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Anime DVD Reviews
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Anime Review by Carolyn Whu

The Melancholy of Haruhi SuzumiyaWhat do you do with a god that doesn't know that she is a god? You make sure she never gets bored with the current universe and wipe it clean out of existence with a brand spanking new fun universe.

Poor Kyon is the one that is stuck with the job of keeping the god entertained. The minute he decided that he is now a mature, logical, reasonable high schooler, all the things that he chose not to believe in showed up at school. Lovely, how they all just popped up: androids, time travelers, ESPers, and even his very own god. You know how all this loveliness began? Just like how most trouble begin for all guys: he opened his mouth and talked to a girl. Read More...

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

5 Centimeters Per Second
5 Centimeters Per Second
Anime DVD Review by Brian Cirulnick

5 Centimeters Per SecondHere's the only thing you need to know about this movie: Makoto Shinkai.

For those of you living under a rock for the past few years, Shinkai has pretty much been hailed as "the new Miyazaki" for his exceptional ability to craft an amazing story with compelling characters and infuse it with amazingly awesome artwork. His first film was a labor of love done almost entirely by himself (Voices of a Distant Star), which he then followed up with the critically acclaimed "The Place Promised in Our Early Days", both of which, if you haven't seen yet, you really, really, REALLY need to.
Read More...


Below: The trailer for 5 Centimeters Per Second.



Moonlight Mile
Moonlight Mile
Anime DVD Review by Brian Cirulnick

Moonlight MileSo, you think you're an Xtreme sports fanatic because you can do a few tricks with your skateboard? You've got nothing on Gorou Saruwatari and Jack "Lostman" Woodbridge, two mountain climbers who reach the summit of Mount Everest and then decide they want to go even higher... into space!

An international effort to mine Helium-3 on the moon and bring it back to Earth to use as a power source sounds more like something you'd read on the front page of Slashdot, and this near-future science fiction series packs a significant amount of real science and space realism into a guts and glory drama about two manly men and their dream to boldly go where no man has gone before. Read More...

Moonlight Mile

Dragonlance
Dragonlance
Anime DVD Review by Lawrence Sufrin

DragonlanceThe first novel in the celebrated Dragonlance fantasy series was written way back in 1984. It's about time the thing got to the screen. It took a combination of old fashioned cartoon animation and state-of-the-art computer graphics to bring this New York Times best-seller to your DVD player. Here is Dragons of the Autumn Twilight in all its glory.

Journey to a far-away time in the far-off land of Krynn. Here, the stuff they role-play in Dungeons and Dragons are amazingly real. Warrior elves live among the trees, and really hate it when humans show up. An evil god schemes to subjugate all life with her dragons, and dragon-like minions.
Read More...


Dragonlance
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The Orange Box
The Orange Box
Videogame Review by Brian Cirulnick

This was a triumph. I'm making a note here, HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Yes, dear reader, Orange Box may be the best bang for the videogame buck since Super Mario 64, because Portal is worth price alone, but Orange Box also has 4 other games! If you've even a passing interest in Half-Life, you want this disc.

The Orange BoxAnd Portal. Well, we could talk forever about Portal. It's simply the best new game mechanic to come along in quite a while. I won't bore you with the details. There are plenty of reviews out there already. All I'm going to say is that if you like videogames at all, YOU MUST PLAY THIS GAME!!!! The Anime.Com videogame testing lab has never had this much fun doing something that was actually legal. This may be the most "quoteable" videogame of all time, thanks to the spectacular sarcasm of GLaDOS.

Portal was impressive in every way, as well as deliriously disorienting. If you're prone to motion sickness, you may have a problem with some levels. Take some Dramamine and just keep on trying until you run out of cake. (The cake is a lie... The cake is a lie.)

The Orange Box

Ramune Japanese Soda
Japanese Food Review by Brian Cirulnick

At the New York Anime Festival, I had a chance to sample Ramune Soda, and I was intrigued by the bottle shape and the unusual way you need to open the bottle and drink it. The bottle has a thin neck which is sealed by a marble held in place by the pressure of the carbonation. To get to the beverage, you've got to open the bottle and then release the marble. It's refreshment, but it's also a challenging game. First-time drinkers might experience problems!

Ramune is one of the modern symbols of summer in Japan and is widely consumed during warm festival days and nights. Ramune is available in regular (lemon-lime) as well as pineapple, kiwifruit, melon, strawberry, orange, lychee, Blue Hawaii, peach, wasabi, bubble gum and curry. However, I think Amazon only carries two or three flavors. Nevertheless, definitely worth a try!
 Anime.com Recommended Books:
Translucent
Translucent
Manga Review
by Carolyn Whu

TranslucentSweetly affecting. Two words that my jaded self haven't seen in quite awhile, forget about feeling them. There are many mangas out these days that try to be visually or even story-wise spectacular or different or strange to get people to notice them and like them but they forget that what makes a manga truly special deep down is its affects. For a manga, truthfully anything, to reach a level of being special, it has to be able to affect you deep in your soul and you can cry with it, love with it, laugh with it. Read More...

Translucent

Gear School
Gear School
American Manga Review by Brian Cirulnick

Gear SchoolIt's "The Breakfast Club" meets "Macross". Humanity is already at war with a bug-like alien race. Our weapons of choice are three-story tall robots known within the military as "Gear". Only the best and the brightest are allowed to pilot these amazing machines, but the process of elimination begins as early as Junior High. Read More...

Gear School

Paradigm Shift
Paradigm Shift
American Manga Review by Lawrence Sufrin

Paradigm ShiftIt's not easy being a cop in the mean streets of Chicago. Under normal conditions, Detectives Kathryn McCallister and Michael Stuart have to deal with big time crooked scum. They're hot on the case of some low-life arms dealers. (One of them fired an Uzi at Kate.) Conditions are not normal. Horribly dismembered corpses are showing up in the streets. They look as though they were savaged by a wild animal. A wild animal? In Chicago? Is there a full moon out or something? Read More...

Upcoming Events and Cool Links:
Most people know about anime and manga, but a new wave of Japanese popular culture is just starting to hit the shores of the United States: the light novel. The light novel (literally "raito noberu" or "ranobe" for short) is similar to a young adult novel in the United States, but it also has a little twist: manga-style illustrations are littered throughout the books. Here are ten light novels that are worth knowing about from Manga expert Gia Manry:
Light Novels: Zero no Tsukaima (Zero's Familiar)
• Shinigami no Ballad (Ballad of a Death God)
• Kino no Tabi (Kino's Journey)
• R.O.D. Read Or Die
• Slayers
• Kyou Kara Maou! (Demon King From Now On!)
• Ghost Hunt/Akuryou Series
• Ookami to Koushinryou (Spice and Wolf)
• Shakugan no Shana (Shana of the Burning Eyes)
• Zero no Tsukaima (Zero's Familiar)
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

The below commercial for Tezuka's Black Jack stars Japanese comedian Miyuki Torii — I just love how she's talking to a cardboard cut out:



Takeji Nakagawa is a Japanese craftsman who makes his futuristic toys out of our types of wood: keyaki (a Japanese tree of the genus Zelkova), teak, walnut and white ash:

Takeji Nakagawa

And if you're looking for some screen decor check out our Anime.com Anime Wallpapers page:
Wallpapers




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