This week I’ve been trying to get some more new artwork done. Things are going slowly but surely. As much as I’d live to just jam on new pieces of work all day and all night, I still have to be careful. My wrist is still not what it used to be and I’ve had a few moments of discomfort recently. Certainly not to the extreme rage-educing levels of pain I was in a year ago, but troublesome all the same. So, during extended periods of working on some art with my digital tablet, I have to take a break every once and awhile.

Usually I fill up break time by playing video games. After neglecting it for awhile, the game that took up most of my time this week was The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. This is the first home console Zelda game I’ve ever gone out of my way to play. Yesterday I finally finished it. Though as it started to become apparent that I was coming towards the end, I took my sweet time with it and went through several of the side-quests. I was enjoying the game so much that I didn’t want it to end. Now that I am finished, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it truly is a beautiful, inspiring game with a fantastic story. I especially enjoyed how the concept of the wind was used as a practical gameplay device and as a storytelling tool woven into the tale both literally and meteorically.

I understand that you could probably take any given game in the Zelda franchise and talk about how great it is for hours on end, but I think it’s important to say this specifically in regard to The Winder Waker because the visual style is so different and controversial. Some people may have been upset when the game was first unveiled with its cartoonish style, but at the end of the day they really knocked it out of the park with this one.

I loved the story of this game so much that I could honestly see it as being a movie or a TV show or something like that. There was a Zelda cartoon years ago, but I found it obnoxious. Of course, Pokemon, Kirby, and F-Zero are big Nintendo franchises that have recently been animated, and Nintendo has a sweet deal going with 4Kids to bring those shows and any future Nintendo-based anime series to the international scene. One must wonder, though… Why no Zelda yet? Recently Nintendo has expressed interest in going into animated films. Could this mean that a Zelda movie is on the horizon? I would love to see that. I don’t care if it used either traditional animation or CG or both. A movie like that could be the huge event that finally puts animation over as a valid medium of expression in the eyes of the general public.

Until that highly hypothetical event happens, we’ve got another Zelda game coming up later this year for the GameCube. Not much is known about it yet except that the style is different than Wind Waker, but from graphics alone I can say that it looks freakin’ amazing. See the new trailer here. I waited a year after Wind Waker came out before I picked it up, but this one I might have to dive into right away. I’m really looking forward to it.

Sayonara.

Died not from wounds inflicted on the battlefield, but from Prostate Cancer.

I speak, of course, of Robot Chicken, the new series on the Cartoon Network Adult Swim block. It’s a comedy show co-created by Seth Green and completely animated using stop motion with toys and action figures. Each episode is about 12 minutes long and is made up of all sorts of various bits and sketches of various lengths. One of the longer sketches, and the one that everyone seems to be talking about, is the Transformers parody where Optimus Prime is diagnosed with prostate cancer and dies.

Originally I wasn’t going to go out of my way to watch this, but after seeing some screen shots and hearing so much buzz around it after it had aired, I decided that I had to see what all the fuss was about and found a way to download it. Now that I have seen it, I have to admit that I did chuckle a bit. It was pretty well done, and as far as being a Transformers parody goes, the people responsible really seemed to know their stuff. It was a real Transformers parody and not just some vauge reference to the concept of Transformers. Some of the figures they used were actually highly customized to get different characters on the show. The voice acting was pretty close to the original Generation 1 cast, but the real gag came from seeing the Autobots in situations you’d never see them in, like in the showers after winning a battle, and Optimus Prime at the doctors office.

News of Prime’s death has been spreading, and even the National Prostate Cancer Coalition has issued a press release, both in the spirit of fun and to seriously raise awareness of this disease. So perhaps some good may come out of this silly cartoon.

Other, less moralistic skits involved swearing Pokemon, a smoking Teletubby, crude and violent TV show bloopers, and “The World’s Most One Sided Fistfights Caught on Film“. Some are funny, some are lame, but for the most part the show isn’t a complete waste of time. The humor is obviously not for everyone, and it’s certainly not for children, but it’s worth checking out.

Geeze, never thought I’d ever have to type the word “Prostate” so many times. Rather not have to do that again.

Sayonara.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, and I’ve got nothing else to write about now, so here are some of the shows that I’ve seen recently.

Air: A traveling puppeteer who seems to use magic takes his act to a town and is immediately surrounded by several very strange girls. Sounds like a crazy show, but it’s actually a very serious character study. I can’t put my finger on why, but after sampling a few episodes I got really interested in seeing how the story will turn out. Very nice animation with vivid colours too. I’ll recommend it for those looking for something different than a typical action series.

Major: A baseball anime. I’m not very interested in baseball, but I gave this show a shot and I find it very engaging. Like most sports anime, it’s not really about the topic at hand, but about the characters and what they go through. An aging and injured pitcher, left with his 5 year old son after his wife passed away, attempts to grab hold of the few remaining strands of his career by making a comeback… as a batter! Like most sports anime, this one piles the drama on very thickly, and does a damn good job of it too.

Black Jack: Some time ago I talked about watching the Black Jack special “4 Miracles of Life” episodes, and mentioned how there was going to be a new ongoing series. This series has easily become one of my most favorite anime shows of all time. Each episode presents a new situation in which Black Jack is creatively weaved into the story to use his amazing surgical abilities. Some episodes are real tearjerkers!

Mahoraba Heartful Days: I could tell you how this show is about a young guy who has left home and moved to the city to go to a special school for artists, and maybe that would sound interesting. But after watching the first episode I discovered that the aforementioned young guy has the hots for the girl who runs the building he’s living in. Oh, and she’s his cousin. Now, granted, the cousin is pretty cute, and perhaps the specifics of the situation may not be culturally taboo in this case, but I thought it was kind of creepy so I’m not watching anymore. Just say no, dude. Just say no.

Mahou Sensei Negima: A little boy is a teacher at an all girls school. Oh, and he also knows magic. For a show with so many girls, I was surprisingly bored while watching this.

Ultimate Girls: By the title, I thought that this was going to be some inane series about materialistic girls who go shopping and talk about their school lives while eating sweets. I was seriously wrong. This show is an Ultraman parody. It’s probably only funny if you know anything about Ultraman, but I do so I thought it was hilarious. A giant hero called “UFO Man” accidently steps on 3 girls while fighting a monster who looks like a vinyl collectable toy. He uses a portion of his powers to bring them back to life so that they may fight in his place. There’s tons and tons of fanservice. In fact, the whole show is just a hollow spectacle of fanservice and various transforming super hero jokes with a perverted edge. So, needless to say, I love it!

I’ve got a big pile of other shows to talk about, and even more that I haven’t gotten around to watching yet, but this will do for now.

Sayonara.

So, if you haven’t heard by now, Naruto, the ninja themed anime about the Nine-tailed fox demon, has been licensed for distribution in North America. This is big news. Naruto is one of the biggest franchises in Japan right now. The manga has been available for quite some time and is very popular, and a sizable fan base of die hards has already been established through the Internet via Bittorrent downloads. Any fool can see the money dripping off of this show. It has the potential to be the next Dragonball Z. But, of course, to the typical elitist anime fan on the Internet, this is not good news. It didn’t take long for the whole “OMG! They’re going to ruin it!” nonsense to start up. Why? Because they’re going to have to make edits to the show’s content in order to conform to broadcast standards. Geeze, aren’t we past this yet? Who cares? Does it really make that much of a difference? Besides, unedited DVDs will come out eventually. I’m sure much of the backlash has to do with people not being able to easily download episodes for free off the Internet anymore. I think that’s disgusting. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. If you’re a fan, then you should pay. It’s only fair.

Personally, I think the bigger story in the world of animation isn’t the international processing of Naruto, but the potential desecration of the Looney Tunes through this new project, Loonatics. They’re taking these classic characters and making them the basis for a completely unrecognizable, edgy, “extreme” sci-fi show out of them. I’m sorry, but no amount of editing to a Japanese show to make it palatable for an English speaking audience can possibly be as bad as pillaging the Looney Tunes, who are cultural icons that have been with us for half a century. But this is Warner Bros. we’re talking about, and they have proven that they are more than willing to ignore or even rewrite their own history in order to force feed the masses what they think should be popular. Then again, it’s too early to condemn the show outright, and it could end up being good. We’ll see. But the people responsible are working inside of an important and legendary universe of characters, and thus have an awful lot to live up to. I hope that they can see and respect that instead of just picking the bones of a franchise they’ve allowed to flounder in a vain attempt at cashing in.

Sayonara.

Yep.

Sayonara.