I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

The Honey Files

Never before collected in one place: Three decades of Honey!

Not entirely work-safe. But it's Go Nagai, so duh.


Cutey Honey (1973)




New Cutey Honey (1994)






Cutey Honey Flash (1997)




Cutey Honey Movie (2004)




Re: Cutey Honey

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:59 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Potering

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Testing, Testing

The conversion worked out better than I thought - I'll try some lower bit rates and see how they go. The result looks a bit icky at 1280x720, but Flash-in-a-browser is hardly the ideal delivery vehicle for HDTV anyway.



Update: Here's a lower bit-rate version. Above: 800kbps video, 112kbps audio. Below: 500kbps video, 80kbps audio.



Slightly NSFW examples after the jump.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Boku wa Trap

At least when Pokemon did it, they knew it was a joke.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:30 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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If You Want One Of These...



You'll need this.



Also a colour printer.  And a pair of scissors.  And a sharp knife.  And maybe some glue.  Oh, and paper.  Paper would help.

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Nanatsuiro★Drops

A de-h'd h-game conversion.  Which is not automatically a bad thing (Popotan), but not exactly a star draw either.

Magical girl show featuring a love interest who turns into a stuffed animal at night.  Stereotypically cutesy whiney helpless moe heroine who should be drowned in a bucket.

Rating: Meh

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Potemayo

Okay, have you ever seen Pugyuru?  Well, imagine that, only more and better, and with a better balance between gross-out and absurdist humour.

If you haven't seen Pugyuru, well, think of something very cute and very weird, and then take the factorial of that.

Probably best taken in small doses, and if possible, in company.

Rating: Cabbage?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:06 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A New Day, A New Season

Let's see what we have here...

Zombie Loan

Melodramatic pseudocomedy garbage about zombies.  Rating: Bah

Mushi-Uta

Incomprehensible melodramatic ultraviolent moe pseudocomedy about bugs.  Decent production values wasted on a story of unparalleled - okay, at least unsurpassed - stupidity.  Rating: Bleh

Shinkyoku Soukai Polyphonica

Magic music fairies who, when you play their tune, gain a foot in height and two cup sizes.  I like the telephones.  Solid production values but not otherwise outstanding.  Rating: Hmm

Rating system for this season:

Yay
Hmm
Meh
Bah
Bleh

So not off to a good start.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:03 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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From The Not Nearly Scared Enough File

Moetan: Because you have to know where to draw the line before you can cross it.

It does at least appear to have a coherent story... of sorts... unlike some entries from last season where the creators apparently just threw darts at a wall.  We're going to make a plink romantic comedy about plink yakuza plink mermaids.

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The Deneotenisation of Megumi Morisato

I started posting this as a comment on Steven's blog, but it got longer and longer and in the end I decided it was better as a post in its own right, so here it is.  It's a discussion about the art styles in the various incarnations of Oh My Goddess! - particularly the OVA (which is a classic) and the recent TV series (which is a pile of poo).  See hideous thirty-year-old transvestite Megumi and ugly flat-faced Urd for background.

Joe wrote:

I've been an AMG fan for close to a decade now, and I have a nearly complete collection of the original Japanese-language manga all the way to the latest volume (34), so I'm able to review the way in which the drawing style has changed over the eighteen-some years of the manga's run (the way Belldandy was drawn at the beginning is RADICALLY different from the way she looks now, so much so that if it wasn't for the identifying marks on her face, you'd wonder if they were even the same person). To me, Belldandy, Urd, Keiichi and Megumi have always looked like what they were meant to be - young adults - in the manga as well as the anime.

Joe is right that the artwork changes substantially over the course of the manga - with such a long-running series, that's not surprising.  And the changes to Belldandy are the most significant (with Keiichi coming second - early Keiichi was kind of ugly, and that seems to be the version they picked up for the TV series).

Steven wrote:

Within that context, Megumi as drawn in the TV series looks scandalously mature, even old -- but only because the context itself is distorted. Megumi doesn't look 29; she looks 18. The reason she looks out of place is because so many other girls that age (or slightly younger) in anime are drawn to look 12.

18-year-olds tend to look more like kids than not (though of course there's a lot of variation).  And Megumi is not just an 18-year-old, she's a cute and bubbly 18-year-old.  The artwork in the anime is dull and flat; it shifts the colour of her eyes and hair from red-brown to grey-brown, elongates her face, makes her chin pointed rather than round.  All it really succeeds in doing is making her look tired and washed-out, which makes her look older than she should be.

Steven wrote:

The difference in art style between Skuld and everyone else is the source of one sight gag. Urd senses that Skuld is hiding something and needles her by imitating something that Skuld would say. The seiyuu makes her voice sound like Skuld's voice, but they also change Urd's face art so that her face has the same proportions as Skuld's. That gag wouldn't have worked if everyone had been drawn like Skuld is. And everyone is drawn that way in the manga and in the OVA. Irrespective of body proportions, they all have the faces of kids.

But the change there is the eyes, Skuld being wide-eyed and childlike and Urd being narrow-eyed and mischievous - even in the manga.  Manga Urd may have a similarly-shaped face to manga Skuld, but the expressions are different, and the proportions of the face are different.

I don't recall that gag from the manga, but what Fujishima did do was have them swap ages, so that Urd was a little kid and Skuld was grown up.  And their faces changed appropriately.  They're similar, because that's the artist's style; they aren't identical.  (And even if they were, the gag would work just fine - c.f. Jungle Guu.

Steven wrote:

As it turns out, Megumi is quite slender and isn't at all top-heavy; and that's realistic.

Actually, Megumi is supposed to be short and... well, not particularly slender. (As in, solidly built, not top-heavy.)  Megumi is supposed to be cute, in contrast to characters like Belldandy and Urd and Sayoko, who are tall and slim and beautiful.

Height's another age cue, but Chihiro is short like Megumi and Sora (and not particularly slender, either), and her face is drawn in the same style, but she still looks older.  Fujishima does this using facial proportions and expressions - and hairstyles.

Steven wrote:

Pixy is, I think, reacting first to the series history and objecting to the changes that were made. (Fanboy loyalty.)

That's partly true, but it's a small part.  Anime Megumi's face looks tired and old, because they've washed the colour out of it.  It just doesn't suit her personality.  And the artwork of the entire show is ugly and flat.

Steven wrote:

But he's also reacting to the current anime context where "adult" girls are being drawn more and more young looking, a kind of genre-wide pervasive lolicon.

Well, where you define 'current' as everything since Osamu Tezuka first picked up a pen.  And he stole the concept from Disney.

Oh My Goddess! is supposed to be cute and bright, and it is, in every version except the TV series.  The characters look older in the movie, but that's because the movie comes late in the ongoing story, and the movie doesn't make Megumi (or anyone else) look washed-out.  (In fact, the movie is gorgeous.)

It's not simply a question of neoteny, it's that the art style in the TV series is both ugly and inappropriate.

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