Subatomic Brainfreeze

Subatomic Brainfreeze sells out to The Man: YOU LIKED IT BETTER WHEN IT WAS STILL UNDERGROUND

If you're reading this, then I'm doing awesome, because my first piece of work for Anime News Network just went up. I'm taking over Astro Toy, the ANN toy review column. I've never really talked about it on the blog, but I used to really be in love with Japanese toys, to the point where I just ran out of room for them. Every few years I buy something nice for myself, but I've mostly been away. When I was approached with the opportunity to re-awaken the terrible, plastic-and-diecast-craving beast inside of me as a part-time job, I really had no choice but to say yes. The first piece is a review of Max Factory's Figma Golgo 13, and I hope you all love it. I'm gunning for other opportunities, so hopefully this won't be the last of me you see around the internet. Tell your friends! Tell your friends who can pay me to write for them! In fact...

HIRE DAVID CABRERA TO WRITE FOR YOU TODAY.

Hey, everybody! If there's one damn thing David Cabrera knows in all the world, it's stupid crap like Japanese videogames and cartoons! I'm proven to have spent way too much time on this stuff. I:

-am Anime News Network's new toy reviewer
-have been writing about videogames and anime on this blog for over three years, and am a founding member of Colony Drop, the angry anime fan's favorite destination.
-have guest written at places like Insert Credit and Action Button
-was famous, filthy-mouthed 4chan gimmick poster Badass Manly Anime Reviewer
-have a functioning work ethic
-am regularly asked things like "How do you even know things like that?" and "You're an Akiba-type, right?"
-love this stuff too, too much.

Potential employers are welcome to contact me at subatomicbrainfreeze at google's email service.

(Don't worry, guys, the blog isn't going anywhere.)

Bakemonogatari is ABOUT WORDS

There isn't a single anime this season, outside of Mazinger, that I'm actually enthusiastic enough about to stay up to date with. Not that this is unusual for me-- I don't think it's healthy to consume entertainment on deadline-- but even though there's always plenty of good stuff running, none of it has really grabbed me. Bakemonogatari has me a little bit, though. Five episodes worth, anyway.

The show is about words: it's based on a light novel by Japanese novelist NisiOisiN and it's directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, who, if you're familiar with the guy, loves to flash words up on the screen whenever he can. In fact, no matter how much translation work goes into the show-- and my fansubs are pretty comprehensive-- you never really feel as though you fully understand everything going on, because the palindrome author is constantly punning at you. And you don't know Japanese.

The story is about one of these Salinger-type loner protagonists otaku seem to love, and his not-girlfriend, a self-proclaimed tsundere character, as the two leisurely solve mysteries related to ghosts and monsters and stuff like that. The title itself is the Japanese words for "monster" and "story" slapped together, so you can just as easily call it Monstory or Ghostory for the same effect in English, with the added bonus of getting stuffy Wapanese people really angry at you, which, in my experience, is always the cool-guy thing to do.

What people on this show actually seem to do is have long chats about nothing of immediate importance. As I was saying, words come up often. Here's a sample conversation that leads off one episode:

"It's gotta be "lost cow". The kanji for "cow" is part of how you write "snail", right? Take the "whirl" out of "whirlpool", replace the radical for "water" with the one for "bug", then follow it with "cow". And you get "snail"."

So you see what I'm saying here, right? Entire storylines hinge on this kind of thing, like the girlfriend who is weightless because she's numbed herself to some bad memories, because you see, "omoi" can mean both your weight and your feelings, and there are a million other puns besides that in this arc. You can have it explained to you as much as you want: it's not going to hit a non-speaker the way it will hit a native speaker as clever. Though it certainly is clever! The show has a lot other than just wordplay going for it, like Shinbo's distinctive style and characters who are a bit more likable and engaging than their types usually are. And unusually classy fanservice. But at the same time, I'm sure "vegetable breakfast" is some kind of clever wordplay that I'll never understand. I should probably get back to studying Japanese one day, huh?

LET'S W DISCUSS: Anime Mag Roundup

So I've got this printed material sitting here and I should probably say something about it. Otaku USA is a new magazine run by a guy whose blog I read, like, all the time, Patrick Macias. I'd been meaning to pick it up on account of heavy plugging by Macias and the Anime World Order crew (two of whom contribute to this issue and one of whom has put me ON NOTICE), but I didn't bother doing so until today. My not breathlessly jumping up and scramble dashing to the bookstore has a lot to do with that cover: like an 80's action hero crashed his motorcycle into a glowstick factory. The colors are so noisy that the text gets lost in itself, and while it's not hard to pick out the book on a shelf, it is hard to see what the hell is inside. I didn't even notice that they misspelled "Haruhi" as "Haruchi" until just now.

As a noisy aside, the other big anime magazine going is ADV's Newtype USA. While their editorial content is growing-- but crippled by the fact that they are owned by an anime distributor ifyouaskme-- much of the book is a translation of the Japanese Newtype. Back before Newtype was available in English, the mag had a certain level of mystique in the English-speaking fan community. People would import it and marvel at the high-quality paper and the glossy pictures from anime that was on Japanese TV a month ago: anime that they would therefore not see fansubbed for at least another year. If only they could read the thing. Newtype USA originally set out with just that goal, and it turned out that Newtype's editorial content was little more than a series of press releases overlaid on pretty pictures. Fluff, in other words. Mystique dead. I put the first issue of NTUSA back on the shelf about two minutes after opening it.

On that note, I have good news. Otaku USA is a book with words and information as well as pretty pictures. Topics are eclectic, ranging from the usual previews, reviews, interviews (we'll call them views) to really weird and awesome shit, like a collection of Ultraman kiddie rides and Matt Alt (of the hey-whatever-happened-to ToyboxDX.com) and Macias' trip to the inner sanctum of the Bandai Hobby Center-- a holy ground forbidden to mortal man! It's a good, substantial read, and I am quite surprised to actually feel as though I got my ten dollars' worth.

"Adding" to the value is the DVD: not really worth noting, it's a few dub-only anime episodes I'd already seen and a number of trailers for anime, manga, and the three-games-behind Naruto PS2 fighting game. I popped the disc in right away, because it promised a Phoenix Wright 3 trailer. No such luck: what you actually get upon popping the disc into a DVD-R drive is a link to Capcom's website for Phoenix Wright 1. Ouch. Something fell through, I suppose? About the dub-only thing: I don't know if something like this is at all in the hands of the publisher, but this magazine's targeting a pretty hardcore market, and it might be a good idea to get the Japanese voice tracks too, for their sake-- our sake. My sake. Unless the voice work is really high-quality, anime dubs tend to lose me after about the first five minutes. Sorry, guys: you just sound weird most of the time.

In summary, the magazine's good stuff and the disc needs some work. Always nice to hear the Boogiepop Phantom OP, though.

This, meanwhile, a buddy of mine threw at me a month or so ago. It's called POPJNEO and it doesn't cost money, which comes out to a price ten dollars less than Otaku USA. I'm mostly out of my element reading it; it's largely J-pop, fashion and visual kei stuff and I'm not pop or fashionable or a marketing type . By necessity, it's a very quick and unfocused read: feels more like a catalog than anything, except there's no number to call. The book advertises "PUBLICATION DIRECT FROM JAPAN" on its cover, and that kind of gives me a hint. The layout reminds me of the articles in the dearly departed Raijin Comics: there's the feel that this is a Japanese company doing it their way, dammit. This has led to things like Raijin (totally awesome but totally failed), but it's also led to things like Bandai Visual USA (not really very awesome at all, poised to fail). We'll see what happens, but as a generally benevolent person, I wish the pamphlet well. I should have entered their giveaway last month, though: I could have won me a YOU WA SHOCK single.

Just finished reading the Notenki Memoirs

First things first, a bit of buyer beware: ADV gave this book a shamelessly misleading cover. The Gainax/Eva connection is milked for all it's worth, and the result is that the casual bookstore buyer is probably going to pick up this book thinking it is the story of the production of Evangelion. It is most definitely not; Eva is only given a glance at best. 

Now, personally, I'm fine with this. I knew it coming in. I wanted to know about Gainax, and on that front the book delivers. The Notenki Memoirs are something of an autobiography in fandom and fanboy business by Yasuhiro Takeda, Gainax's "general manager". That's as good an explanation as I can give you of what the dude actually did at Gainax; Takeda paints a picture of a fast-and-loose operation where people didn't have job titles and specific tasks to accomplish so much as they worked. People at Gainax worked their asses off; more than anything I was impressed by the sheer youthful energy of these people (the author reminds us, over and over again, every time he fails sophomore year in college) and the single-minded intensity with which they pursued whatever the hell it was they were pursuing. It really speaks to my quarter-life crisis, you know?

This story is much more about the people involved in Gainax than the products they turned out, but there are some interesting tidbits, and some really obscure trivia. Obscurity is the order of the day here. Did you know that the the last episode of Gunbuster wasn't in black and white because the studio ran out of money, but because Anno insisted on doing a a black-and-white episode on color film? It was the opposite of the oft-repeated fan urban legend; the episode was in fact a tremendous waste of money. It is comments like this, made in passing, that are the juiciest bits for the Gainax fan. When Takeda does talk about Gainax's projects, he makes sure to give the most coverage to the most obscure. There's quite a bit in here that never made past planning stages, and quite a bit I'd never even heard of, including Komatsu Sakyo Anime Gekijou, which was completely news to me, and which I'd very much like to see.

Another thing that occurred to me while I was reading was Takeda's account of the departure of Toshio Okada, a founding Gainax member and writer of the fan-favorite Otaku no Video. There's clearly some bad blood between these two. Takeda portrays Okada as having been, in later years, a layabout. Apparently, the guy never did any work aside from shooting off fanciful and infeasible ideas that didn't go anywhere, expecting everybody else to drop everything and get to work on them while he continued to chill. That's so otaku! This bit pops out at me particularly because Otaku no Video makes so much sense with it in mind. Talk about fanciful and infeasible; the end goal of the OVA's fictional Gainax-stand-in is to build a giant underground mechanical fortress from which to rule the world in some kind of Char-helmeted otaku dictatorship.

I don't know who to side with here; Takeda the manager or Okada the dreamer. On the one hand, the dreamer Gainax would have lived hand-to-mouth, sleeping in animators' sweatshops, putting every ounce of themselves into some quirky masterpiece that won't really make any money. On the other hand, Gainax mostly makes safe and easy cash-grab projects nowadays. Not that I can blame them; they've been the dreamers, and it's moved them into jaded professionalism, and that's moved them to He Is My Master. I guess I'd do the same thing.