Well … it’s about time. After a lot of fussing about and hard work (and tearing my hair out because things were taking too long), Animated Meanderings is finally back up and running in its new home.

As you can see, we have an entirely new theme going – looking, in my personal opinion, a lot better than it used to. Of course, with a big move like this there are bound to be some teething pains – with any luck I’ve managed to do what’s needed to avoid most of them – but there might still be a broken link or two – if you find one, contact me and let me know. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve got to hand it to the Japanese. Nothing seems to be beyond these guys.

There’s a whole history behind this, which I intend to cover at a later date. But basically -  we had a bunch of virtual characters stage a live concert. Using the voice/music synthesis software, Vocaloid, to sing their songs, the 4 Vocaloid characters appeared live, on stage, in front of a crowd of about 2,500 adoring fans on the 9th of March, 2010. The concert was intended – if I understand correctly – as a thank you to the Vocaloid community; hence the date on which it happened (3/9 can be pronounced as sankyuu in Japanese – which is similar in pronunciation to “thank you”)

Read the rest of this entry »

All of those who know me, and those of you who have been following Animated Meanderings for any length of time should be familiar with my extended love affair for those anime series derived from Key’s games. These are, of course, Kanon, Air, and more recently Clannad, of which I did a review in the not too distant past.

So, finally, I managed to get my paws on Clannad ~After Story~, and this managed to sit for my shelf for quite a length of time before I finally got around to watching it. You might find this odd, but I was actually scared to watch it. One of the reasons is that it would finally bring to a close a much loved series, and the other, more significant reason is the fact that I knew what was coming. Read the rest of this entry »

After five weeks of running voting, the community at Animemusicvideos.org have announced the winners of the 2010 Viewers’ Choice Awards. I haven’t been following the competition as closely as I would have liked to, but I daresay there were one or two surprises in the results.

Or maybe I’m the only one that thinks so?

Anyways, without further ado – the winners, by category, of the 2010 VCA: Read the rest of this entry »

The 2010 Viewers’ Choice Awards has finished its initial round of voting, and has moved into the semi-final phase, with all the videos that passed the first stage competing to move into the third and final round of voting. The second round of voting lasts until the 29th of January, at which point it will move into the final round of voting.

I would love to post all the nominees, but the list is just much too long – so you’ll have to visit the site and go to this page – where all the nominees are available.

Have fun voting! If you plan to, of course.

It was with great joy that South African anime fans received the news that South Africa would be getting its own dedicated anime channel. The joy was short-lived however, and soon complaints surfaced regarding the endless reruns and repeats, the lack of new shows and the usual messed up episode orders.

Three months after the launch, I decided to comment on the state of Animax, and at the time, stated that I thought Animax still had some promise. Views swayed both ways though, with a lot of people having negative opinions about the channel and the direction it was moving in.

However, Animax made it through the first six months, and suddenly seemed to start getting things right. New shows started appearing, albeit at a slow pace … and when I say new I mean shows that the channel hasn’t been airing non-stop for 5 months. Nothing newer than 4 years old. In October 2008, I decided to revisit the topic.

Animax was still not living up to its promise.

And now, I’m starting to think people have given up. Animax seems to have lost the plot and turned into an MTV clone. A lot of reality TV shows have been added to the channel – not all bad, I’ll admit, but I’ll give a brief rundown:

Ninja Warriors

Ninja Warriors is a Japanese reality show, in which contestants have to compete in the obstacle course from hell in order to be crowned Ninja Warrior. And to complete the course, you’ll need ninja skills – at this point (we’re watching shows from 2007 at the moment), only one person has ever managed to finish all the stages.

Takeshi’s Castle

Another obstacle type scenario, but this one seems to be geared a lot more towards the contestants enjoying themselves. Takeshi’s Castle is good for a couple of laughs, and the commentary tends to be pretty witty as well, even though its being done in English.

That’s it for the good stuff – now lets move on to the sewage:

Next

Next is a dating game, American I might add, which features a bunch of guys and girls who think the world of themselves. It features one guy (or girl), and a bunch of members of the opposite sex who do nothing, as far as I can see, but humiliate themselves. And of course, trying to convince the viewer that they’re the shit.

As far as dating shows go, it’s probably one of the shallowest ones I’ve come across and not worth the time I actually spent watching it. Or writing this.

Bromance

No idea what this one is about. I’ve seen it advertised, but I’ve never seen it. However, it’s American, it’s reality TV, and once those two have been combined I don’t think I’m going to stress myself trying to find an actual time it’s playing at. Moving on.

Shipwrecked: Battle of the Islands

This one is a pointless little Survivor clone in which they took everything that made Survivor great, tossed it out the window and came up with their own little failure of a formula. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the point of these types of situations to challenge the contestants?

Instead, they get a new addition every so often and the two opposing teams square off and try and get the new sod to join their side. This includes getting the girls to wear nothing but bikini’s and flirt with the guy (if it’s a guy). And they get supplies dropped off from time to time. Sweet.

Sounds like the sort of desert island situation I’d like to be in. Who wants to get home if you get your food dropped off for free every week. Oh, and its British by the way. And crap.

Solitary

This show is actually vaguely interesting, but I got bored pretty quickly. A bunch of contestants are locked up in cubes by themselves and competed against each other in a bunch of tortuous events – the first one to give up is out of the game. Of course, they don’t see each other, so they have no idea when someone has given up.

Their only contact with the outside world is a semi-sadistic female computer voice who completely fails at her HAL 9000 impression. I may be interested if people start vanishing mysteriously. Also British.

Kenny vs Spenny

I haven’t watched this one. I don’t want to. The ads themselves were enough to put me off for life, and convinced me that Animax has finally lost the plot. Kenny and Spenny compete against each other and whoever loses need to perform an act of humiliation. It’s the lowest form of toilet humour, and could only possibly have any kind of following in the US. I hope. But it’s nothing more than a steaming pile of …. let’s not go there.

I shudder to think that people might actually find this entertaining. Once again, its a US program – and for the life of me I don’t see its relevance to the channel or target audience.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Shows like Bleach, Death Note and Black Lagoon have made it onto the list, but at the same time, we have Negima and Wolf’s Rain, which have been playing for two years, and .hack//Sign, which have been with us since the beginning. A brief foray into subtitled anime with a Japanese soundtrack didn’t last very long either.

The worst part is that the abovementioned reality shows take up prime-time slots. Yes, from 6pm to 11pm, the people who wanted the channel and who want to watch anime would be better off just sticking their heads in the toilet. It might be more entertaining too.

Right now, the channel has many more negatives than positives; for myself, I’d rather just go out and buy anime. It’s more expensive, yes, but I can watch it in the language of my choice, at the time of my choosing and I don’t get showered by crap every night.

I’m sorry Animax, but you’ve failed us. You probably won’t go away by yourselves. It’s sad. Hopefully, we’ll one day get a channel here that cares about its viewer base. But I won’t be switching to channel 126 again. Go away.

AnimeMusicVideos.org have kicked off the 2010 Viewers Choice Awards – with a few minor differences compared to last year. This year, any of the videos entered in the site during 2009 are automatically entered – after meeting a few basic requirements.

So by the looks of things there are going to be a lot of videos to be voting for.

The contest is currently in its nomination phase, which will last through until the 22nd of January. You need to be a registered member of the site to nominate – once logged in, head to the Nominations Page, and start nominating away.

As much as I would shamelessly like to self-promote myself, I’m not going to – not sure what kind of chance my little attempt has, but I’m hoping for some better results with my next one :).

I’ll try and keep everyone updated on the progress of the VCAs as they go along, but as a parting shot, I’ll leave you with last year’s AMV of the year – and also one of my personal favourites. Done by Nostromo, the video is named Auriga; music – DJ Spoke’s Watch Them Fall Down and the anime used … well, there’s a whole list of them, but I’ll name a few here – Shakugan  no Shana, Gunbuster 2, Starship Operators, The Third, Macross Frontier, Ef – The latter Tale, Sky Girls and Ah! My Goddess. To name a few.

I could go on and on about this AMV, but I’d rather just let you decide for yourselves. Enjoy!!

Now that I have managed to put my exams behind me, I’ve finally been able to devote some time to things I actually enjoy doing, such as my drawing. On the other side of things, I’ve also finally managed to upload my very first AMV. Unfortunately, I am unable to post the video here due to some issues regarding copyright on YouTube. So, I’m currently investigating other options. In the meantime, you can visit this link to  download it. Again, you’ll need to log in to be able to download it – but I’ll try and find hosting at some point which doesn’t require it. Sadly, I can’t host it on this domain as I’m limited by storage and bandwidth allowances.

The details of the video are as follows:

Anime: Kanon (2006)
Song: Deliver Me by Sarah Brightman
Format: Windows Media Video (.wmv)
Resolution: 720×480
Length/Size: 04:23/45MB

On to the fan-art section of the post – sticking with the Negima theme, I completed this pic below – my victim in this case being Kagurazaka Asuna. Once again, this is the version from Negima Neo – however, I’ve kept the heterochromia (the different eye colours) that she had in the original series.

Asuna, in this picture, is 15 years old – she’s headstrong, physically strong (abnormally so), kind, caring and, unfortunately for her, the dumbest person in her class. Only in academics though; Asuna is quite quick-witted and was the first to discover Negi’s secret. Shortly afterwards, while Negi was facing off against Evangeline, she became his first Pactio partner.

As a final note – this will most likely be my last post before Christmas. If it isn’t, this paragraph will of course mysteriously disappear – but until such time, I’d like to wish all of my readers and visitors Happy Holidays and a Merry Christmas. See you after the break.

After many months of delays, wonderings and that eternal terror referred to by students and teachers world-wide as exams, I finally managed to get some free time together to finish off another drawing.

The character pictured below is Miyazaki Nodoka (宮崎 のどか) from Mahou Sensei Negima! This isn’t the actual version as featured in Ken Akamatsu’s manga – rather, this is the version featured in the spin-off manga Negima!? Neo drawn by Fujima Takuya. There aren’t any major differences though, and personality wise Nodoka remains pretty much the same.

Nodoka remains one of my favourite characters for various reasons. Despite being almost painfully shy and – initially – scared of men, she is probably one of the smartest, gutsiest and most capable characters in the series. She also doesn’t seem to have a jealous bone in her body, since she supports Yue’s love for Negi, despite being in love with him herself.

Not sure if that’s good or bad actually, but whatever.

At the start of the series Nodoka is 14 years old, she loves reading and is one of the top ranked students at Mahora. Her birthday is on the 10th of May, her blood-type is O, and her pactio artifact (which she received when she made a pactio with Negi), as pictured below, is the Diarium Ejus, which gives her the ability to read people’s thoughts once she knows what their name is.

Nodoka Miyazaki – Negima Neo by ~stellar-illusions on deviantART

I’ve managed to scare up the next AMV I wanted to show you.

Now, if you believe for a second that the our Full Metal Panic! AMV in the previous post was high-energy, prepare to be surprised, because this one attains a new level of energy.

It’s fast, it’s pacy and above all it’s fun with a tune I can only call somewhat catchy. And worth watching more than once, certainly.

The video contains scenes from more than one anime – The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, Ouran High School Host Club and Lucky Star. The song used is The Game of Love (E=MC2 Mix) by Jenny Rom.

It has also managed to nab itself the following awards in various comps:

Best Editing @ Anime Boston 2008
Finalist @ Anime Central 2008
Best In Show @ Otafest 2008
Fan Favorite @ Otafest 2008
Best Editing @ Anime North 2008
Best Fun @ Viewers Choice Awards 2009 (thanks to Angelic_Mew for reminding me)

Now – should you like the AMV and decide to add it to your collection, as always you can rely on Anime Music Videos to be hosting the file – click here to visit the video page. Remember, you’ll need an active profile in order to download it. While I love the idea of hosting some AMVs myself, its beyond my means at present.

So, on to the video – hope you enjoy.