Tag Archives: Tokyo

Art book Review: Ping Pong

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Ping Pong CoverA while ago I finished up watching Ping Pong the animated series. It was a fantastic series and the first sports series (outside of Initial D) I watched. The story was very compelling and the characters had very unique stories of their own. So of course I needed to check out the art book for Ping Pong.

First off, I have to admit that I am a sucker for art books that go in the landscape format instead of the traditional portrait style. Just something about them that I find much more enjoyable and more immersive.

The Complete Artworks book has a lot of the types of things you would see an your typical anime art book. The first segment breaks down each episode, complete with art and (assuming) a summary below, the book isn’t translated into English which isn’t a big deal since I buy them for the artwork.

The book goes into rough colored storyboard frames, the background environments and settings. One of my favorite “spreads” in the book is one with all of that characters laid out with all of their different clothing outfits on. You can see Smile and Peco (among other characters) in their ping pong attire, school attire, and even casual attire. It’s nice to see this since in most series characters wear the same clothing.

Beyond the character “spread”, is a wide range of character model sheets, expression sheets and notes on each character. These types of images are things I have always enjoyed looking at. You can see the characters in some of their earliest stages and also see how they look all the way around and their various expressions.

However, my absolute favorite part of this book is the following section. It is a very technical section on ping pong. It shows the different holds of the paddle the characters would have depending on their grip. There are sequential images for different types of hits with each grip as well. So if the animator needed to see how a pencil grip back hand looked, they have it as reference. Not only that, but they have it done in a couple styles so you can see exactly how the character moves from different perspectives. I really wish this portion was translated so I could read the notes on these pages. I can only assume they are gold.

The next section of the book contains key animation art for select shots, allowing you to see how the characters move for expressions and in some cases, the extreme perspective  of some shots. There are even a few pages of characters playing ping pong against one another so you can see how they react to the other player when the ball is hit.

One of the final sections breaks down some of the use of computers. Using 3D animation and even Flash for the series. Again, I wish this section was translated because this would be gold to read and learn how they used these programs in this series since it has such a unique visual style.

If you’re into art books, you can pick up Ping Pong at Tokyo Otaku Mode online.

Recent Reading: The Flowers of Evil Vol 2

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This week we continue our review of The Flowers of Evil series, volume 2 in particular from Vertical. If you haven’t checked out the review of the first volume, you can see that here.

Volume 2 sticks close to the anime series if you watched it online via crunchyroll. The contract between Kasuga and Nakamura continues, only things get a little complicated since Saeki starts to play a more pivotal role in the series. Saeki and Kasuga go out on a date and begin a relationship all while Kasuga is hiding his secret of the gym uniform from the first volume. Nakamura starts to interact more with Saeki as well playing the role of a potential instigator by telling Kasuga something about Saeki that may turn out to be a lie. In a way, Kasuga starts to develop a second life. His first being the book nerd student at school who is dating Saeki, one of the prettiest girls in school. The second life involves him sneaking around with Nakamura and keeping his secret buried. A secret that plants the seed of an inner struggle.

As the story progresses we can see more and more of the characters dynamics intertwine and how they are starting to develop for the rest of the series. We get more of an insight to the dynamic between Nakamura and Kasuga that begins to show deeper layers than just the contract that was agreed upon that I can only assume will get deeper as the story evolves. The relationship between Kasuga and Saeki is just starting to get underway and should start to be expanded on in future volumes.

Kasuga and Nakamura have their own inner struggles and we catch glimpses of each. Kasuga is torn on what type of person he is and the battle is played out over his choice of which female classmate he wants to be with. Nakamura feels trapped and suffocated in the countryside town the characters live in. This trapped feeling is something that Nakamura feeds to Kasuga and he starts to feel suffocated by the countryside.

The second volume closes on a notable scene with some great artwork. The scene is beautifully animated in the series and plays an interesting dynamic in the future of the story (at least it did in the anime series and assuming the manga and anime continue to parallel one another). The scene is important for more than just the beautiful artwork, in a way it solidifies Nakamura and Kasuga as a unit instead of two individuals.

We get more of an inside glimpse into the characters in volume 2 and each of the characters are becoming deeper, meaning we are allowed to see more of their character and what drives or frustrates them, and the few things that make them happy.

Recent Viewing: Kenshin (Live Action)

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When I was first getting into the anime scene in high school, Kenshin was one of the more well known titles to fans at the time. We didn’t have the abundance of streaming options and a few select titles were making their way to late night TV. I enjoyed Kenshin for the most part, but was never a really big fan of the series, admittedly.

Regardless, it was good news to hear that Japan was making a live action film. Some of my friends posted images of the film shoot and slowly but surely I was getting more and more excited for the film, even though I haven’t rewatched the anime in close to ten years at this point. I recall the second season being really good, but found myself forgetting some of the events in the first season.

When I was at A-kon earlier this summer, they had a screening but I missed out due to the lines for registration and pre-registration 🙁 So at this point I figured I wasn’t going to really get a chance to check it out. Then to my pleasant surprise, it was screened at this years SGMS. So how was it?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq4O1zHyJqo&w=560&h=315]

The story of Kenshin revolves around him being a top assassin during the war, but when the war is over, the age of the samurai is as well marking the start of the Meiji Era (I believe this is right, my Japanese history is a bit lacking). So Kenshin takes up a life of not killing, however, other wandering swordsman continue their search for the legendary assassin so they can have their crack at killing him.

The actors and actresses fit the characters well from what I recall, although some of the characters I didn’t remember (mostly some of the villains). Since I also haven’t seen the anime for a while, I wasn’t able to track how closely they followed the storyline (which is a completely different situation than my viewing of Gantz, which will be up next week). So The I wasn’t relegated to knit-picking the story progression to the manga or anime.

I was really thankful for that, because I enjoyed the film since I some of the characters and story seemed new to me. There were a few kinda awkward moments in the film that took it down a notch for me. Mostly there was a pretty harsh cut in the film in the latter portion that  took me out of the film. I didn’t feel like they had to do such a harsh cut, they could have added in another scene or something to help smooth out the transition, or at least some dialogue. That was mostly the only issue I felt in terms of editing. The other moments were a couple lines of dialogue and weird moments of silence, even though I could see those being winks to the anime or manga.

I would be interested to hear what Kenshin fans thought of the film. I talked to one of my friends and she thought the film was really good, so it seems for fans it is a worthwhile film. The film has done well enough that a sequel is in the works as well. I must admit I am pretty excited for this because the second season of the anime was awesome and featured one of my favorite villains in my early anime years.

Animating Real Life

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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.

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

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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.
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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.

Japan Adventure Day 13

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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

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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).

Japan Adventure Day 9

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Today was our final day in japan with the group 🙁 I had a great time getting to know some fellow travelers and had so much fun over the previous week or so of adventure. The majority of the group was flying back to the States and a few of us were staying in Japan and going our separate ways.

For the last few days there was a handful of us talking about going to the fish market for sushi breakfast. Admittedly, some of us had too much fun at the beer garden so morning came a bit too soon but never-the-less a small group of 4 including myself made our way to the market.

We had options of breakfast sushi platters so i went with the variety platter that included, eel, salmon, sea urchin and many more. At the end of breakfast, our guide had suggested we try one more type of sushi. I am not sure what it was called but it was a slightly seared piece of fatty tuna. It was seriously the most delicious thing I had ever eaten, hands down. Nothing has ever come close to that.

After we made our way back to the hotel we waited for a few other travelers before we hit up a couple areas. In the meantime we wandered a nearby temple and took some interesting pictures.

Around lunchtime we made our way to a mall that I was itching to go to since I started planning my trip. The reason I wanted to go, was to score myself some anime cels. The mall we went to was 4 stories tall, and covered a lot of ground. As we got to higher floors we started finding nothing but toy stores. So naturally I bought some more gachapon figures.

While roaming around looking for the cel shop, we discovered a small art gallery that focused on Rurouni Kenshin, featuring cels, figures and more. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside so I was only able to get one off the wall.

As I continued to look for the cel shop, I finally broke down and called the guide for directions. I was able to get a vicinity to the shop and I found several cels to my liking 🙂 My objectives of the trip were almost complete.

We decided to stop by in harajuku again and we showed a couple travelers where the Neon Genesis Evangelion store was at. To our surpass, they had a lot of new content in the store from when we were there a little over a week ago. I was eyeing an Asuka figure earlier in the trip but they were now all sold out. I picked up a couple more art books and we were on our way back to the hotel.

By this point the other travelers were nearing their departure time. We hung out and swapped information with some of the travelers and watched as they boarded the shuttle bus and headed to the nearest station. It was now just me and my friend in Tokyo and neither of us speaks japanese. We went out for some eats at a chain place called Yoshinoya, which has some awesome beef bowls and went to bed early that night. We had a long day with the short amount of sleep and tomorrow we were starting a new challenge, Mt Fuji. Stay Tuned!


*(First image is my variety sushi platter for breakfast, the second is of lanterns at the nearby shrine, third is the wall outside of the Kenshin gallery showing and the final image is one of thousands of glass cases filled with toys at the mall.)

Japan Adventure Day 7

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Day 7 was another travel day. We were leaving the countryside from our 3 day retreat of relaxing at the ryokan and enjoying the onsen and heading back to Tokyo. I had such a great time at the coastline that I decided that I was going to wake up and catch the first train back to the coastline and was going to meet up with the group at a train station outside of Tokyo. I wanted to explore and hike more for a few hours since there was such a large area and we were only there for a couple hours. I fell in love with that countryside over the course of 3 days.

The first train of the day started at around 5AM in the morning so I got up early and snuck out of the ryokan ninja style and made my way to the train station. The trains had a brief stop at another station where I was suppose to get off but failed to. So I had to take the train again and only lost a little bit of time before I made it down to the coast.

I was able to hike around the area for a few hours, it was very calm with almost no other travelers or hikers around. I did see a lot of fast and small bugs on a trail but I didn’t get a chance to take a picture to find out what they were.  That morning was a little wet and rainy, one of the few days it rained while we were there.

After I got my hiking in, I made my way back to the train station and met up with the group several stops down the line. Some of them were pretty surprised I woke up so early to go out hiking. As the train made its way closer to Tokyo, the rain started to subside and the sun started to peek through the clouds and shine.

Our first destination was to head to Odaiba. Odaiba was having a giant fireworks display that night, but Comiket was also going on. Comiket is a super huge comic convention. So needless to say there were thousands and thousands of people in the area and everywhere was extremely packed with people. We worked our way through the crowds at a mall and went shopping at the Shonen Jump store. I was hoping to score some Dragonball Z stuff, but it was mostly relegated to just some manga. The store was packed with One Piece and Naruto stuff.

Post-Shonen Jump store, a couple of us made our way to the Gundam Plaza to see the RX-78 gundam. Who doesn’t like giant robots? The Gundam activated and did its thing, after that it was on to an arcade. I played a few crane games and won myself some Pokemon from the machine. I am a sucker for toys that look cool, such as an Axew. Unfortunately, I ran out of 100 Yen coins and someone won 2 toys that I got close to winning from the machine. It’s all good though, they went to 2 little kids that were pretty stoked to get a toy that day. i think my favorite aspect of the arcades is that the crane games are completely winnable, lots of us won toys from machines. When you win at a machine people working at the arcades will announce it over the speakers in the arcade so others know that people are winning and on what machine.

After the arcade we grabbed some eats and headed to our tarp for fireworks. The fireworks display was solid and lasted well over an hour. The trains were packed leaving Odaiba.

As we approached our hotel again, some of us decided to sing some karaoke. We went to a karaoke bar and got a room that fit all 14 of us in and we proceeded to drink, sing and have a great time. Next weeks Japan adventure day is one of the sole reasons I went to Japan, stay tuned 😀

*(first image is of the sunrise outside of the ryokan, second is an image of the rainy day from my seat on the train, the third is a cool building I saw on the way to the coastline, the fourth is the Shonen Jump store and how packed it was that day, fifth is the Gundam Front, finally is the crowd that was there for fireworks that night).