Tuesday, September 9, 2014

More Anime, anyone?

Okay, if you want some free anime, all legal, go to www. animelab.com and sign up. There is a fair bit of anime of various styles and new episodes are still being added. I am not sure ofthe exact nature of it, - maybe they are old, some are only two episodes long as if they got canned after that - but there are some gems there. My favourite is STEIN;S GATE (yes, that is how it's spelled) a story of Time Travel - well, it starts with sending SMS messages back in time, okay? In the first ten or so episodes it looked kind of silly but then all gets explained and the story is excellent, I went right through all 24 episodes very fast - ( Time travel is one of my favourite subjects ) and it is well written - dramatic, funny and touching too - and just in case you were wondering, yes, there really was a guy posting on the net back in the nineties calling himself John Titor who claimed to be a Time Traveller. No-one has ever owned up to faking it either.  You will have to see the series to get the rest of it.

 . . . and now onto something much stranger. . . .
DYNAMO. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb6AqhT9quA>
Paste the link and you can watch episode 1 of this home made series. I mention it here because it seems to me to sufer from all of the classic faults of home made SF movies:
1. The plot  - well, okay, I have only seen five episodes so far, but the plot seems to be swimming in visuals, mostly adrift  . . . . . There are flying machines and so on, all done in Blender, but they suffer from what I decided to name "Transformers disease"  - lots and lots and lots of moving thingies like wings and so on that really don't seem to do anything except decorate - if your ship has antigrav lifters, why the heck do you need fins? - and then they all fold or bend up or down? what for? If they were control or lift surfaces, you really would want them solidly mounted to keep your craft in the air - ah, but they are just there to look "scifi".  
2. Visual - more and more visuals of surreal scenes, low lighting and yet more surreal scenes. A woman typing on a mechanical typewriter. A character who does not talk in one episode then talks in the next - it's all very cryptic and picturesque but not really my cup of tea.
It just seems to me a bit incoherent at the moment.

More oddities as they come to light . . . .