After a Sat­ur­day spent watch­ing the new Three King­doms, one of the top rea­sons to eagerly await the com­ing of Sen­goku Basara II just paled in comparison…

What hap­pens when a Sen­goku gen­eral attacks you, once…

Ani­ma­tion can do a lot of beau­ti­ful things, and amongst them is the abil­ity to exag­ger­ate the most destruc­tive of bat­tles at low bud­get in order to dis­play the inhu­man power behind cer­tain GAR indi­vid­u­als. But when it comes to com­bat, I’d say that a well-produced high-budget live-action scene will trump its equiv­a­lent in anime, every time.

There’s just that fac­tor of a cer­tain sur­re­al­ism dis­con­nect in anime, you see? Read the rest of this entry »

Once again, no not the anime. Although I should check out the anime and make a com­par­i­son against this…

Peach Gar­den Oath (left to right): Liu Bei, Zhang Fei, Guan Yu

The new Romance of the Three King­doms live-action TV series pro­duced by main­land China began air­ing just a few days ago on May 2, 2010. Con­trary to my orig­i­nal expec­ta­tions, this series was not actu­ally pro­duced by CCTV, which might be the fun­da­men­tal cause on why I haven’t enjoyed it as much as the orig­i­nal 1994 adap­ta­tion. Read the rest of this entry »

In the art of enjoy­ing blog­ging, I stopped car­ing about how late I am on post­ing things. This is win­ter catchup project #3, as I need to pre­pare for the series finale com­ing next season.

Only the live-action can bring such bril­liant tears to Chiaki’s eyes

I still haven’t for­given them for the unbear­able dis­grace that Toei calls Saikano, but Nodame cer­tainly went a long way in rec­on­cil­ing my rela­tion­ship with Japan­ese Live Action. Sto­ry­board wise, both the live-action and the anime fol­lowed the same path, with a few dif­fer­ences in pre­sen­ta­tion that more or less can­celed each other out in its pros and cons. How­ever, it’s the per­for­mance of the actors, espe­cially Chi­aki (Hiroshi Tamaki)‘s face, that really made the live action shine over its anime coun­ter­part. It’s ironic in a way: usu­ally I’m jeal­ous over the facials anime pro­duce that sim­ply aren’t pos­si­ble in real life, this time it’s the anime that falls short of depict­ing Chiaki’s moods (pre­pare for incom­ing com­par­i­son pictospam).

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Actu­ally, they came out half a year ago. I just can’t believe I missed these trail­ers until now…

No soz, not the animu, but I would gladly trade my anime sea­son year to get my hands on this right here and now. I won­der if that makes me more of an otaku (in its orig­i­nal def­i­n­i­tion) or less…

There’s noth­ing that hypes me up quite as much as CCTV’s (Chi­nese Cen­tral Tele­vi­sion) new Romance of the Three King­doms TV series (actu­ally, I gave my house­mates a heart attack over this as I exploded over it upon cross­ing the thresh­old). Out of the Four Great Clas­si­cal Nov­els of Chi­nese Lit­er­a­ture, I con­sider Romance of the Three King­doms to be the best one by far. Explain­ing this involves me to go onto a mas­sive rant about polit­i­cal schem­ing, mil­i­tary tac­tics, and bat­tle­field badassery… but I can say right now, no West­ern story I’ve seen or heard of to date could match up my expec­ta­tions to them since I’ve read/watched Three Kingdoms.

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