I'm not usually a Nintendo Dream collector, but the latest issue had a History of Zelda art book in it! It's got all of the official art from all of the games to date, including my favorite cartoony style! I just love it!!! Eeeeeeeee!!!!! ^_^ Super helpful since I got a certain commission from a certain someone who's looking for something close to the feel of that style! Yaaay! Nothing like inspiration to get the creative juices flowing again!

Sorry about not commenting on it. It simply hasn't made it to Japan yet, and I see now signs of it coming, though rumor has it that perhaps by March it might make it here. Going by other people's reviews, I have heard that the animation isn't quite up to it, though the story and songs are nice. To me the design and color scheme looks a lot like All Dogs Go To Heaven, which isn't a bad thing. I just hope it's not TOO similar.

Disappointingly, the princess seems to look like any other Mark Henn princess with a recolor. It's a shame they decided to go kind of generic with her features instead of picking a beautiful lady of African descent, studying, drawing and obsessing over her features as they've done with non-caucasoid ladies in some of the other films. I guess they might have been a bit too worried about not being PC enough? Not sure, but there are plenty of gorgeous African ladies out there with features that could certainly have been interpreted uniquely and beautifully by the right team of artists.

I am most certainly a Disney Features geek, being a veteran myself, but all in all, judging by the trailer I saw, I'm hesitant at best to spend good money on that film at the theater. It's extremely expensive to go to the movies in Japan, and waiting for the DVD rental might be the best way to go for a film I'm not 100% gung-ho over. Hope the rest of you have been enjoying it, however.

Living in Japan, I have become acutely aware of how much illegal downloading of anime is killing the business. As much as I'd rather not hand out money to greedy executives and other useless, gaping mouths along the production food chain, animated movies and series still rely on a group and not just a single individual to organize and produce it. I hear and read stories all the time about the miserable pay rate and living conditions of Japanese animation workers, and it is nearly all thanks to illegal downloads, sadly.

Since it's really easy to see how bad the conditions are from here, I do my best to make sure I buy anime - and any type of Japanese film - in its original Japanese release from a store (whether new or used) whenever I can. I feel good about it until I realize that I'd be able to glean a lot more from what I was watching if I had some subs to help me out when I'm stuck somewhere. My understanding of Japanese TV Drama Speak is reasonably good and I can understand a lot of what's going on, but sometimes the added comfort of the subs can be great in a pinch! And you know about Japanese - there's ALWAYS something you don't know!

That's where we get into a gray area.

There are plenty of fansubbers out there who love to upload new anime to YouTube or wherever as fast as they can before a US licensor picks it up. I don't want to rob the animation studio of profit by watching somebody's fansub for free, but on the other hand I really would rather not pay a US licensor for their subs 2 years down the line if they ever get around to releasing it.

What to do?

I'm doing my best to take the high road - Plain old get better at Japanese enough to be able to watch it and fully understand it in its original language - then buy the DVDs in their original domestic release. That doesn't help me keep up on NEW titles, however.

Yeah yeah, it's easy to rationalize that fansubs must be ok as long as they won't get shut down by the Man in the US, but these people don't really think about how they're hurting the very studios they want to see more anime come from. Most anime is not meant for a foreign audience, this is true, but if someone not in Japan wants to make use of something Japanese, shouldn't they have to pay for it, the way most other people have to pay for other foreign imports? I guess it's a lot easier for me to see the ill effects of downloading since it's quite common to see crisis reports about how the industry is crumbling in the papers and news magazines.

So....What to do to stay current without hurting the studios...Mind you, I don't have a few of the rather pricy super fancy anime satellite channels that play all of the better crafted adult oriented anime, so that in itself poses a problem. I watch whatever I can on the channels we *do* have, but for everything else, access to it by way of internet is soooooo easy!

Hmm.....

For whatever reason, when this DS game first was being advertised last year, I waited and waited for it and never ended up seeing it in stores. We were going to order it online, but never got around to it. I finally FINALLY saw it used at my favorite store a few wees ago, and now it is finally mine!

Extremely cute design, TONS of hand drawn animation. I guess the character designer was the creator of Habanero-chan, and some people have made the strange claim that it looks like a signature Vanillaware game, though it looks nothing like the Vanilla games I'm most familiar with, Grim Grimoire and Odin Sphere. Apparently some art book was released with it, but I had never seen that around either. Someone I know with a really bad memory sent me over a scan of it a year after he'd gotten it, having forgotten (or simply not having cared enough to remember) that I had mentioned I was pretty excited about the game. Better late than never, I guess! ^_^ It's full of great character art!

Kumatan is a little bear girl. She lives in a zoo. She's got a big boobed cow friend (for all you cow-girl fetishists out there), a boy cat friend, a "big sister" tiger friend (who speaks in a Kansai dialect, making me wonder if it's a joke about the Hanshin Tigers), and a bunny girl friend. There's a monkey who comes along from time to time as well, trying to steal the cow chick's panties for whatever reason. There are other characters she interacts with regularly along the way, and basically all you do is put on shows for zoo visitors for money. Once you earn enough money, you can build yourself a really nice pad!

One of the highlights of this game is that you have the option to pat her nicely on the head, which ups her ureshii level, or you can FLICK her with your finger, which she obviously finds annoying. If you touch her directly with your stylus, it's like smacking her hard, and she'll stay pretty pissed at you for awhile after that, not doing much that she's supposed to. Excellent!

Anyway, I'll be playing this one for awhile, so I'll let you know how it turns out. I recommend it for the great animated sequences, and the opening, which is just like an anime opening with a catchy little song! ^_^ If you can find it and are into moe, definitely pick it up! Very very cute.