a very fictional anime. However, it manages to plod on with an engaging story. The last episode gave me the sense that Balsa and Chagum finally have time to relax. However, the star diviner, Shuga, noticed in the stars that the water spirit still lives. If the emperor figures this out, then Balsa might have to face the samurai again. I'm looking forward to some more action in the next volume.

"Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit" is still a very solid anime, with plenty of ancient Japanese spirits and intense action. Hopefully the next volume maintains the anime's intensity.

Image courtesy of anime.tedfox.com

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

DVD Review: Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex

This is old news by now, but the complete collection of "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season One" was rereleased in a cheaper box set in October of last year. Unlike the previous DVD of merely the Laughing Man story arc, this set features all the complete episodes.

And if anyone hasn't seen "Ghost in the Shell" before, it's a dizzy spectacle of robot military action, deep philosophizing and complex dialogue.

The main character, Motoko Kusanagi, is the operations leader of the secret special ops group named Section 9. They specialize in policing all forms of heavy-duty cyber crime, such as drug and organ smuggling.

However, this is very dangerous work. Some of these groups deal in heavy-duty machine guns, and some of them possess cybernetic body parts. Thus, almost all the members of Section 9 have complete cyborg bodies. Well, all of them except for the former police investigator, Togusa. He's flesh and blood, but he possesses cybernetic gizmos in his body.

The cyborg bodies allow all the Section 9 members the ability to communicate wirelessly without moving their lips. Their eyes are equipped with night vision. And they all can read bar code data for information. They also have spider tanks called Tachikomas.

Although the machinery and cyber-punk technology alone makes this one of the coolest anime series, there is also a much more complex storyline which starts in episode four. Togusa gets a tip from a former coworker at the police department about Interceptors, optical implants which allow hackers to see video through other people's eyes. Togusa discovers his first shocking conspiracy--that police are illegally installing Interceptors in all their officers to find the Laughing Man, a professional hacker.

However, the hacker is also a professional muckraker. Although he doesn't show his face too often, the Laughing Man is also trying to lead Section 9 to uncover a hideous plot involving corporate blackmailing on the scale of billions of yen.

It's a complex anime to say the least. "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" is an epic masterpiece, involving government conspiracies and military warfare. It almost suffers from too much fancy shmancy dialogue about hacking, Internet communications and existential conversations. However it all holds together to make an awesome first season that is hard to beat.

The series is now available for $40 in stores. If anyone hasn't seen any "Ghost in the Shell" anime, they have to check out the movie. "Ghost in the Shell" is deservedly one of the best action anime around, even if Motoko tends to show a little too much skin.

Images courtesy of grumpfactory.wordpress.com

Sunday, January 18, 2009

No anime in newspaper anymore

Well, I'm bummed out. The Daily 49er is not printing blog articles anymore. So that means that my anime stories will not appear in print.

Damn. Well at least I'm still keeping the anime blog alive. Hopefully I'll have the motivation to keep this up.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Redesign time

Back from Idaho. I'll be redesigning the page over the next few days.

I also got a great deal on the complete series of My-Hime, for only $36. Boy, I think that's my favorite anime now.

I'll write a review of the set soon.