Winter 2010 Anime Season Preview

With Japans aging society and falling birthrate they’re going to start making more anime for senior citizens

This grim prediction was made by Gintama and this season proves it. OK, maybe not. But enough of that, welcome to Bokutachi no Blog’s season preview! Since Bokutachi is a proper team blog again, I’m  joined by my fellow writers. Yup, all 4 of the other writers have joined me to share their thoughts on the relatively small selection of anime airing next season. Now sit back and relax while you scroll through our lengthy preview and enjoy. And you better enjoy it. It took a bloody long time to make.

The info on here was taken from a load of places, including but not limited to ANN, MAL, Moetron, Chartfag’s amazing chart, Mangafox, Animesuki forums and a load of other places I can’t remember. Also a lot of info was taken from each respective anime’s website. If you click on the title of each anime it will take you to their website.

I completely encourage anyone to link this preview on a forum or wherever but for gods sake do NOT copy and paste the entire thing onto a forum or your own website. I swear, this happens more often than you might think.

Hetalia Axis Powers episode 44 (a bit earlier than usual for some reason)

Hetalia usually comes out on a Monday and the gg usually sub the thing Tuesday or Wednesday. However this week the episode randomly appeared on Friday, way before it was meant to be released. Why? I’ve seen people say it’s because the mobile phone download always comes earlier and someone uploaded it onto nico (the Japanese version of youtube, although most of them use the Japanese language youtube anyway so I dunno why nico still runs…). That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense though. If this has always been the case then why did it take until episode 44 for this to happen? Why would gg decide to sub this version at episode 44? My guess behind this is that it was accidentally leaked. Similar to what happened to funimation with One Piece, they just didn’t handle their security properly. Either that or someone on the other side made quite the blunder. Heads are rolling back in Japan over this mistake. All very strange stuff it must be said.

Might as well review the episode since it’s out.

I’m in your blog, talking about Honey and Clover

Using my l33t hacking skills, I have worked my way into THAT Anime Blog and started to deface their blog by rambling on about Honey and Clover. OK, not strictly true. I was invited by one of the authors to join him in a joint, ani-blogging project to discuss our alternate opinions on this widely praised Josei series. Though I’m a bit disappointed you can’t see some of the behind the scenes discussion what occurred while writing the post. Honey and Clover to PlantetES to Code Geass to the IRA to punk rock to Darfur to Kannagi and so on. I’ve turned off comments on this post in order to encourage you to go comment on the post in question over on THAT instead.

Critique us please

So it first started with the Otaku Elimination game and the criticism of anime blogs they decided to distribute. While some people seemed to recoil at the possibility of their writing being critiqued (usually from the people whose writing was in dire need of a kick up the hole funnily enough) most of the aniblogsphere embraced the prospect of finally receiving some constructive criticism. However, lets face it, the OEG isn’t exactly giving wonderful advice on how to improve your blog, certainly not while they’re in Danny Choo suck up genocide mode at the moment. So a man dangerously low on hit points decided that the best idea was to simply ask on the blog for constructive criticism. This followed suit over at Anime² (::Edit:: and later over at Mikitoism) so now over to Bokutachi no Blog.

I invite you all to provide us with constructive criticism. 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be about me either, it can be for any of the writers on the blog. Although I will say that none of us have any sort of coding skills whatsoever so the layout will have to stay the exact same.

Hetalia Axis Powers episode 43

Between blogging Hetalia, writing season previews, discussing animblogsphere shitstorms and god knows what else, it seems I spend far more of my time discussing anime than actually watching the stuff. Ah the humble anibloggers life is a harsh one.

But hey, it’s fun so I’m not complaining.

Two non-Japanese animation shorts: Because we all love animation here

One thing you eventually develop from watching mountains of Japanese anime is an eye for eye-catching animation, no matter what the origin or style. Before you may have known that one piece of animation looks better than another but with years of training the eye to recognise quality animation you can now pick out what makes a certain piece of animation so great. I’m not saying that we are all turning into animation gurus but it’s the same principle that applies to spotting young talent on football. While we may not all be scouts for football clubs, anyone who had watched any amount of soccer could spot the great talent that lay in players like Lionel Messi, Cesc Fabregas and Wayne Rooney when they first strode onto the pitch as raw 16 year olds. That overly long introductory paragraph is simply there to introduce you to two wonderful animation shorts. I went on a bit of an animation short binge recently and these two were the cream of the crop. The first is a Bafta winning Polish short called ‘Falling Art’ and the second is one of those Pixar shorts called ‘Lifted’. One about moving up, the other about moving down. Neither have any speaking in them and tell their story through their actions (Fallen Art) or through their facial expressions (Lifted). Trust me when I say these are the best. I watched a lot of stupid artsy ones that made no attempt to make any sense.