A Glimpse into the Universe of Cosmic Rage

The day that we have all been waiting for has finally arrived. A glimpse into what the universe of Cosmic Rage.

Episode 1 is currently in production, stay tuned for more production updates and don’t forget to share with your friends!

Random Post- Fall Anime Previews

With the summer anime run coming to a near close, I thought I would run through a few of the titles I have read previews for and let you know what shows I am excited about this fall. Currently this season, I am only paying attention to one show, Attack on Titan. You cna read about some of the titles due out this fall at RocketNews.

1) Kill La Kill

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85X_tmunBNY&w=560&h=315]

I have heard some say this is the most anticipated title out this fall. I haven’t seen the work the trailer references to so I am going into this show pretty blind when it starts. Crunchyroll has announced that this title will be streaming.

2) Coppelion

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm_IflUKc7U&w=560&h=315]

I haven’t heard if this title will be streaming or not, but the fall line-up should be fleshed out in the next week or so. Coppelion has the story setting of Tokyo after a nuclear meltdown. I need to check this one out b/c it could have some nice social commentary to it or even a political bit. This one might have me the most curious of the season.

Those are the 2 titles I am the most excited about, granted I don’t really know much about them heading into them. There are a few others that look interesting but aren’t really my thing, but I figured I may check them out anyways and see if the first few episodes are enough to keep me interested. Check them out below.

Short leash titles (titles I might check out and if they are unable to hook me quickly I’m done)

Non Non Biyori

I am interested in this one from a sheer art standpoint. The show is set in the Japanese countryside and I am interested to see the backgrounds and environment artwork. The story doesn’t seem like anything I typically watch but I might need to check out a few eps for art sake.

White Album 2

Not sure if this is a sequel or not. I like music anime’s even though I never really have seen one all the way through. I generally check these out for music alone and see if they are used mostly as a marketing tool for an actual album or not. Who knows if the story will be enough for me to stick around.

Voice Actor Force Voicetorm 7

This series is suppose to be animated like a motion comic. I will be really interested to see how it plays out and how it is received by fans.

Looks like it should be an interesting line up for the fall with a little something for everyone.

Production Update 55

Where do the weeks go? This last week was very eventful, some good and some bad. I had a family medical scare late last week that lasted over the weekend, but I can report that every thing is as good as it can be for the situation. My mom needed to have a stent put in an artery, not the thing I thought I was going to be doing this weekend, but very grateful it wasn’t anything worse. So I spent a lot of time at the hospital making sure other family members were informed on everything and making her stay be as enjoyable as possible. It’s been a very long time since I had to visit anyone at a hospital that I still get a little uncomfortable in them. Not really sure why but it is what it is. The good news will probably be shared later in the week or possibly a week from today.

I am writing this up on Sunday night and currently working on the final scene compositing that I aim to finish up tonight. After that, I just need receive a revised audio track and the prologue will be good to go 🙂

So that means that this week I should be getting back on episode 1. In terms of episode 1, I will be starting to model a new environment that will take place of several scenes, which means I will be able to reposition a camera around in the scene and get the backgrounds for many shots. The area that I will be modeling is the basis for the main conflict in the first episode. I hope to get some pictures posted up on the modeling process on facebook and also next week’s update. I am really excited to test out my modeling skills on an interior shot.

On deck for this week also is some more work on my Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits proposal. I need to have it in by the end of the month which shouldn’t be an issue. I believe I have enough information to put together my proposal. I’ll keep you all up to date.

On a side note, last year to the day was the day I first stepped foot in Japan on my first trip overseas. It was a trip that I had so much fun on  and met so many cool people. I know someday I will make it back, hoping for sometime next year or early the year after. I have too many places to explore yet 🙂

*Morning Status Update*
Last night I rendered out all of the scenes for the prologue and I plan on piecing it together tonight. Just one audio change left until launch.

Recent Viewing: From Up on Poppy Hill

I recently saw From Up on Poppy Hill, the new studio Ghibli film to be released. Studio Ghibli is commonly referred to as the Disney of Japan, creating amazing stories and maintaining a high level of quality in their animation. From Up on Poppy Hill has a limited released so I was very fortunate to be in a city that had showings while it was out. The film was direct by Goro Miyazaki.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-rhgSCAqDU&w=560&h=315]

Synopsis- A young girl named Umi is living with her grandmother, her younger brother and sister and a couple others in Yokohama. Umi’s mother is studying abroad in America and her father died in the Korean war when the cargo ship he was on struck a mine. The film is set in 1964 when Tokyo was preparing to host the Olympics and a transitional period between old and new.

While at school, Umi meets a boy by the name of Shun, who works on the weekly school paper from the Latin Quarter clubhouse. Shun jumps off the top of the clubhouse and into the school pool as a stunt to promote the paper. The next day Umi’s younger sister wants to travel to the club house to get Shun’s autograph.

While at the club house Umi and Shun become friends and Umi starts helping with the paper. News starts to travel about the club house needing to be torn down and Umi comes up with a plan to clean up and restore the club house.

Throughout the process, Umi and Shun become even closer. While at a gathering Shun sees a picture of Umi’s father during the war. Shun has the exact same picture and starts to piece together his childhood. Do Umi and Shun share the same father and how does it effect their friendship?

Review- Studio Ghibli continues to make great films and this is no exception. The film revolves around the relationship between Umi and Shun who become friends after a crazy stunt and a purposed demolition of Shun and friends clubhouse.

The story is well paced and doesn’t have any drawn out areas and considering the film is 90 minutes that is a good thing. You could possibly argue that the start of the story is bit slow, but it is building the world that Umi is in. The story is set in 1964 Yokohama, Japan is still rebuilding from the war, it is post-Korean war, and they are preparing for the Olympics. We are also shown more of a glimpse of Umi’s everyday life, which consists of cooking the meals for the house, buying groceries and also taking care of her younger brother and sister. It depends on your attention span, I personally thought the beginning had some of the best composed shots of the film and enjoyed the beautiful artwork in the process.

The artwork adds the characters personality and emotions in crucial scenes as Umi and Shun’s relationship goes on a bit of a roller coaster. The relationship between Umi and Shun do not feel like a typical up and down relationship story. The time period combined with the animated aspect and the reasons why their relationship is up and down are a very unique combination. There is a bit of comedy in the film as well, ranging from witty one liners to exaggerated expressions on characters.

Production Quality- Poppy Hill had very well done animation with a few scenes that I would have to see again before I can decide if they were done in 3D or not. The environments are very well painted and have both nice daytime scenes, dusk and even night scenes. Scenes are painted with great detail and seem to be very layered at times.

The character animation is really well done, there are a few scenes of the kids running and walking into school that really help the kids come off as playful. There are a handful of other shots that are animated from an interesting perspective.

There isn’t really any kind of effects in the film since it is based in reality, the visual effects that are applied are used as accents in subtle ways. If you are a fan of well drawn 2D animation without a lot of heavy effects, Poppy Hill is a must see. As an animator, Studio Ghibli films are always must see.

Music- Very light hearted, fit the story of the film well. The choir scenes were a little awkward but that is also in part f the gap between audio and lip movements which is to be expected when dubbing a song for animation.

Dub- Very well done. There are a couple scenes with the students of the school singing as a choir and the singing not matching up that closely with the lip movements, but that is to be expecting in a song dub.

And of course there was no extras since it was in theaters. Check out their Facebook to see if it is coming to a theater near you.

1964 Tokyo Olympics picture from the Edo Tokyo Museum.

1964 Tokyo Olympics picture from the Edo Tokyo Museum. From my trip to Japan last summer, this is the period of “From Up on Poppy Hill”.

Recent Viewing: Burst Angel

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odbhs_9PsCQ&w=560&h=315]

At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to marathon Burst Angel in the span of a day while getting some work done. Burst Angel was created in 2004 by Gonzo and licensed in America by FUNimation (I told you I would get to a FUNimation title).

The story is very similar to Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 (BCT 2040). We follow around a group of girls that are fighting against mutated people/creatures that are wreaking havoc in Tokyo. Each character set has the a few archetypes of characters. The strong silent/ rebellious leader, the loud quirky girl, the young genius (in BCT 2040 its a young male), and a serious but yet sometimes fun leader or business head.

I really had no knowledge of the series going into it, it had been a while since I had seen a trailer for it and I have never really looked into the title to see what it was about. Having said that, there was an early episode that really had kinda set up some high hopes of a direction the series would go. However, the story never progresses down that path. After a few episodes of introducing characters in the first few episodes, I thought this storyline was going to be the main plot for the remainder of the series. It only turned out to be a one off kinda episode that never touches the topic.

All was not lost, from a production standpoint, Gonzo creates some of the best CGI in all of anime. I really got familiar with their work when I was preparing my SGMS presentation last year. However my presentation covered only 3 time periods of CGI in anime, it’s inception, the titles when it started to become more mainstream and where it was at today. If I had a longer period of time to present, one of the areas I wanted to go into was the mid 2000’s. Some titles that were the first to use CGi were in the late 1990’s and Gonzo was one of the studios that was at the forefront of the movement.

So to see a title from 2004 which is the time I wanted to study more as there was a flurry of new techniques and such coming out. Burst Angel had some really nice animated robot sequences in the later episodes. A couple years prior to this title there were studios that when animating robots, would animate them very robot like and not too responsive, they look very rigid and unnatural. Burst Angel has scenes where robots are slinging around large weapons and you can get a sense of the weight of the weaponry from the way the robot is wielding it. The robot will swing the weapon into position and they go past where they need it and bring it back just a little. It is one of the animation principles, but you didn’t see these applied to CGi robots before in anime.

The downfall of the series a little bit is the lack of compositing in those final episodes. By compositing I mean that there are effects that look like they are just dropped onto the animation and don’t blend into the environment to make it fit in. Explosions are placed over the top of the animation and sometimes you can see that things around them aren’t effected by the burst of light and fire. In one shot in particular you can see the building underneath an explosion has no breaking windows or even damage.

I may be coming off as really harsh, but I’m not. At the time this was released it probably was pretty solid to other anime titles being produced at the time. A lot of titles in that time were experimenting with CGI and how they could use it. I have a fascination with this time period because in a way it relates to what I am working on as well.

All series have budgets and restrictions, in my Cosmic Rage project, I have the limitation of doing the whole project with my laptop. I dig into these titles because it is very intriguing to see how other animators cut corners to save on budgets and how they have to keep budgets in mind. It is fun to dissect how they did things to get a certain look as well. And to be honest some of these things they can get away with because the audience doesn’t know what they are looking for in some cases.

I enjoyed Burst Angel, I thought it was an entertaining 24 episode series that really allowed me to see more of what Gonzo was doing in the mid 2000’s. It is a time period that I would enjoy to see more titles from since it was such a time for experimental techniques and balancing looks with a computers render power as well.

Animating Real Life

I was watching Penguindrum last week while working on some artwork and jokingly sending texts to a friend. I was in episode 9 and the episode started with the characters arriving in Ikebukuro. My friend that I was texting was the one that traveled to Japan with me. The reason I texted him, was because after the characters were revealed to be in Ikebukuro they were at an aquarium.

This past summer when we traveled to Japan, we also visited an aquarium in Ikebukuro. This immediately got me sending him texts about how funny it would be if that was the aquarium we were at. Well, it turns out it was.

Screen Shot 2013-01-23 at 3.10.27 PM

Here is the subway signs that Penguindrum uses to let viewers know what area of Tokyo the characters are in.

IMG_1875

This was a sign of the aquarium that I took a picture of on our trip. Notice the logo on the top of the poster.
Screen Shot 2013-01-23 at 3.11.06 PM

Does that logo from the above poster look familiar?IMG_1937

Here are the penguins that we saw at the aquarium.
Screen Shot 2013-01-23 at 3.10.43 PMThis is what the rest of the penguin area looked like, wooded pathways and a glass facade so you can see the penguins swimming.

Now you may be thinking big deal, but let me proceed with my point from an artist stand point. As artists we typically use reference material for characters, environments and objects. It is virtually impossible for anyone to have intimate knowledge of every item to be able to draw it convincingly all the time. For instance if you had to draw a desktop or car or house from memory, chances are you could but to take those areas to the next level is to make it look like someone uses the desk, the car and lives in the house.

If you were to draw a living area of a house, you could draw the couch, tv, tables, maybe some magazines on the table and a ceiling fan. But when you compare scenes and items that you draw from memory with ones in real life, you will notice all kinds of things that you may have missed. Maybe there is a child’s toy on the floor in the living area. Did you draw a tv remote or a coffee cup on the table? A book? There is so many little things in areas that reference material is needed for artists.

While I was in Japan, our guide told us about an area (that I can’t recall) that was the setting of a manga series, and that this area drew thousands of visitors each year just because of that. I want to say it was a school… I’ll have to look into this. But this is part of the appeal of basing series off of an actual location.

Another film that comes to mind is My Neighbor Totoro from Studio Ghibli. That film is based on locations in the countryside of Japan. On dvd extras it is revealed that other films such as Ponyo and Spirited Away are also. It is through research that these rich worlds are created and it my opinion actual locations help connect with viewers as well.

Recent Viewing- PenguinDrum

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zam5t3dasUU&w=560&h=315]

This past week I had a chance to watch Penguindrum from Sentai Filmworks created by a studio I have never heard of before, Brains Base. Check out the opening above (disregard the red type in the first :15 seconds). For some reason Sentai Filmworks does not have it’s own youtube channel to display their shows and trailers don’t exist on their website either. So we went with the only video involving the opening to the series. Sentai Filmworks is releasing Penguindrum over 2 discs, so this is only about the first disc since disc 2 won’t be out until mid-March.

Penguindrum has a very interesting story. I had seen a few subtitled (subbed) episodes about a year or so ago while at a conference and instantly enjoyed watching the little blue penguins throughout the show cause chaos and act as the series comedic relief. However, the story does not revolve around the aforementioned penguins, it revolves around 2 brothers (Shoma and Kanba), their sister (Himari), a schoolgirl names Ringo, and a handful of other characters.

The story starts with Himari being sick/dead and when she dawns a magical penguin hat she returns to life and gains a split personality. The split personality is her reason for existence and she orders her 2 brothers to embark on a comedic journey to retrieve the penguindrum. With this hat, comes a group of 3 little blue penguins that each follow a character around and creates comedic relief in the series.

Before you disregard this series as a comedic and random series, hear me out. While it was the comedy that got me interested in the series, Penguindrum has a more darker side to it as well. There is a lot of fate/destiny vs choice in the series and certain characters trying to prove one or the other. There is a little bit of magic, and more. Towards the end of the first 12 episode set, the series starts to paint a darker picture involving the characters. I by saying this I will be setting a high standard, but, dare I say that the series may be heading down the path of Neon Genesis Evangelion where things get darker and more open to interpretation.

I am excited to see how the series plays out and look forward to seeing the conclusion in March to the first Brain Base anime series I have had the opportunity to watch.

From an animation standpoint, they tend to do some things that are par for the course in Japan. Some elements are animated in 3D, which if you watched the opening above you will see they use 3D for some secondary elements. They use particle effects in some scenes as well, for water and even to replicate dust caught in laser sites of some weaponry.

Personally, my favorite stylistic choice in Penguindrum is the use of flat 2D layers that I could easily see being done in Adobe After Effects. If you watch the opening above it would be all of the Penguin face logos, but the series uses those and also uses 2D cutouts for certain scenes too. The series is very focused on settings so when characters go to new scenes we see a 3D subway gate followed by 2D subway signs where the characters are. The signs are all done in 2D with very stylized backgrounds.

When the characters are in crowded areas, the background characters are people icons and not drawn people. The people icons are similar to what you would see on bathroom signs here in the U.S. but when I traveled to Japan last year, they use iconography in explaining many things. There was even a series called XXXHolic (Funimation) that used a similar technique in which all of their background characters were simply white pencil sketches.

Penguindrum provides a fun soundtrack as well. I am a sucker for comedic penguins and especially the amount of subway scenes that appear in Penguindrum as well. I still have to wait to see the last half of the series, but the first half is for sure worth checking out for a variety of reasons discussed above. Let’s hope the second half is at least as good as the first half. Monday will be a new production update and a special post for next Thursday as well.

Japan Adventure Recap

My apologies for being a day late again. I have a couple freelance projects that bottlenecked a bit, I am actually blogging while waiting for a render to finish up. An article I read last week from a friend actually inspired me to write one last entry about my trip to Japan, which seems long time ago already. Blogging about the trip and looking at pictures to post has really been a fun way to look back on my trip, I would strongly recommend it to anyone. Clearly, I would strongly recommend a trip to Japan as well as going through the agency I did.

I basically wanted to run down some of my favorite things, favorite foods, best experiences as well as share some pics of the haul of goodies I brought home and more.

Since there may be some foodies out there, lets go over that first. My friend and I had the intention of finding fugu, or pufferfish. Pufferfish is poisonous and will kill the consumer if the chef fails to prepare the food correctly. There are next to zero deaths a year of consumers dying from prepared food, most deaths come from fisherman that eat the fish in the wild. During all of our adventures we seemingly pushed this endeavor back each day until we basically ran out of time. This is on the list of things to do on our next trip.

My favorite food came from a ramen shop and the takoyaki from the street vendors. I would have to wayward an honorable mention to the squid I ate from a vendor as well, I am a little disappointed I didn’t get a chance to eat octopus. Again, next time.

Japan has a lot of lemon flavored drinks, which I miss greatly. A specific drink was CC Lemon, I have been looking for somewhere to get it from in the states, but to no success yet. It will only be a matter of time.

My favorite place that we visited would have to be the Ghibli museum. As an animator, it was the closest thing to heaven I could have imagined. I wish I could have taken pictures inside to post, but I settled for a book with pictures of the inside. If you haven’t seen any of the Studio Ghibli films, I strongly suggest you give a couple of them a chance. If you ever visit Japan, this is a must see site. They even show short films that you can only see at the museum.

This was also the first trip I was able to see the ocean. Some of the funnest moments I had was around the ocean. On one occasion I went seashell hunting and found some shells to take back to give to my sister. My second ocean experience was when we were in the country and we had a group of locals want their pictures taken with us. The people in the country were extremely nice, especially at the festival events.

My favorite experience was climbing Mt Fuji at night and witnessing the cities at the foot of the mountain’s fireworks. As I stated in a previous entry, climbing Fuji was one of the most mentally demanding things I have ever done, but it is also one of my proudest moments. I would like to climb the mountain again.

Probably the most unexpected awesome experience was the ryokan. I had no idea what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised. The breakfasts were amazing, we walked around in yukatas the majority of the time we were there, the hot spring was amazing and the customer service set a new standard. When I go back to Japan, staying at a ryokan is on the top of my list.

The arcades in Akihabara were super fun, you would be surprised at how far you can get in a game just based of user interface design and game animation without understanding the language. The card reader games blew my mind. Shibuya had some musicians playing, I would like to return and go listen to some music some night. Theres something very cool about walking down the street and seeing various musical acts and being able to stop and listen at will.

I had a pretty good toy and book haul on the trip. I ended up with a book about the art of Princess Mononoke and also a picture book about the Ghibli museum. I also ended up with 3 production art books from the series Neon Genesis Evangelion as well as some Asuka chopsticks that I eat my cup noodles with. I picked up a giant list of gachapons, from various stores in various areas. The coolest was a store that you could actually trade your gachapons in to and buy other people’s trade ins and complete your collection. My favorite toys were small figures from Neon Genesis Evangelion I picked up in sealed mystery boxes.

While in Japan, I wanted to pick up some anime cels. In early 2000 animation went into the digital realm, which meant that cels were no longer being used to make animation. For example, you can not find cels of newer series, you can only get them of older series. Studios sold cels to fans as a way to make money and provide fans with content that they didn’t have much of a use for. At the cel shop, I could’t read any of the names of the binders of series he had. I did stumble across some binders of Inu Yasha and bought 3 cels. 2 of one of my favorite characters, Miroku and also a cool cel of Koga from the same series. I found some binders of Dragonball Z, but most of the cels were missing backgrounds and I want my cels to have background art. On my next trip, I plan on taking more money to get more cels. It was cool when we found a small gallery displaying cels and art of Rouroni Kenshin.

As for me, I would like to return to Japan again. I am targeting the spring of 2014 for the spring festivals as my next trip. Hopefully the stars align and I am able to get the trip lined up. If you get the chance or are looking for a trip, I highly suggest Japan!

 *(Images of my anime cels and also of my toy haul from Japan. Makes you want to go doesn’t it?)

Japan Adventure Day 13

Our final day in Japan was a little bit of a lazy day. We hadn’t really had anything planned except for hitting up a few areas that we wanted to revisit. For the duration of our trip, we constantly saw signs pointing to a Pokemon Center nearby at the train station we used daily. We decided that we would check it out. We sadly discovered that it was basically just a store with a ton of Pokemon gear. We thought it was going to have a different layout than just being a store.

When we went to the Evangelion store earlier in the week we picked up a magazine that had other Evangelion sites we could visit and get stamps at. We didn’t do the stamp collecting but we did go check out a giant slide of one of the main characters, Rei Ayanami. We also stopped at the Evangelion store by the slide but it was a rather small one that had mostly the same content as the other store we went to. By the Ayanami slide, there was other stuff advertising for various series, old and new alike. In this area there was a giant steampunk clock.

We headed back to Akihabara for some ramen and we also went to spend the last of our loose coins. When exchanging Yen back in the states, they only take the paper bills. So we had 500 and 100 Yen coins we decided to deposit at the arcade. It was the cool seeing Neon Genesis Evangelion posters, billboards and such being advertised everywhere. We even found people sized figures of Asuka and Rei at arcades as well.

We made our way back to the area of Tokyo that we were staying at. We decided to go to the park that we saw when we first arrived in Tokyo. The park was very large and it was smack in the middle of the city. There were ponds of koi fish, turtles, and lots of flowers.

We found one turtle that was swimming and as we watched him he made his way towards us and actually got out of the water and walked up to us. We would hold our hand out and it would try to touch it with his nose. I haven’t seen anything like that before. We took some really good videos of the turtle before he worked his way back into the water.

We sat at a park table as it started to rain and we talked about our favorite aspects of the trip. We headed back to the hotel to grab our stuff before we headed to the airport to fly out that night. We landed back in the states safe and sound 🙂

*(First image is of the Rei Ayanami slide, next is the giant steampunk clock, the third is of a curious turtle that came out of the water to greet us, finally a close up of some flowers).

Japan Adventure Day 12

After recovering from the Mt Fuji hike and not getting a case of pneumonia we left the hotel in search of more adventures in Tokyo. In our planning phase of our trip, we both had decided that we wanted to go to a museum and get a little bit of a “learn on” while we were in Japan. Our online searches had directed us to the Edo-Tokyo museum, where we could learn about life in the period and the development of Tokyo to its present day.

One of the things I enjoyed about the museum was all of the models to show castles, cities and bridges. At one point the museum had a mock storefront of a print shop with all sorts of ukiyo-e art and how the woodblock printing process works.

Later in the museum we started to see the western influence in Japanese society, in architecture, cars and clothes. The museum contained items all the way up until post World War 2. We also learned a lot of what life was like in Japan during the war. Kids were forced to the country because they were afraid of fire bombs and raids in the cities. It even had artwork from kids in school at thte time about the war.

Before we left the museum, we watched a few performers at the museum do tricks with umbrellas and balance things on them. It was quite an interesting show.

After the museum we went to Ikebukuro to find the Sunshine aquarium. It happened to be the one year anniversary for the aquarium so it was jammed packed. We saw all sorts of cool fish and a crab that was the size of a small car. Little kids were taking all sorts of videos and pictures with their Nintendo DS.

They had several tanks that you could walk under and see jellyfish, and even sharks. There were tanks of lizards, seals and turtles also. We had the chance to see a lot of interesting creatures.

The aquarium had an outdoor area where we saw seals, penguins and some other birds. The seals had an interesting tank that you could walk underneath and see the seals from under them. The same seals also performed a show with all sorts of tricks and acts.

After the aquarium we stopped at a restaurant for some food and I had an awesome bowl of soup. Ikebukuro had a little bit of a nightlife that we decided to enjoy that evening. We spent most of the night at an arcade playing crane games and a pokemon game that gave us tokens that had computer information on them that we could use on other pokemon machines.

As we searched the arcade for other games before heading out for the night, I found a crane game for a show called Penguin Drum. The machine had all sorts of penguins in it. I deposited 500Yen and got an extra play, I ended up dumping out 6 penguin toys. I also grabbed a pepsi in the flavor of “salty watermelon” and we headed back to the hotel. Next week is the final day in Japan!

*(First image: The sign for the Edo Tokyo Museum, the second: a bomb from WW2 that was found well after the war, the third: penguins from the aquarium, the fourth: the seal tank that you could walk under).