Several big license announcements this week.

ANN: Funimation has licensed Dragon Ball Kai, the recent edit of the original DBZ to follow Akira Toriyama’s manga more closely, and to enhance some of the long-in-the-tooth special effects.

ANN: More big news: Adult Swim still shows anime, apparently. They’ve now picked up Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which will start airing about a week from now, on Sunday, February 14th at midnight.

ANN: Meanwhile, Yen Press continues to license awesome stuff: the gag manga The Melancholy of Suzumiya-Haruhi-chan, kakifly’s K-ON! manga, and the first light novel in Mizuki Nomura’s series Bungaku Shoujo (the story of the weird members of a high school literary club).

ANN: I reported several months ago that Stan Lee was working with Studio BONES on an anime called Heroman. Well, we now have confirmation that it’ll air in Japan on TV Tokyo starting in April. Yay! Interestingly, it’s the story of a young boy living in America who stumbles upon a toy robot. The toy apparently then transforms into a giant pilotable robot, with the kid inside. So, Stan Lee is officially writing mecha. Woohoo!  (This also means at least one mecha show next season.)

AnimeNation.net:  Another new anime was announced: an adaptation of Daisuke Sato and Shoji Sato’s Highschool of the Dead, a horror action story about a group of high schoolers trying to survive a zombie apocalypse in their school. I keep hearing about this manga; apparently a lot of people like it.

ANN: Mamoru Nagano, creator of legendary shoujo mecha series The Five Star Stories, will be directing an anime film. It’ll be called Hana no Utame Gothicmade, and it’ll be mecha. So, cool! No word on when it’ll be released.

AnimeNation.net: Joseph Chou, producer on Appleseed: Ex Machina, has revealed that there will be more Appleseed movies.  This comes after plans for an Appleseed TV series were cancelled.

ANN: Chou also revealed that pre-production discussion on the live-action Evangelion movies continues, as they discuss the project with mysteriously unnamed producers and studios. Apparently, the project stalled mainly because of the recent downturn in the anime market.

ANN: Speaking of Eva, Japanese retailer “Geo on the Rakuten” now lists Neon Genesis Evangelion 2.22, which is the first we’ve heard of anything beyond Evangelion 2.0. According to the site, 2.22 has “enhancements” over 2.0. That’s all we know.

ANN: Namco Bandai’s in a spot of trouble. They released their 2009 earnings numbers this week. They had anticipated a profit of US $94 million for 2009, they instead had a loss.  Of US $340 million. So, they’re re-organizing! And in typical Japanese fashion, they’ve titled the re-org “Namco Bandai Group Restart Plan.” They’ll cut 10% of their workforce and re-structure their operations. Here’s hoping it’ll help.

One particularly interesting detail: one part of this production streamlining involves simultaneous release of anime on disc and online streaming. Good!

ANN: They’re not the only ones: Navarre, parent company of Funimation, saw a sales drop for the fourth quarter of 2009. They basically blamed the market, and said that fortunately they’re in a good position to grow as the economy picks back up.

ANN: A followup: Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, which was on the ”long list” of animated films in consideration for the Best Animated Film Oscar, has been dropped from the final nomination list. No anime will be on the roster this year; instead we’ll see Coraline, The Princess and the Frog, Up, The Secret of Kells, and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

ANN: But J-Rock fans have something to celebrate. Major Japanese band X Japan has been invited to the main stage on Lollapalooza, the first time a Japanese band has ever received that honor. And yes, they’ve agreed to perform, in Chicago on August 6 to 8.

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One of my favorite elements of moe show K-ON! was the high school they went to.  There were all sorts of whimsical details, like the little tortoise statues decorating the staircase handrails.  I thought such a high school must have been a product of kakifly’s imagination.

It’s real. Judging from the video below, the school fell into very bad disrepair recently, but thanks to a sit-in protest by locals, it was repaired and re-opened.  Now that its inspiration for K-ON! has been revealed, it’s being visited by otaku; you’ll get to see a lot of itasha (anime-painted cars) in the video.

This follows the great interest otaku showed in the shrine Lucky Star was based on. If nothing else, I think this underscores the importance of using real life as a basis for anime.  The verisimilitude of the anime built the fanbase, which in turn attracted them back to the real location.

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A recent post on Cutfilm Tovent has me thinking about the anime industry’s reaction time.

The anime industry is incredibly quick to capitalize on trends. Moe became popular, and in less than a year the new anime season was chock full of moe shows.

Isn’t this a good thing for the industry? Isn’t it healthy for an industry to react rapidly to user wants and needs?

It becomes a problem when you’re a fan of the last trend. And I think this might explain the lack of ”seasoned anime fans” (those who’ve been watching anime for more than, say, 10 years).  Whatever trend gets you into anime will have largely disappeared from the airwaves 5 years later.  So, many of the otaku fade away, as they can’t find any more anime that fits their interests.

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ANN: Kuroshitsuji fans! Commence with the rejoicing. A second series is planned…and it’ll feature two new protagonists, a new butler and a new master. Will this work as well as it did for R.O.D.?  We’ll find out in July.

ANN: Gundam fans! And non-Gundam fans who want to check it out. We know that Bandai Visual announced they’ll be streaming pretty much all of Gundam for free on the ’net soon.  Well, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam–the second series in the franchise–is now streaming…on Anime News Network!

ANN: Speaking of giant robots: I mentioned earlier that a new Fafner project is in the works. Now I understand: it’s going to be a movie. Here’s hoping it makes a bigger splash than the TV show.

ANN: Another movie in the works: a live-action Ghost in the Shell film. There are now two interviews online with the current incarnation’s screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis. She promises plenty of action, but also plenty of atmosphere. Cool!

ANN: Here’s an odd bit: Crunchyroll has announced it’ll start streaming Phantom Thief Reinya later this week. It’s a series of 12 anime shorts centering on a whimsical thief, adapting a gag manga. Why should we care? It’s inspired by Reina Tanaka, a member of Morning Musume. It’s got a pretty high-calibre crew, too, including the director of Fullmetal Alchemist and Gundam 00…directing the music.

ANN: Also unexpected: the upcoming finale of the Winter Sonata anime will be film in live-action, using the Korean actors who starred in the 2002 live-action adaptation. Should be very interesting to see what they pull out of their sleeves for that one.

ANN: But that’s not nearly so weird as the website for Ikkitousen, which recently launched a cross-collaboration between that franchise and…Shin Koihime Musou, a similar franchise about fighting girls, both based (very very) loosely on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In one, the girls have their clothes ripped off; in the other, they’re all moe-fests.  There’s stuff on the site promoting the collaboration, with a mini-game “coming soon.”

ANN: But I’ve got weirdness to top even that! Have seen the the ED for Sora no Otoshimono? It’s a quiet song, showing what looks initially like a flock of birds…until you realize it’s actually pairs of panties, flapping gently in the night sky. Yeah. So get this: Housuke Nojiri–a Japanese SF author who wrote the original Rocket Girls novel–had nothing to do with Sora no Otoshimono, but he so loved that ED that he invented an ornithopter that looks like girls’ panties. And they’re being mass-produced.  For a one-day event where they’ll all get launched into the sky.

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A special, introspective post!  I want to make Otaku, No Video better, so I have two questions:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being awesome), how would you rate Otaku, No Video?
2. What would you like to see changed that would make Otaku, No Video a 10?

Post your feedback below, or email me. Thanks!

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