There are a few possible explanations here: one, the FSG is immature and petty. Two, I missed something categorical (like honorifics, for instance) that I just didn’t know. Three, they wanted perfection. There might be others, but heck if I know. I’ve seen the quality of English that goes into fansubs, and while there are some standout outfits, most of the time it’s just there, and it’s not rarely awful.

I know that I did better than most of what I’ve seen, although I’m sure it wasn’t perfect. What frustrates me is that I received no useful feedback; I have no idea whether I missed by an inch or by a mile. And the script was for Shiki, not something like Saiunkoko Monogatari!

I guess this is just one of those weird experiences that leaves you wondering.

Pale Cocoon displays, in twenty-two minutes, everything that is beautifully crushing about space and the past. The music is perfectly matched to the immense, gothic scenery, and the discovered record of a J-pop song is wistfully optimistic, like a doomed butterfly. The characterization here is simple without being simplistic, leaving much unsaid, yet communicating in subtleties. Pale Cocoon is deep, emotional, noble, pure, and at the end, ruefully ironic.

This short animated film is set in the not-so-distant future, where the earth has suffered a population explosion, necessitating escape. Honestly, that old Malthusian saw is the only weak point of the entire movie, but if you can suspend your disbelief over it (and it’s not really that important; it’s just the disaster that set things in motion), you’ll be home free. To say much of the plot would be to reveal too much, but the main characters work in the middle levels of an artificial world, recovering and restoring archives of the past.

Zero profanities, no gore, no sex, and positive mention of prayer.

Thanks to Brightslap Encoding.

Download from them, or at the torrent hole of your choice.

If you are wondering, is Whisper of the Heart worth an 18 Gb Blue-ray download, I’ll set your mind at ease: it’s not. However, it’s far from terrible. While this movie isn’t half-hearted, it’s more like three-quarters-hearted — good, but not excellent. All of its constituent pieces just don’t come together to leave an enduring impression; it begins small and it stays small, and sadly, of little account.

Whisper of the Heart is one of those Ghibli movies, so you know the animation style, and being as it was released in 1995, and a movie, you know that there won’t be photorealistic scenes, but what is here reflects a lot of care, skill, and probably love. The realism of passing clouds, shadows falling away when characters go from shaded areas to light, and the perspective of a train going forward are very nice. The eyes are not very detailed, but the faces are. If you’re a fan of Hime-Chan’s Ribbon, then you’ll be fine with what they do here. The animation doesn’t disappoint for the time period, but I’ve never been a stickler for watching only masterwork animation, anyways; in many places, it’s quite good. Animation is not why Whisper doesn’t succeed.

The music is rarely interesting, and it is, at the beginning, quite confusing. While you’re watching the main character, Shizaru move from place to place in Tokyo, the soundtrack is “Country Roads”, the 1970′s country song. For a good minute, I thought that I had accidentally played something off a web page. It was that jarring. In other places, the music is muddled (sonically) and emotionally, doesn’t add an extra impact to the storyline. It functions often as merely background music, as if the director said, “Hey, we need some music here,” and they just found whatever royalty-free stuff they could toss in. It remains low-key throughout, and that’s a shame. Music is part of why Whisper doesn’t succeed.

The vocal work is mediocre; some of the female characters sound too much alike. The voices are not sharply distinguished as in most anime from the late 90′s forward, and as a result, it’s hard to tell whom is talking from time to time. The men cut a much better form. The vocal work is a small part of why Whisper doesn’t succeed.

The storyline generally works. It skirts the line between fantasy and reality, and depicts Shizaru’s home life in a convincing, realistic way. The challenges she faces, the people she meets, and the situations that she works through all work together, but the emotional depth is missing. Only rarely do you feel the tears that Shizaru cries, or do you feel the heat rush to your cheeks the way it does when love arises. The end waffles off into cheeziness instead of pulling back to an expansive, “open-up” type ending. I don’t know if they compressed too much of the manga here, but it feels like they covered too much ground, and therefore couldn’t go as deep as the story deserved. The characterization is short-changed, as are the emotions, and the overall effect. Whisper ends up feeling like a story that doesn’t matter much, and it should have been the opposite, claiming such ground as To Heart and To Heart: Remember My Memories, at least. This is the big reason why Whisper doesn’t succeed.

As for details, the plot begins when the avid reader Shizaru, notices that someone else has read the books she is reading before she did. (This was back in the day when you used to sign your name on the book card and they would stamp the date after it.) Shizaru follows a cat that leads her to a very strange curio shop, and meets an obnoxious boy. The boy, of course, ends up being the boy who has checked out the books before her; the curio shop (and the boy) spur her to discover her talent, instead of wandering through middle school life without any direction or purpose. In the end, she writes a novella that demonstrates she has talent, and the title of this work is Whisper of the Heart.

I wouldn’t say that Whisper is cheezy, although depending on your tolerance for shojou works, you may find it so. Sometimes it gets perilously close to the edge, but it never wanders over until the very end; sadly, it just doesn’t go far enough the other way to make it recommendable.

Available as an 18-GB huge download from REVO subs, or from your local torrent hole. Note: there are other versions out there, but it looks like no-one is seeding them (aside from the perv-pushers over at Coalgirls).

So, why did I watch this at all? Why did I persevere in the face of profanities, blasphemies, paper-thin characterization, and authorial self-indulgence? Basically because Paranoia Agent was written by the same person that wrote Boogiepop Phantom, which I thought, at some level was captivating. Here’s a warning: if you also enjoyed that show, you won’t enjoy this. It features the same basic themes, and the same infatuation with detectives, but it’s done half as well.

Take the title. There really is no paranoia agent ever shown in the entire story; it can’t be Shonen Bat, because Shonen Bat is born as an excuse by a young girl whose dog was accidentally run over. Yes, you read that right. And even the series admits the whole silliness/stupidity of its central character by admitting that it’s a crazy world where the guilt over a dead dog murders about a hundred people before going on a citywide genocidal rampage. Uh, yeah. The dramatic tension becomes an emotional black hole at that point.

And don’t get me started on how tenuously the characters are tied together, because there’s nothing that unites them at all. The police can’t figure it out, really, other than stating very casual, surface-level links — but that’s all you get. Wow, how meaningful!

The rest of the series features strong profanity (most of which is a mistranslation), porno, filler episodes (8 and 9). Paranoia Agent adds up to nothing meaningful. It is a waste of time; it is a waste of mental effort; don’t respect a series by watching it, if the series does not respect you.

Welcome to the graveyard, Paranoia Agent!

A cross-generational ship is bringing cargo from another world to Earth; an asteroid strikes the ship and renders repair and course correction impossible. One man is found dead, and the rest have no choice but to use the escape pods. Their chance of making it to Earth is very small, but en route they relate the stories that the dead man told them, and reveal their own pasts.

I won’t go into too much detail, but the sense of isolation brought on by space, and the fate of each character (except the captain), just drip with pathos. It’s well-conceived and it uses flashbacks well. The symbology is deep and bizarre.

The language is for the most part fine, but the number of profanities increases towards the end. No sex. Some gore, so be warned.

The only truly disappointing thing is the ending theme, which rips off the music for 2001: A Space Oddessy and throws in cheesy 70′s funk.

After doing some research, I discovered that the manga which this was adapted from was one of twelve stories or so that told of the phoenix’s interaction with humanity in different ages of the world. Only two OVAs were made from the manga (Phoenix – Space and Phoenix – Karma), and they reveal a fatal flaw about the execution of the whole series: the same character types show up in every age, with the same punishments handed out to them. It’s basically the same story retold twelve different times, which is both pointless and dull.

So, how does this apply to Phoenix – Space? If you view it as a standalone anime`, with no sequel and no prequel, then it’s quite enjoyable, because it is self-contained and it doesn’t grow wearying with repetition. If you view it in the context of the manga, then its luster disappears and it sinks into the background of a mass of mediocre content. My advice is to just enjoy this OVA for what it is by itself.

Available for you downloading pleasure from Banana subs or the torrent hole of your choice.

Welcome to the graveyard, Lovely Complex!

Bride of Deimos is a movie from 1987, and it holds up well for its age. The animation style is a bit static in several places, relying on the pan/zoom techniques, and while the music is of the late 80′s dark-synth goth variety, overall, it’s done well. Some movies lose their lustre as they age; others hold on to it; BOD falls into the latter category. The vibe here is timeless, wronged innocence, and squeamish horror. (Yes, it actually does work.)

You’ll suspect the ending probably within ten minutes, but the ride is still worthwhile. The setup is that Minako has a friend, Hisamatsu, who is an amateur botanist. He’s entered the Grand Prix for botany and wants to discover more about Ohba Tohko, who takes the prize every year. Even Minako is fascinated by the Snow Goddess, a stunningly beautiful, albeit cold, orchid of hers.

Hisamatsu looks up Ohba Tohko and then disappears. Minako is the last one to see him alive, so she goes to Tohko’s as well. Deimos appears and states that she will be his bride. She escapes him with a powerful purse-to-the-cheek maneuver and runs to the mansion despite his warnings. There she discovers Hisamatsu’s notebook. She returns with the chief of police, and through repeated visits, unfurls the horrific secrets of the prize-winning orchids. At the end, Deimos gives a fittingly morbid summary and then vows to return for Minako.

Bride of Deimos is effective because it’s consistent. No element is out of place; everything works together, layering one stone upon another, in a crypt of fear. You don’t have to give the plot a pass in too many places, and those that you do are pretty standard. It sticks with you, from the eerie synths to the tortured Deimos to the even-still-more-tortured Minako. Impressively, BOD achieves this without a single profanity or risque scene. As it’s horror, there is blood, and semi-gory scenes, but they are not particularly graphic. BOD doesn’t need gore to send chills up your spine.

However, the movie leaves a lot of questions if you don’t know the backstory. Bride of Deimos is a movie adaption of a particular manga episode from a long-running manga series by the same name. The manga ran from the ’70′s into the 80′s. For a good explanation, see Jason Thompson’s House of a 1000 anime` (warning: profanity).

It’s haunting.

Grab it at the torrent hole of your choice, and thank Bluefixer subs for this if you have the chance. (For some reason, BOD is not listed on their blog.)

I’d call them the most annoying fansub group in the world. I wish Tokyo Toshokan would let you filter by posters so I’d never have to see their antics again.

ARR subs, you suck.

I don’t use ad blocking per se, but a proxy filter called Glimmerblocker. Over the past months, I’ve laughed as Nyaa tried to outsmart those of us blocking ads. At first the ads were served from one directory, so it was easy to block them. Then the serving directory took on random names such as OMG and LULZ and so on; at first the images were all JPGs or PNGs, but then GIFs started coming through, so you couldn’t filter on just the graphic type anymore. I gave up on a regex to handle all the permutations and instead wrote one that blocked all graphics from the site. Yet, I download torrents from there whenever I want.

Here’s why Nyaa is stuck: serving up HTML links using anything but a href tags requires non-automatable solutions (such as creating custom Flash objects that launch URLs, for instance), which means that they’ll never be done. If you mess around with your filter, you should be able to block the graphics but leave the links intact. Doing that leaves you with some very small but functional links. Voila`! Porn avoided, and torrent happiness achieved.

Episode one was fascinating, freaky, odd and darkly humorous. The second episode was about 90% of the quality of episode 1, the third, 70%, and by the fourth episode I didn’t care if the series continued or not. Some anime`s fail catastrophically (like Dog Days, Miracle Girls, and Hana-Saku Iroha); others just suck from the start; but Stein’s Gate is a slow-motion fail.

In the end, the boredom caused by watering down the plot, the perviness, and the glacial pace just proved too much for me to handle. I should have known that any series dealing with time travel was destined to fail, anyhow! Like Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, Stein’s Gate failed as a series. If it had been a movie, it wouldn’t have reached the level of The Girl That Leapt Through Time, but it would have been fairly decent, I imagine.

Welcome to the graveyard, Stein’s Gate!