This… is one of the best music videos I have ever seen. EVER. I mean… Wow.
And you know how anything can be made better by adding LASERS, right? Well…
Touhou – Bad Apple!! (Lasershow)
Pardon me while I stare at my screen with my jaw hanging open.
What happens when you take the Haruhi season 2 opening and add Russian music?
Until I saw this, the thought that such a pairing could be awesome never even entered the darkest recesses of my mind. But now I have to say that…
I LOVE IT!!!
After watching all these animes, I thought I would finish off the series with a few words concerning the openings, or the OPs. I won’t embed all of the videos in the post, since that would take up too much space. Linking will be good enough. Now let’s get started:
Sugar: A Little Snow Fairy – It was this video that started a chain reaction that got me into this whole anime thing in the first place! It’s cute, it’s fluffy, it’s adorable, it melts in your mouth, and it will give you diabetes if you aren’t careful.
Clannad and After Story – I like After Story’s just a bit better, but both have great music, and incredible animation. I’ve come to hold a great deal of respect for the guys at KyoAni.
Death Note (Seasons One and Two) – I didn’t like the Death Note OPs, to be honest. I did like the animation style on the second one, but the music just doesn’t quite work for me.
Lucky Star – A fun dance, with a happy song to go along with it.
Code Geass (Season One OP1 (V2), OP2 (V2), OP3 and Season Two OP1 and OP2) – SO MANY VERSIONS! But my favorite is OP2 of season 1. I love that guitar.
Strawberry Marshmallow – HEAVILY addicting. At least, for me it was. It’s so light and fluffy… Fuwa fuwa…
Kanon – A nice slow song, fitting with the series.
K-On! OP1 and OP2 – I like! Girls n’ Guitars. (And drums. And keyboards.)
Haruhi Suzumiya (Seasons One and Two) – My reaction to Season 1: “That’s pretty good…” My reaction to Season 2: “WOOT!!! AWESOMENESS!!!” *plays air guitar*
Azumanga Daioh – I love this OP. A lot. A VERY lot. It’s fun, it’s catchy, it’s silly, it’s just the way I like it.
Planetes – It’s got rockets. I’ll give it that. I just didn’t care for the song much…
Neon Genesis Evangelion – It’s cool, I guess. It didn’t strike me as being particularly great, though.
Cowboy Bebop – Cool music, and cool animation. This gets a thumbs up from me.
And that brings us to the end of this season’s anime column. I’m still Xbolt, and I’ll see you next summer! Sayonara!
Or they’ll do this to you.
Over lunch today, I was talking with some friends. And we stumbled across something that will eventually change the world: using ZIP compression on matter.
Think about it, you can compress computer data in ZIP files, right? So, why not apply those same principles to matter? We just need to invent matter decompilers/recompilers, and we’ll be all set.
But since none of us have degrees in engineering, we’ll leave the details up to the engineers when we form our company. We just want to get paid billions of dollars for coming up with the idea.
My series just wouldn’t be complete without a few words about the first anime I ever watched, and which still holds the place closest to my heart, now would it?
As you may remember, I’ve talked about Sugar: A Little Snow Fairy before, but hey. Who says I can’t do so again? :D
Like I said, the basic premise is that the world’s weather is controlled by Season Fairies; tiny creatures who use magical instruments to do their thing. Normally, humans cannot see Season Fairies, but very rarely, there comes along someone who can.
Saga Bergman is one such individual. Saga is an utterly dependable girl, who takes issue if she is just five minutes late to an appointment. “Tardiness is tardiness!” is what she says. She lives by the clock, creating complete schedules for her and her friends days in advance. However, her perfect rhythm is interrupted when she finds a tiny little creature nearly passed out from hunger during a rainstorm. She feeds it a waffle, and takes it home. She soon regrets it, as her new roommate, Sugar, causes her nothing but trouble.
Sugar is an apprentice Snow Fairy currently undergoing training in the human world as a part of her effort to become a full-fledged Snow Fairy. Along with her friends, Salt the Sun Fairy and Pepper the Wind Fairy, Sugar is in search of the mysterious ‘Twinkle’, which will allow their magic flowers to bloom, thereby completing their training. Sugar is very clumsy, always trying her best, but messes up because she never thinks things through properly. Salt and Pepper are less prone to impulsive actions than Sugar is, but they will still do so at times. Salt is kind of loud, whereas Pepper is always quiet and polite.
Greta is an interesting character. The spoiled daughter of a rich family, she is very arrogant and boastful. She is Saga’s (self-proclaimed) rival, and is always setting up contests between them. (They usually end in pain for Greta, though.) However, despite her outward abrasiveness, Greta takes her place as my favorite character in the story.
In my opinion, Sugar reached almost perfection in the balance between the comedy and drama in the story. I can only name one thing I would have changed if I were writing it. Other than that one point, I was left completely satisfied with the show, right up through the end credits. Surprisingly, among the story-driven animes I’ve watched, it’s rare that the ending leaves you completely satisfied. Many of the endings were a bit of a letdown after a great series. (Actually, that applies to a lot of other things, too. Not just anime. Still a bummer, though.)
Now for a video… I’ve already posted two Sugar videos, (one of which was taken down by YouTube, alas,) so how about this one?
A Little Snow Fairy Sugar – Ike Ike
Catchy song.
And that wraps up all the anime reviews I’ll be doing this season. I have one more special post in mind to end the series, but after that it’ll be nothing for a while. But fear not! Next summer, when I have a lot of time to watch more anime, I’ll reboot the series because doing these reviews were a lot of fun for me, and I hope for you too. (All four of you…)
When most people hear the word “animated cartoon,” images of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Wile E. Coyote come to mind. These cartoons were all created by American studios. Anime, however, is a distinctly Japanese style of cartoon that has become increasingly popular in the United States during the last decade. As a child, Disney’s Gargoyles was one of my favorite television shows. The animation is much better than most other American productions; yet it would rank only as a mid-range quality show in Japan. The first Japanese anime I ever watched was Sugar: A Little Snow Fairy, and it was quite a shock to see what the Japanese air on their regular television. In comparing televised animation, I found that Japanese anime is superior to American cartoons due to its quality of animation, character development, and storylines. Read More
CryEngine 3 – “Beauty, Speed, Interaction” trailer
I looked into the future, and I saw… Beauty.
Instead of Flash this semester, I’m enrolled in a HTML Web Design class. And in keeping a promise I made a while back, I present y’all with…
The Official Whaleware Website!
XHTML-compliant, CSS styling, and all that jazz!
*dreads having to fix up the X-Net website to be standards-compliant…*
Clannad is my second-favorite anime, ever since it pushed Death Note out of its spot.
The word ‘Clannad’ is derived from ‘clan’, the Irish word for family. And that’s really what is at the heart of the anime; the building of families. Not just actual relatives, but a close circle of friends who are like family.
Tomoya Okazaki is a high school delinquent, who is generally apathetic towards life. He is absolutely straightforward with his comments, and will speak his mind, even if he may come across as rude. Despite that, he is steadfastly loyal to his friends, and will not hesitate to help if he can.
At the beginning of the story, Tomoya meets Nagisa Furukawa, a very soft-spoken girl with very little self-esteem. She loves anpan, (sweet bean bread,) and the ‘Dango Daikazoku’, a group mascot character. Nagisa wants to re-establish the school’s drama club, which Tomoya helps with.
Kyou Fujibayashi is an aggressive girl, who will throw the book (literally!) at anyone she gets mad at. She has a pet baby boar named Botan, is the class representative for her class, and a good cook. Her sister on the other hand, Ryou Fujibayashi, is very timid, and not a good cook.
Kotomi Ichinose is highly intelligent. In every subject on standardized tests, she is among the top ten in the country. She is also very shy and quiet, and is always found sitting in the library, reading books. She also likes playing the violin, but is rather terrible at it, causing pain for everyone within earshot. After Tomoya meets her, he tries to help her become more sociable by having her join in the drama club.
Tomoyo Sakagami is very strong. Youhei Sunohara, another friend of Tomoya‘s, often challenges her, but always ends up falling victim to her Megaton Kick of Doom. She aims to become the student council’s president, in order to try and preserve a grove of cherry trees that are in danger of being cut down. Tomoya helps her with that, because she could also help the drama club if she were president.
And now we come to my favorite character: Fuko Ibuki. Fuko is a slightly silly girl, who always refers to herself in the third person. Tomoya finds Fuko sitting all alone, making little wooden carvings of starfish to hand out to people as presents. She does this because she wants people to attend her big sister’s wedding, the big problem being that nobody at the school knows her, since she had retired three years earlier. Despite that, Tomoya and Nagisa help Fuko with the (slightly embarrassing) task of handing out starfish to all 700 students at the school. Fuko is also highly susceptible to cute things, going into a daze when confronted with one. This leads Tomoya to play lots of pranks on her.
The following video is made of So Much Win, it is hard to describe:
It is a Japanese fandub, but with a guy playing a girl, and a girl playing a guy.
This is both hilarious and scary at the same time. “KAWAIIII!” *shudders*