I was away for a week, and attended my brother's university graduation ceremony on Friday of last week. He's just as qualified as me, now, woo!
During last week, I also watched some anime and played some games...
Anime: Iczer One. This was more horrific than I'd expected but I enjoyed it. I couldn't stop halfway so I ended up watching this until 5am when I viewed it! It's got a great soundtrack by Watanabe Chuumei, and aside from being horror, it's also yuri-mecha, which is one of my favourite genres. That poor girl Nagisa, having so many terrible things happen to her and her family, all the while being staked by a crazy alien android who wants Nagisa to co-pilot a mecha because she's fallen in love with Nagisa. It's somehow quite funny if you look at it in a certain way.
It also looks very nice, very much the style of the time - the 1980s - styles you don't see too much of these days... doing a bit of research after watching the show and the interview extras, we found out that the director (Hirano Toshihiro) and animation director (Kakinouchi Narumi) are now married. In the DVD extras the director says the next thing he's like to work on would be a love story. (With monsters?) And so they next collaborated on Vampire Princess Miyu, which fits the bill perfectly. And is also a much more evolved series. Interesting to see what steps they took in leading to that series, though...
BTW much of the rest of the English-language internet will tell you that Watanabe Chuumei is called Watanabe Michiaki. He's definitely not! We've heard his name spoken in interviews! That's not the way you're supposed to read the kanji in his name...
(And he's definitely not the manga author of Violinist of Hameln; that's someone else who's actually called Watanabe Michiaki, with different kanji).
Watanabe Chuumei is definitely one of my all-time favourite anime soundtrack composers. Especially now I've been listening to a lot of his work recently on Kushida Akira albums... the various Super Sentai themes and Uchuu Keiji songs... I got this DVD mostly to see him in interview 20 years ago. He was really old 20 years ago! He's ancient now! ^_^;; (and he always looks so serious...)
