Cartoon Roundup! Turning Red, Hilda, Vox Machina, NSP

 I’ve had to take a break from creative stuff for nearly a week because of the pain from an infected tooth, but it’s now being treated and will be yanked at the end of the month.  So to help me get back into my writing groove I thought I’d spit out some quick thoughts on some recent animations I’ve had a chance to watch.

Even before my recent bout with oral tragedies, I hadn’t been watching much of anything new, animated or otherwise.  Just wasn’t in that mood, I guess.  Lately I’ve much rather be listening to music or playing Don’t Starve with what free time I have, but I have managed to squeeze in some stuff here and there.

TURNING RED

Let me start off by saying that the idiots — and I mean IDIOTS — who were condemning this movie before they even saw it, or were so desperate for criticism that they resorted to its lack of mentioning 9/11 as a condemnation, deserve all the derision they got and so much more.  It’s okay to not like a movie, and there are all kinds of reasons why you may not.  But to attack it for such transparently dumb bullshit because you have some petty political agenda to push is pretty inexcusable.

But that aside, this turned out to be a thoroughly well-crafted and entertaining movie.  What I thought might be a simplistic furry take on the Hulk actually turned out to be a charming, moving, and very funny tale of generational trauma and the pains of growing up.  Meilin Lee, a 13-year-old girl in Toronto, finds out that at a certain age the females of her family gain the ability to turn back and forth into giant super-strong red pandas.  But before she can sign up for the Avengers, she also learns that the transformation is triggered by any strong emotion, very bad news indeed for a pubescent girl crushing on boys and fangirling over the pop band 4*TOWN.

This sets her on a collision course with her loving but overprotective and controlling mother Ming, who had issues with the panda herself.  The heart of the film is about mothers and daughters, and about Mei and Ming’s relationship in particular.  Both the ups and downs are handled well and believably even given the fantasy elements present.  The film is based heavily on director Domee Shi's’ own childhood in Toronto in 2002, and the verisimilitude that brings really shows.

Some people don’t like the film’s use of the CalArts style of character design, but that approach’s dynamic simplicity is put to good effect here especially for the humor and visual expressiveness of the characters.  I especially liked Mei’s group of surprisingly supportive and positive friends, and of course the doofy but quiet and capable dad.  All of them had a lot of their nuanced personalities conveyed through visuals as much as through the dialog.  The film’s climax at the concert also turned out to be surprisingly epic as well.  TURNING RED is definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet.

HILDA AND THE MOUNTAIN KING

And here we have another girl about the same age as Mei, but dealing with an even more traumatic involuntary transformation.  This movie is a capper to the first two seasons of the superlative HILDA series, and I think might have been intended as a series finale before the upcoming third season was approved.

The HILDA series follows the exploits of an eleven-year-old girl and self-proclaimed ‘adventurer.’ It’s set in a pastiche of the modern world and various elements of (loosely interpreted) scandinavian mythology, where dealing with trolls and elves and such can be an everyday occurence.

In the movie, Hilda wakes up in the body of a troll in the middle of troll homeland inside the mountain.  Suddenly able to talk and understand them, she learns a devastating secret hidden in her hometown of the human-inhabited Trollberg. She has to race to head off a potential war between the two races before disaster strikes while trying to find a way to turn back human as well.

This movie is an absolute banger and fires on all cylinders.  Story, character, animation, production, quality world-building, and more.  The only negative is that some parts of the story might be hard to follow for those who haven’t seen the series or read the books.  All of the secondary characters get a chance to shine as well, especially Johanna, Hilda’s mum, who we saw in the season 2 finale is not afraid to fight trolls head-on for her daughter, and shows equal courage and tenacity here in her quest to get Hilda back.  This is even more of a must-see than TURNING RED, especially if you’ve watched the series as well.

THE LEGEND OF VOX MACHINA

This is a 12-episode animated series on Amazon Prime based on a Critical Role campaign.  For those unaware, Critical Role is an online D&D group that livestreams their sessions.  Even though I love playing TTRPGs, I find watching other groups play deathly boring.  But since CR’s DM and players are composed of voice actors and the like, they can be fairly entertaining and have helped them become pretty popular.

This animated series began as a kickstarter.  They originally intended to raise enough to make a ten-minute animated short, but the kickstarter raised so much (like $12 Million) that they were able to turn it into a full-length season of half-hour shows.

I enjoyed the series a lot, but I will also admit that it can be a mixed bag.  On one hand, there are a lot of interesting characters and situations.  I especially like Percy the gun-wielding Warlock and the adorkable druid Kayleth.  It was also neat to see a lot of the elements in the game brought to life through narrative and visuals instead of dry game mechanics.  There are whole vids on Youtube that breaks down each episode into what spells/magic/skills/saving throws from the game are used when.

But the individual episodes were also very uneven.  The first two were kind of merely serviceable as introductions into the characters, and some character arcs in the latter Briarwood storyline were spotty and all over the place.  You can really see a stark contrast between looser RPG-generated stories here and actually tightly-crafted narratives in other fantasy series, such as say RISING OF THE SHIELD HERO.  RPG play is by necessity decentralized and chaotic while fictional storycrafting tends to be tightly focused and carefully constructed.  Transferring one to the other doesn’t always work well.  For example, the whole long sequence in one episode where the group deals with a room filling with acid could have been a fun and exciting encounter in a game, but as a narrative story element it mostly came across as dumb and unnecessary filler.

VOX MACHINA may be a worth a watch if you’re a fan of TTRPGs, D&D, or Critical Role.  But as a purely fantasy narrative on its own it’s merely okay and doesn’t reach the heights of other top-quality fantasy series that have come out in the last decade or so.  It is an enjoyable series but may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

NINJA SEX PARTY

I admit I’m late to the party — Ninja Sex Party, that is.  Even though this band’s been around for 10+ years, I only ran across them recently.  But better late than never.

NSP is a comedic rock group made of singer Dan Avidan and keyboardist Brian Wecht, whose stage alter-egos consist of Danny Sexbang, a doofy glam rocker, and Ninja Brian, a dour murdery ninja, respectively.  They’re also part of the group Starbomb, frequently collaborate with TWRP, and Dan is co-host of the Game Grumps let’s play channel.

Despite the group’s comedic bent, they create some seriously awesome music as well.  I’m talking about them here because in the last five years or so they have created some really outstanding animated music videos, all of which can be found on Youtube.

Probably their best both musically and animation-wise is STARLIGHT BRIGADE, which is a TWRP song they contributed to.  The song is great and the animation is no less than stunning.  There’s no other way to describe it other than simply epic.  That video did Star Wars better in four minutes than the last four Star Wars movies did in 10+ hours.

Other notable animated videos include but are not limited to THE MYSTIC CRYSTAL (an 11-minute rock opera whose animated sequences are done in the style of Don Bluth’s DRAGON LAIR,) 6969 (a fun claymation epic where they time-travel to the future to rescue sex — lol really,) and MANSION PARTY (which is pure hilarious chaos.)  Definitely worth a watch.

Animation Round-Up: Encanto, Space Dogs, and more!

 Been a while since I've done one of these. As some may already know, I am a big animation buff, and once in a while I give my thoughts on recent animation projects I may have seen. So here goes!

ENCANTO

The most recent animated feature offering from Disney, released to streaming right on Christmas Eve.

The family of a tragic matriarch in Columbia is blessed with magic, except for one granddaughter, Mirabel, who is just a normal human. Despite earning the disdain from a good portion of her family, Mirabel seems to be the one to save the family 'miracle' or may doom them all.

This movie is a pure delight. It an animated movie from Disney with songs by Lin Manuel Miranda. How could that go wrong? Visually, it's just stunning, with a bright and brilliant color palette, super-fluid quality animation, and lots of amazing visual designs and staging. In terms of sheer spectacle this is Disney animation at the top of its form.

Storywise it's also very strong, but maybe not at the level or emotional depth of say something like Coco or Wolfwalkers. I don't think it's designed to be, given how fluidly non-diegetic a lot of the singing and dancing numbers are. There's always a trade off with doing that. On one hand, it allows you to stage some amazing visual and audial spectacles that can wow the audience. On the other, doing so tends to lose a good portion of the verisimilitude, which can take away form a potential emotional impact. But I think it was tending more toward the lighter end of the emotional storytelling spectrum, and succeeds in still telling a compelling story. Definitely worth seeing.

And we don't talk about Bruno!

DOGS IN SPACE

A great little surprise that seemed to come out of nowhere from Netflix, this is a ten-episode comedy series about, well, Dogs in space. The backstory is that Earth is dying from environmental neglect, so scientists genetically modified a few hundred dogs to be human-like and sent them into space in a town-sized starship to explore and seek out a new home for Earth's creatures. The series focuses around the usual band of sad-sack misfits who must figure out how to work together as a crew on one of the explorer subcraft.

Do you like light scifi adventure, a new spin on the Star Trek formula, and lots and lots of dog-based puns? Then you'll like Dogs In Space. The humor is usually not belly-busting, but each episode did leave me smiling throughout. The characters are quirky and actually very likable, even the kind-of villains, and you do feel for them. Apparently all the dogs were pets at one point, and even after a few years on the ship they still very much love their human owners and miss them dearly. This leads to some poignant plot lines among the hijinx, particularly since they haven't heard from Earth in all that time. Here's hoping we see a second season, as this series definitely deserves to keep going.

STAR TREK PRODIGY

Speaking of a new spin on the Star Trek formula, we have this new animated half-hour Star Trek series aimed squarely at a younger crowd, airing on Nickelodeon. Teen-age prisoners from a diverse number of species are trapped on a slave colony in an unknown section of the galaxy. An opportunity for escape comes when they stumble upon the apparently abandoned Federation starship the USS Protostar buried in a cave. A harrowing chase ensues across light years as they're hunted by their former captors.

This is as major a departure from the usual Star Trek fare as Lower Decks was, but in a completely different way. In fact, in many ways, it feels more like a Star Wars animated series than a Star Trek show, but given the show's quality so far that's not a bad thing. In fact, the central premise seems to be, 'what if Star Wars characters discovered a Star Trek ship?' And it is interesting seeing that instead of a Federation crew chasing after a MacGuffin, the Federation actually IS the MacGuffin here, as the kids try to figure out this alien, ultra-tech ship while fleeing for their lives, with the vague promise of the Federation, out there somewhere, that may provide them with a safe haven.

Visually, it's very well done, with good but not spectacular digital animation. Some of the visual designs seem a little off, and the fluidity is a bit janky in some action scenes. But it's mostly a great series to look at.

Only five episodes are currently available, with the other five of the first season coming after the first of the year in 2022. Here's hoping it keeps up the quality, and doesn't fall into the abysmal storytelling traps that Star Trek Discovery did.

OLIVE THE OTHER REINDEER

I try to watch this once a year around Christmas time. It is one of the great underrated TV Christmas specials, based on a children's book by J. Otto Seibold and first premiering in 1999. The story is that Olive, a dog with a heart of gold (is there any other kind though, really?) mishears Santa say he needs 'all of' the other reindeer when one of his sleigh-pullers breaks a leg. So she's off on an odyssey to the North Pole to fill in and save Christmas.

This cartoon gushes with pure whimsy and charm. There's puns everywhere, with great humor with the noble Olive and her shyster penguin companion Martini, as they meet very colorful characters on the way to the North Pole and try to foil a comically villainous mailman. It's just great stuff. But what people most remember about this special is its visual style, with greatly abstracted character designs that look like the love children of Picasso and Dr. Seuss. But in a good way! It has some of the stiffness one would expect of computer animation from the late-90s, but the visual designs are so stylized that for the most part it works well for the story even today.

The special is available freely on Youtube the last I checked, and probably elsewhere. Hope you check it out!

Patreon A-Go-Go

 

It's been about a month, so I think it's safe for me to say that may Patreon Page is active again, with me posting stuff there fairly consistently. Check it out! My patron tiers are super cheap! Kind of like me! =p

https://www.patreon.com/paullucas

I'm super grateful for the patrons who have been supporting my work through the site all along regardless of whether I posted stuff there or not. All that art and writing I do that people seem to like is thanks in no small part to them. It's part of the reason why I want to give them some more exclusive content when I can.

My basic plan at the moment is that the Patreon Page will mostly be home to sketches and inked pics plus story excerpts from WIP, as well as some exclusive color pics that will premiere there first about a month before I do the same on mainstream sites like DeviantArt or Twitter. There will be exceptions of course, and I'll just play things by ear.

Thanks!

80s Magical-Girl-Apalooza!

So lately I got into this binge of watching 80s magic girl anime.

It's a sordid tale of insomnia, nostalgia, and dumb curiosity.  I made a habit of watching old Urusei Yatsura episodes (my fave anime comedy, btw) to help me fall asleep.  I noticed the guy who uploaded them on youtube had uploaded other old 80s anime episodes, so I gave them a try.  They turned out to be all magic girl series produced by Studio Pierrot, with a particular quartet (Creamy Mami, Persia, Magical Emi, and Pastel Yumi) considered to be the seminal series of that genre of the era.

I wasn't super into these (with one exception), so I've been using them to help fall asleep as well, and it often takes me several days to end up watching a full episode.  But still, they are interesting artifacts of their era, and they do have outstanding and imaginative episodes here and there.  And for the target audience, aka prepubescent kids, they'd be a fun watch. So I thought they might be interesting to quickly review for those who might be interested.

They all follow a basic template;  a girl around 10 or 12 years old stumbles upon magic creatures of some sort (fairies, kappa, floating magic sky boats,) helps them out, and is in turn granted magic powers for the duration of the series.  The usual caveat is that they have to keep their new abilities secret from everyone except their newly-acquired magical guides/companions.  These aren't latter-era magic girl shows, either.  instead of fighting evil or saving the world with their powers, they mostly use them to fulfill their own wishes as well as help out their friends and families in what is mostly light slice-of-life-with-magic stories.  There are, however, occasional full-on magical adventure stories involving pocket dimensions, monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural stuff.

In chronological order, the first is Creamy Mami (these shows do have longer names, like this one is actually called Creamy Mami the Magical Angel or Mahō no Tenshi Kurīmī Mami, but the abbreviated names are good enough for googling them.)  Creamy Mami is probably the most-out there and weird one of the lot.  Twelve year old Yuu helps out magic aliens driving around an invisible space ark called the Feather Star (no really,) so in return its leader/god of magic, a four-inch-tall pixie, grants her the ability to change back and forth  into an adult version of herself.  While transformed, she has various vaguely-defined magic powers, and is given two magic kittens as guides and companions.

Yuu in her new body stumbles onto a singing contest in which she uses magic to win, and becomes and instant overnight pop idol called Creamy Mami when it's televised.  So she has to live a double life while dealing with both home and school as well as being a media celebrity.

Creamy Mami was mostly good, but not great.  Yuu's family and friends as characters were either boring or idiots.  Meanwhile, Mami's managers and a rival singer working for them were much more interesting, but were rarely given the development they deserved.  This was also the most purely 80s of the shows, which any glance at the costumes and designs will clearly show.

Next up is Persia, The Magic Fairy.  Unfortunately, this is the worst of the lot.  It has a much more gonzo and comedic tone than the other shows, but the comedy often misses the mark.  The concept is really out there, too.  Persia is a jungle girl brought up in cringey stereotype Africa (yeah, I know it was 80s Japan, not exactly a beacon of progressive enlightenment, but those scenes are still very awkward to watch), complete with a pet lion and leopard-skin outfit.  She moves to Japan, has to adjust to modern life, trips over some Kappas, and ends up having to collect love energy or some such.  In return she's able to turn into an adult version of herself with whatever skills she wants when she changes.  If she wants to be a driver, for example, her transformed self will be an expert car driver.

Unfortunately, Persia as a show is too unfocused, with characters I never really cared about.  I only watched a handful of episodes before I moved on.

Which brings us to Magical Emi, which is by far the very best show talked about here, and the only one I found myself genuinely invested in.  Mai is a klutzy girl born into a family of struggling stage magicians.  One day she stumbles into a fairy in a magic mirror who, you guessed it, allows her to transform back and forth into a grown up version of herself with magic powers.  She uses her magic abilities to salvage her family's magic show, and becomes and overnight sensation with her astounding and spectacular magic 'tricks' no one can figure out.  Like Creamy Mami, she often has to balance her 'normal' life as a kid with her secret identity as superstar Magcial Emi.  But the real kicker with her character is that she wants to become the world's greatest stage magician, but with only her real skill and not magic powers.

Magical Emi honestly has it all.  Great writing, engaging characters, damn good animation, an intriguing set-up, and a three-dimensional main character with both believable flaws and an admirable goal.  Even the op is super-catchy and memorable.  The series has 39 episodes and a movie, but unfortunately I've only been able to find 22 episodes translated online.  I'm currently looking for the rest.

The last of the four is Pastel Yumi.  Like Creamy Mami, its good for what it is, but not great.  Yumi's family runs a flower shop, and upon going out of her way to save a dandelion, she is rewarded by two 'flower fairies' with a magic wand.  Unlike the others, she doesn't transform.  Yumi can use the wand to 'draw' anything she wants, which instantly poofs into reality.  The conjured object only lasts a short time, however, and she can't draw the same thing more than once.  This has some bizarre and potentially disturbing implications, as she can create not only living creatures, but exact duplicates of real people, but the show never really addresses that.

Yumi is mostly about slice-of-life-with-a-side-dish-of-magic stories, and isn't terribly exciting.  Some of the side characters are amusing, like Yumi's stuffy flower-hating neighbor, and her 'adventurer' grandpa, but there's rarely anything all that interesting going on.  Kind of just a so-so-entry.  But it is the show that so far has put me to sleep the fastest.  I've only seen about a dozen episodes of it so far.

It should also be mentioned that all four shows do form a loose kind of 'cinematic universe.'  As the various series went along, characters from previous shows would show up in the background here and there.  On a few episodes of Magical Emi, for example, you can occasionally see Creamy Mami posters and bus ads, and one time there was even a quick back-shot of Mami as Emi was running by.  There was also a few team-up specials between the various girls that Studio Pierrot produced in later years, but I've only read of them and haven't seen them yet.

And there you have it.  Who knew these old shows had so much to them?

Animation Round Up April 2019

Just some thoughts on animated stuff I've watched recently, for other cartoon-o-philes like myself who might be interested in what to or what not to watch

FRUITS BASKET 2019

I just finished watching the first episode of this as of this writing. This is a reboot of an early-2000s anime, considered very much a classic fantasy romcom of the medium, and am quite impressed so far. I don't know how it stacks up to the original show, as I only knew it by reputation, but this first episode was funny and interesting and filled with good characters, as well as having some beautiful looking animation and designs.

The story follows a hard-working, semi-homeless highschool girl Toru who gets taken in by a cursed family in a secluded manor house. Their 'dark' secret? They're all possessed by the animal spirits of the eastern Zodiac and, oh yeah, they transform into their animal forms when hugged by the opposite sex. And of course the ones Toru most closely interacts with are all handsome young guys, so I assume various goofy romantic hijinks will ensue in subsequent episodes a la Ranma 1/2. Definitely one I plan to keep watching.

NETFLIX ULTRAMAN

And kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum is Netflix's new Ultraman anime. Unfortunately, while this one looks like it had potential, it's a mess so far. It's based on the old Kaiju-fighting japanese superhero that dates all the way back to the late 60s, and has had a lot of various incarnations since. I do not like the cel-shaded computer animation here--it too often edges into the uncanny valley for the human characters, and the aliens and ultramen look stiff and unnatural when moving. The characters are bland, especially the Main Character who's a generic well-meaning doofus like a thousand other anime protagonists, and the villains are one-note and underdeveloped. But some of the action and fights are good, as are some alien and monster designs. I also have to give them props for trying and mostly succeeding in keep the aesthetic from the old show while updating enough so that it looks somewhat believable for 2019.

Plus in the original, Ultraman grew to 150' tall and fought rubbery kaiju, which when I watched the original as a kid was easily the coolest part of the show. Why is there none of that here? Might as well be watching japanese Iron Man where they replaced Tony Stark with the world's most boring teen-ager.

I believe this show is supposed to get at least three season. Maybe it will improve as it goes on, but for right now I'd say skip it.

LOVE, DEATH, & ROBOTS

This new animated anthology series on Netflix actually grew out of the creators' long-standing efforts to revive the Heavy Metal movies. But I guess there were various rights issues, so they ended up saying screw it and just created their own thing. There are 18 shorts in the series, many very reminiscent of Twilight Zone stories, and they vary wildly in quality and cleverness. Some were dumb and pointless (the god-awful 'Witness,' the werewolf soldier one, and the one non-animated one with the fridge.) But some are definitely worth a watch. The best, imho: Three Robots, The Secret War, Suits, Good Hunting, Zima Blue, and Lucky 13.

GATE

I'm late to the party on this one, as it first came out in 2015. but I just started watching this last week, and am a few episodes into season 2. It's about an interdimensional gate opening up in downtown Tokyo that leads to an honest-to-goodness D&D-esque fantasy world. A fantasy world army tries to invade and is beaten back, prompting Japan to send its own military through the Gate. From then on its modern soldiers vs medieval armies, dragons, wizards, and so on.

A neat premise with some equally neat and engaging characters, and so far it's been pretty fun. They concentrate mostly on a small cadre of soldiers and the various allies and struggles they have rather than on any of the big-picture stuff, which I think was the smart move. I do have some quibbles so far. I dislike that it's so Japanese Flag-Wavy (but then, being an American, I guess I shouldn't complain, given how dumbly over-patriotic some of our movies can get), that too many of the natives are depicted as dumb cannonfoddder, and that the modern military tech is too OP vs the fantasy armies (ie, it's boring if the good guys don't have real challenges). But so far it's been fun when it focuses on teh main characters, so I'll definitely keep watching.

MAGICAL ANGEL CREAMY MAMI

This may sound like a porno title, but it's actually one of the original magical girl anime series from the early 80s. I was re-watching some Urusei Yatsura (perhaps THE all-time classic anime romcom) on youtube when I noticed the user had also uploaded some episodes of this old series, so I started watching some. Basically a twelve-year old girl named Yuu helps out some magic aliens, and as a reward they give her a magic wand that can transform her back and forth into an adult version of herself. Through coincidence and vaguely-defined magic powers in her new form, she becomes an overnight pop idol singer called Creamy Mami. Most of the episodes I've seen so far are Yuu trying to lead her double life and keeping it all secret from everyone except her two mouthy magic kittens.

So yeah, this is basically a young-girl wish-fulfillment version of Shazam, only instead of becoming a superhero, she becomes a popstar, though she still uses her powers to occasionally help people out and combat various supernatural menaces like ghosts. This also has to be one of the most 80s shows I've ever seen. Just google some images from the show and you'll see instantly what I mean.

It's mostly okay. Not great, but not awful either, and is definitely more sophisticated than any American TV cartoon that was produced in the same era. It's hokey and goofy at times, but occasionally they do squeeze some interesting stories and character moments out of the premise, so it's just fun and entertaining enough to make me watch more, though at a pace of only one episode or two a week..

So that's about it for now. More to come sometime soon!

More Animations News!

They just had the ANNIE AWARDS, the animation industry's big honors. I'm very happy that SPIDERMAN: INTO THE SPIDERVERSE swept the movie awards and that HILDA won big in the TV department. It's nice to see quality productions that actually deserve all the recognition they can get get exactly that!

Other big news is that Disney announced two ZOOTOPIA theatrical sequels. It's unusual for an animated feature to have two follow-ups announced simultaneously like that. But then I guess Zootopia was a surprise monster hit and did break a billion dollars, so I guess Disney is confident they'll get a good return on their investment.

I wonder if they're going to do the interracial couple allegory thing with Judy and Nick, which I'm sure would have all the shipper fans the world over squealing with delight.. It seems like a natural place to go with it, but we'll see.

Right now I'm looking forward to the second season of THE DRAGON PRINCE dropping on the 15th. The first season was great stuff and I thought at the time that it was a shoe-in for best TV animation of last year, until HILDA and SHE-RA showed up. Here's hoping the second season is as good as the first!

The Best Animation I Saw In 2018

It's been a while since I posted anything, since I'm concentrating on getting writing projects caught up.  But I thought I should at least put something online to remind people that I am still alive.  So, touching on one of my passions, here's a list of the best animated stuff I saw in 2018 in no particular order.  These may not all be things that premiered in 2018, but that's when I saw them.  Plus, I have't seen everything animated that came out this year (yet), like Isle of Dogs and Into the Spider-Verse, so they won't be included here.

SONG OF THE SEA This originally came out in 2014, but I only saw it this year.  One of the top three truly classic animated works of the 2010s, along with contenders like the amazing COCO and WOLF CHILDREN.  By the same creator and crew who made THE SECRET OF KELLS, it draws heavily on Irish Folklore and Myth to tell the tale of two contentious Irish siblings.  If there is only one entry on this list that you see, it definitely has to be this one.

HILDA  A cozy but super-imaginative and fun adventure series that took me completely by surprise.  A brash young girl moves from the countryside to the city in a fantasy world, and finds the city offers just as much magical adventure as her former home.  The best tv/streaming animated work this year.

SHE-RA Speaking of surprises, this turned out to be another very pleasant one, better in every way than the original by far.  Especially solid here are all the prominent characters, the true stand-outs being protagonist Adora and her best-friend-turned-enemy Catra.  They didn't shy away from the emotional turmoil caused by the fallout of Adora's decision, and even in the midst of the fighting the two girls' conflicted feelings were still very apparent and made for some compelling viewing.  And screw the comicsgater haters who whined about this before seeing even a lick of footage because She-Ra didn't look like an 80s barbie doll.

CASTLEVANIA No one expects video game adaptations to be good, but this one managed to pull it off.  Great characters and great plot, with one heck of a climatic battle.

THE DRAGON PRINCE  From one of the writers who brought us Avatar: The Last Airbender is a great and very fun fantasy adventure set in an interesting new world.  Some criticisms of its stiff animation are valid, but the solid writing, creativity, and great characters more than make up for it.

YURU CAMP Cozy, relaxing, and very funny in places, I did not expect a slice-of-life series about a group of high school girls going cold-weather camping to be as watchable as it was.  It's very much like SWEETNESS AND LIGHTNING that it's one of those perfect things to watch when you want to unwind after a hard day.

STAR WARS REBELS  The series wrapped up with a crackerjack collection of final episodes.  The very best thing Star Wars on screen since the original trilogy.

AGGRETSUKO   Funny and true-to-life office comedy that just happens to star a death-metal-loving red panda.

MY HERO ACADEMIA In its third season, still a great, solid action anime about student super heroes.  Had my favorite single episode of the year, with All Might in his epic final battle against All For One.  United States of Smash!

And that's it I guess.  I may have missed one or two.  Here's hoping 2019 produces some equally great or even better animation!

Ending Orbital Vector

After much deliberation, I decided not to renew the Orbital Vector website I've had up for 13 years.

Most people reading this probably weren't even aware of it.  I hadn't updated it in 6 years, but just couldn't bring myself to put it out of its misery until now.

Orbitalvector.com was dedicated to presenting speculative science ideas in a layman-friendly way.  All in all, it eventually ended up with over 150 illustrated articles on everything from Dyson Spheres to Interstellar Drives to Plasma Guns and much more.

For most of its existence, the site's ads did cover most of its own operating costs.  Unfortunately, I personally could never earn enough back to compensate for all the time spent researching, writing, coding, and uploading the articles for the website, so I eventually had to stop.  And now I'm letting it go.  I do think it's very unfortunate, as I considered the site very fun and educational, even if it did mostly have a niche audience.

For those of you who did peruse the site in any capacity, thanks, I appreciated having you as an audience and enjoyed creating it and its contents for you.  The good news is that this will free up resources for me to put up an author's website.  And who knows, some of Orbital vector's content may end up on there eventually.

Thanks again!

-- PL

Thoughts About My Father

About ten days ago my father died. I wanted to hold off on writing any detailed thoughts until i was on a more even emotional keel and my family was through their initial mourning. Plus this account is mostly meant to be a fun space for fans, so I don't want to be too maudlin for too long.

The particulars are in the link below. He was 83, a husband, father, and grandfather. He and I butted heads a lot during my life. But as I myself grew older, I began seeing him less as a n avatar of stubborness and more as person and where e was coming from. He grew up during the depression, served overseas, and was very uncompromising about a lot of things, for good or ill.

He loved sports, and watching them on TV. He especially liked yelling at it whenever the Bills lost, which was a lot more often than he liked. he hunted and fished and played pinnochle with the neighbors and went to church every Sunday and loved his grandsons, my nephews, more than anything.

One thing followers of me here should know is that he was also a very big scifi and fantasy fan. He gave me my love of cartoons and animation. Well into adulthood, one thing he and I could always do together is sit and watch the classic Looney Tunes cartoons and others. when he wasn't watching sports, he watched scifi and science shows, and I guess I got that part of me from him too. So whenever you see me doing nerdy stuff on here and elsewhere, my books and artwork and games and other stuff, you probably have him at least partially to thank for it.

Okay, that will be it for now. Back to my regular stupidity with the next post.

http://www.observertoday.com/obituaries/2018/11/paul-j-luczkowiak/

The Ultimate Team-Up: Luke Cage and Zatoichi!

Teaming up for my entertainment, any way. = P

Had a bit of creative blockage lately, so I filled my downtime watching something new (Luke Cage Season 2) and something old and familiar (the Zatoichi film series) to maybe shake myself out of it.

Briefly, I very much enjoyed LUKE CAGE SEASON 2.  It had its flaws here and there--mostly it being too long by about 3 episodes and some bits and storylines being obvious filler.  But there was a lot to like.

Marvel to its credit has seemed to take the criticism to heart, and has been stepping up it's villain game in both the movies and its netflix shows.  Not all of them hit the mark (like Jessica's mom) but Luke Cage made Season 2 all about its villains and did a mostly outstanding job.  Alfre Woodard hit it out of the park with her portrayal of twisted crime boss Mariah, and we got some surprising and entertaining depth to other villains like Shades and Bushmaster, the latter of whom was a great new addition.

Mike Colter again did a great job as the title character.  Though he does have an arc, its not as well developed as the various villains' stories, but was still great in places.  Plus the episode with the Iron Fist team up was great fun, and I appreciated some of the nods to the old comics (particularly "Where's my money, honey?" which made me lol for real.)

ZATOICHI is a classic Japanese film series from the 60s and early 70s, about a wandering blind swordmaster in the late Edo period (early 1800s) in japan.  There were 20 odd films and a TV series.  There were a few sporadic modern remakes, but my heart for this series will always lie with the original.

Although this series is usually lumped together with the samurai flicks of the same period, Ichi ('Zato' refers to his titular profession, a masseur) is yakuza in his origins, and is forever on the lowest rung of japanese society of that era.  He often keeps the fact that he is a terrifyingly skillful swordsman under wraps, usually until some idiot mobsters run afoul of him and he ends up having to cut a fool or fifty.

ichi is played by the great Shintaro Katsu, who usually does a great job in balancing both the character's tragic, human side as well as his goofiness.  Ichi is noble in intention but often flawed in his actions, but is also not afraid to have a laugh at his own expense.

The series does have some flaws, but as a whole it has a lot of great action, good humor, and even some occasional compelling drama.  My favorites are the first two movies ("The Tale of Zatoichi" and "The Tale of Zatoichi Continues"), the seventh ("Zatoichi and the Chest Of Gold," which basically ends in a horror movie massacre in a dark mansion with Ichi as the 'monster'), and number seventeen ("Zatoichi Challenged") which probably has the very best fight of the series, a clip of which is below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=_Hvc1Ae-YCU

Most of the movies can be found on youtube, plus they're also on dvd and blue ray.  Well worth looking up and watching.

Exiles, Transformations, and Sexy Monster Girls coming up!

UPCOMING PROJECTS


First up is the dark fantasy novel HIPPOCAMPUS with co-author Phillip Velasquez.  Two SCUBA divers run afoul of a mysterious sea sorceress and face decades of slavery transformed into something decidedly non human.  The prose for this is finished, and we're just waiting on getting the cover together for it.

Also in the works is RIVER OF DREAMS, the seventh novel in the epic FANTASY ENVOY EROTICA series.  Tobias is joined in his voyage along the continent-spanning river by Drazat, a demented sot of a wizard, and Ezmi, a cynical halfling courtesan hired by Drazat as their traveling sex toy.  Only things take a dire turn as old adversaries rear their ugly reptilian heads...

I've been putting together collections/bundles of books lately, with one more coming: the MONSTER GIRL EROTICA SAMPLER PACK.  It will be a collection of four erotica novels to let a reader get a sampling from different such stories of mine.  It will include the first HOT GOBLIN GIRLS, the first HOT DINO GIRLS, HOT MARTIAN GIRLS, and 100 POTIONS, plus a new short story, "Unicorn Glade."  I published 'Unicorn Glade' online before, but the last time it was posted was over a decade ago, and this will be its first time officially 'published' in an actual book.

And I do plan on eventually collecting together all the 'exclusive' short stories from each collection in their own anthology, once enough of them accumulate to make that worthwhile.

Also coming up will be the anthologies WORLDS OF TRANSFORMATION, which will probably be two volumes.  All my collaborations with Phil Velasquez started off with me doing story commissions for him, and these will collect all those shorter works.

Before the end of the year, I also want to get to HOT GOBLIN GIRLS 5 and HOT DINO GIRLS 5, but I also want to do one or two original erotica works before I dive back into those series.  As things stand right now, that will either be HOT PIRATE GIRLS or PALOMA'S HOUSE, or both.

In between all that I want to finally put out paperback editions of THE SHATTERED SKY as well as all the collected books I've put out lately.

Down the line, I plan on eventually doing two sequels to ICE AGE HEAT.  I had wanted to continue things with that story, but was kind of stuck past a certain point.  But I worked through that now and am pretty confident I have enough for at least two more books.  I plan on being a WRITING BEAST for as long as I can sustain it, so hopefully I can get to that early next year.  But given reality, and especially how the real world has been fucking with me the past half year, I can't make any guarantees when any of this is going to get done, really.

Battling Bursitis This Week

 Blearg.  Over the weekend, I developed some tendonitis in my right knee, which swelled up the joint.  That would have been bad enough, but then I banged my swollen knee on the cane I've been using to hobble around, and bam, got hit by a bit of bursitis too.  I'll recover, obviously.  This isn't the first time I've been through something like this. But holey moley is this painful at times.  Even worse than the chest pains I had back in December, and that was from a 'minor' heart blockage.

Obviously, this means there are going to be more delays on things, at least until the pain quiets down enough so I can properly concentrate on things again.  But hopefully this clears up soon. 

New Updates 3/18

I am currently working heavily on a bunch of book- and writing-related projects. As such, I likely won't be able to update on Patreon, DA, or other sites for the next month or so as much as I have been doing, especially artwork. However, my Patreon patrons will still be able to get a bunch of sneak peaks at ongoing manuscripts and cover art in progress, plus I will still be doing sketches for fun just to unwind.

But on the plus side, it should mean more books more quickly from me, which I assume most people are contributing to my Patreon for in the first place. First up is AQUARIUM BLUES, then THE COLLECTED HOT DRAGON GIRLS Volume 2 with an exclusive short story, then the paperback of THE COLLECTED HOT DRAGON GIRLS Volume 1, all hopefully by the end of the month.

After that will be the first WORLDS OF TRANSFORMATION anthology, THE COLLECTED HOT GOBLIN GIRLS and the HOT ORC GIRLS collection. The latter will collect my Orc-themed erotica novels, including The Virgin Orc's First Kiss, Deep Delve, and Moonfire's Busty Curse. Both volumes will also feature an exclusive original short story.

Those short stories for the collected volumes will be available only to those books AND to my patrons on Patreon!

Later in the year, expect to see paperback versions of the collected volumes, plus brand new works like WORLD OF TRANSFORMATION VOLUME 2, HOT PIRATE GIRLS, PALOMA'S HOUSE, HOT GOBLIN GIRLS 5, and RIVER OF EXILES (Fantasy Envoy Volume 7.) So stay tuned!

Plus, follow me on Twitter! Just got back into it and am trying to build up my audience there.

@plucas1000