Not the Week in Review

[kate_nepveu]

Dull week, so have some anime comments and links instead.

Thanks to yhlee, we have the first two discs of Vision of Escaflowne, and watched the first last night. Spoilery comments behind the cut.

Short version: cause of mild snark, but reasonably enjoyable and moves pretty fast.

Longer version:

Dear me, but the life-of-a-high-school-girl opening takes forever, even though objectively it's about ten minutes. And the dragon looks like something out of Monty Python's animation studio.

Chad's remark on the pendant always taking a second to complete a swing: "Congratulations, you've discovered the regular pendulum."

Hitomi and Van are largely non-irritating, which is a point in favor of my continuing to watch. The cat-girl could be very irritating, but I don't want to smack her, yet. I was interested to find that Allen, the blond guy, immediately came across to me as kind of a jerk; I wonder if this is a YA thing since he's older than Hitomi and Van and treats them as such.

Draco Malfoy in super-petulant mode is not a very interesting villain, but the smart traitor whose name I didn't catch could be interesting. And Destiny Prognostication Engine would be a great name for a band.

The tech interests me. The big robots seem to be mechanical plus a bit of magic, but if they've got the capability to do that level of metalwork, shouldn't they be past catapults and swords (even swords that get bigger when you pull them out *eyeroll*)? It seems to early to tell whether the Bad Guys' superior military strength is magic or tech.

If there's no explanation for Hitomi's visions and pendant, I shall be annoyed, but I expect there will be. I'm less certain that there'll be an explanation for there being a magic invisible mass-less planet that close to Earth, though.

(Oh, this reminds me that I should recapitulate my spoiler policy: if it's not in the episodes I've already watched, it's a spoiler and I don't want to hear it. Any spoiler comments will be screened and ROT13'ed.)

Links:

• A hugely detailed recap of Serenity at Television Without Pity, with plenty of snark but also some close readings of the movie that I found interesting.
• Via lots of places, a big online sale from University of California Press. I've spent way too much time going through the lists, and I'm thinking about getting the following titles. Any comments?
  • J. G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (Revised Edition) (link)
  • Antonia Fraser, editor, The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (Revised and Updated) (link)
  • Luo Guanzhong (tr. Moss Roberts), Three Kingdoms—they have this both abridged and unabridged (volume one, volume two), do I particularly need the unabridged?

    [Edit: the two volumes are not a complete set, see comments.]

• Puppy nose!

Comments

[richboye.livejournal.com]

A hugely detailed recap of Serenity at Television Without Pity, with plenty of snark but also some close readings of the movie that I found interesting.

I read with this interest, but I still found it to be lackluster. I LOVED that movie.

Oh, here's a query - is there a Firefly full-length movie also out on DVD?

Hey, cool choices in books, too.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

It's a great sale. A big fat WAH, though, for the reason behind it: they've dropped most of their humanities-related lines. Like, afterwards, no interesting stuff of the kinds being sold off. Arrgh.

(That's melodramatic, but given that UC Press is hardly the only one to cut hum/soc sci publication during the last decade, there's a good chance that things of the sort they used to pick up just won't see print publication. "Alternative methods" of peer-reviewed publication don't quite have momentum yet, either.)

[oyceter]

Escaflowne! The Guymelefs (big armor things) really amuse me because they're giant mecha! In a medieval society! One of my complaints before about the art was that people's noses looked like weapons, or, at least, moreso than they usually do.

I do love the series a lot though, and I especially love the music (Yoko Kanno of Cowboy Bebop fame! Yay!).

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, here's a query - is there a Firefly full-length movie also out on DVD?

Huh? Unless you mean the two-hour pilot, no--there's the series ("Serenity" through "Objects in Space") and _Serenity_ the movie, and that's it.

Do you know about the abridged-unabridged thing for the _Three Kingdoms_, or shall I have to hope that Trent shows up?

[kate_nepveu]

WAH indeed. I didn't know that, obviously.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, I forgot to mention the noses! Yes, they all have very weirdly pointy noses indeed, I definitely noticed. But at least I can tell the characters apart.

[cliosfolly.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're enjoying Escaflowne--I'd thought about recommending it (it was the first anime series that I ever saw aside from Sailor Moon on TV, and it was what really got me interested in anime), but I didn't think it would hold up well after just coming off Full Metal Alchemist. I'll be interested to read what you think of the series as it continues to unfold.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Escaflowne a lot, right up until the conclusion, when it went off in a direction I didn't care for. I won't say more, because that'd be a SPOILER.

Alan Shezar is my favorite character from that show (with Evil David Bowie the traitor guy--IIRC his name is Falken--being a close second), partly because he is a bit of a jerk with all sorts of conflicting motivations. Van's cat-girl friend, whose name I can't remember, is way the hell annoying.

[kate_nepveu]

It's certainly not grabbing me like _FMA_ so far, but then I wasn't expecting it to, so that's okay.

(I was planning on watching _FMA_ that night, actually, but I had some problems playing back the files; this turned out to be a software conflict, but I didn't track it down until late that night.)

[kate_nepveu]

Very appropriate icon. =>

I look forward to learning more about the traitor guy, though I didn't recall that he looked much like David Bowie--but then I should remember who I'm talking to.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Luo Guanzhong (tr. Moss Roberts), Three Kingdoms—they have this both abridged and unabridged (volume one, volume two), do I particularly need the unabridged?

It depends on what exactly was cut in the abridged version - unfortunately the page for the book doesn't tell one much (other than that about half the text was cut). Certainly there is a lot of material in the book I think you could live without - it's long and rambling - but if someone decided to, say, keep all the verified historical bits and cut the juicy sections featuring Cao Cao, Guan Yu, and Zhu-ge Liang, that wouldn't be something you'd want to read.

Dan Blum

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, I'm leaning toward the uabridged on principle, absent further information from someone who knows both editios.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Poking around a bit, I see people (http://www.threekingdoms.com/) recommending that one should always buy the unabridged version. However, these are people who clearly like the book more than me, so I would take that with a grain of salt.

In any case, before buying the UC Press unabridged edition, I would check and make sure that the 2 volumes that they have published are in fact the complete book. They total about 1,100 pages, whereas Amazon has a 4-volume (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/7119005901/ref=ed_oe_p/002-1178988-2292024?%5Fencoding=UTF8) edition of Moss Roberts' translation which totals 2,340 pages, which is quite a difference. The pages in the latter case are smaller, but it still seems to me that the UC Press edition may be lacking a third volume.

[kate_nepveu]

Oooh, that's a nasty thought. I am e-mailing the press to ask, finding no other way to figure it out.

[richboye.livejournal.com]

I must be referring to the two-hour pilot, then.

Do you know about the abridged-unabridged thing for the _Three Kingdoms_, or shall I have to hope that Trent shows up?

Alas, this seems to be a task for the Loquator, Master of Vocabulary!

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

He doesn't; that's just what my friends-group called him back when we watched it together in college because nobody could ever remember his name. So, he is forever "evil David Bowie" in my mind.

[kate_nepveu]

Via e-mail: "Volume three was cancelled...this will only be a two volume set now."

So thanks for saving me from a nasty surprise!

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. Your e-mailing them potentially saved me from the same surprise, since I had vaguely been thinking of ordering those volumes myself (whether I would ever get around to reading them is questionable, but that has rarely stopped me before).

If you want the book anyway, the 4-volume set is not too expensive.

[kate_nepveu]

Yup, I've tossed them in the might-buy-someday "wish" list at Amazon. Thanks again.

[angelhedgie.livejournal.com]

I do hope you're enjoying Escaflowne - that was a rather big series when I first started collecting anime, and it's pretty fun. Oh, and Dilandou (the Draco lookalike with anger management issues) is an interesting character, once you learn more. Merle, on the other hand, is the stereotypical annoying catgirl.

Oh, and I have a feeling Chad will get a chuckle when he learns who one of the big bads is supposed to be.

Finally, and this is off topic, but Funimation has announced a tenative street date of October 3rd for the Region 1 DVD of Conqueror of Shambala (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/article.php?id=8455), as well as a strong possibility of a limited theatrical release. (And, in a nice move, they'll be releasing DVD 13 (the final one) on the same day, so no cliffhanger issues.)

[kate_nepveu]

Yes, that was nice timing of them. The Adult Swim airing will be done in a few weeks (I was planning to watch our recording of ep 41 last weekend, but had to resort to _Escaflowne_ because of computer problems), so we'll be done with the series in a month or two at the most. I don't know if we'll watch the sub of the movie that I've got or wait for the dub--October is a long way away, after all, but we've been watching the dubs all along.