Otaku, No Video

(c) Hidekaz Himaruya, Studio DEEN

Big news of the week: Funimation’s announced a bunch of licenses. They’ve now got Hetalia: Axis Powers, The Sacred Blacksmith, FLCL (including the original dub), Hero Tales, and Master of Martial Hearts.  They also licensed a number of live-action movies, including RoboGeisha and a bunch of Shaw Brothers kung fu flicks.  In sadder news, they also revealed that Big Windup! has sold poorly, and so they won’t be licensing any more of it.

Crunchyroll is also simulcasting several new shows for the current Japanese season: Chu-Bra, Cobra: The Animation, Durarara, Omamori Himari, Hanamaru Kindergarten, and So Ra No Wo To.

ANN: There’s going to be a new anime season of the odd, very shiny mecha series Fafner. Looks like the original cast will be re-united for the project.

ANN: Head over to beck-movie.jp for a sneak peak at the upcoming live-action adaptation of Beck!  Looks…pretty much exactly right, surprisingly.  Meanwhile, over on AnimeNation.net, you can see a teaser for the upcoming live-action Space Battleship Yamato movie, and a teaser for the upcoming Gantz live-action movie.

ANN: Kimi ni Todoke, the recent romantic comedy about a girl who struggles for looking like Sawako from The Ring, is being turned into a live-action movie!  Which seems fitting, really; it’s based on a live-action movie premise as it is.

AnimeNation.net: There’s an upcoming mecha cartoon being made in China, Astro Plan. And it looks like the pilots fly Valkyries, and launch from Gundam SEED’s Archangel.

ANN:  Boys’ Love fans!  You’ll soon have to shell out a bit more dough to get your man-on-man action. Tokyopop’s BLU line will be raising its prices from US $13 to $15 (CAN $17 to $19) next month.  However, you’ll get more color pages, they promise, with the more expensive editions.  This follows a price increase from US $10 a year ago.

ANN: The incredibly long-running samurai epic manga Vagabond will end sometime in 2010, its creator has revealed on his website.

ANN: The not-so-incredibly-long-running but much-beloved light novel series Full Metal Panic will be ending soon, too.  Shoji Gatoh is now writing the final light novel in the series.  (Frantic rumors: Gatoh hasn’t ruled out writing more short stories in the franchise, and I’ve heard that Kyoto Animation is waiting on the completion of the series to make the next, and presumably final, Full Metal Panic anime. Here’s hoping!)

ANN: The shrine that’s home to the two characters from Lucky Star have been a popular New Year’s destination for otaku several years running, and this past New Year’s broke records: 450,000 people went to Washinomiya Shrine.

ANN: AKB48, the Japanese girl band created as a more fan-friendly version of superpop idol groups like Morning Musume, is proving a popular concept.  Six different countries are now looking to spin off their own versions of the group using a similar model (school uniform clothing, 48 members, etc.).