"The old season is dying, and the new season struggles to be born: now is the time of voting." I think that's what Antonio Gramsci wrote. At any rate our Summer season is over and we need to vote on what to watch during Fall and turn those vote results into a schedule. As usual, that means the schedule for this week is just a loose suggestion - we'll actually want to prioritize re-sampling shows as needed for voting, time for actually voting and schedule-building, and then use remaining time for e.g. sampling new shows from this season.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: We started with voting for a bit. Around 7:10 we went into re-sampling:
Attendance:
Notes: What we did and watched tonight:
Our Fall planning looked a bit like this:
We built our Fall schedule last weekend.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: We didn't intend to create a "righteous beatdown" theme with our samplers tonight, but it happened all the same.
Attendance:
Notes: We bailed on on My Gift Level 9999 maybe 1/3 of the way through. We had time for another sampler, so we pulled in Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Ohta. We bailed on that as well - it had one gag (be Teasing Master Takagi-san, but with less subtlety) and kept repeating it. After that we went to Slayers.
Guy is in town this weekend and said he might make it by showings.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: Steve mentioned that Gene had a lot more free time as of 2 weeks ago.
Guy was in town house-hunting. He was looking at putting in an offer on a place near his prior condo.
Attendance:
Notes: We bailed on The Abandoned Court Magician within just a couple minutes - it had the usual very bad writing of a party full of gratuitously-awful fools who kick out the (obviously correct, sensible, and powerful) member who'll be our protagonist. Maybe some of these shows get better after we're past that part, but we'll never know.
We had started late enough that we didn't get around to sampling Potion - we'll have to push that back to a later week. We did make it to The Fated Magical Princess: Who Made Me a Princess (CR).
Perfect Blue has left (local) theaters after a much longer run than you (or at least I) would have expected, and Infinity Castle is just barely holding on locally. But that's OK - it's freed up screens for the Chainsaw Man movie.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: Gnosia didn't make any sense. It's not that it was hard to understand, but that its premise and characters' actions couldn't withstand even casual examination.
Attendance:
Notes: I had forgotten we sampled Magical Princess last week, so we swapped A Wild Last Boss Appeared in its place.
After the break we were about an episode behind schedule and decided to sample Alma-chan Wants to Have a Family instead of Chitose in the Ramune Bottle.
Busy weekend - of course we all know this Friday is Halloween (and remote-only showings since I'll be busy giving out candy for the first few hours), but we also have Daylight Saving Time ending this Sunday. There aren't a ton of anime-related events this weekend, but next week is looking busier with anime expo chibi, Anime Pasadena, Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl screenings via Fathom Events, and the early release screenings of the Angel's Egg 4K restoration.
Events this weekend:
Notes: Alan thought he'd be showing up around halfway through showings after giving out Halloween candy. This year ended up a bit busier than usual (289 trick-or-treaters, with people coming by as late as 9:30), so Alan was occupied late enough that he never made it.
Attendance:
Notes: We bailed on Chitose-san is in the Ramune Bottle, not because it was double-length or because the last 20 of the 50 minutes was a live-action segment, but because we were just thoroughly done with it after less than 10 minutes. We fell back to Dad is a Hero, Mom is a Spirit, I'm a Reincarnator.
Kooza (someone Alan had met on the Anime World Order Discord) decided to try out our showings online.
I don't know if we can call this Veterans' Day weekend since Veterans' Day doesn't quite fall on a day that extends the weekend, but it seems likely a number of people will find a way to make an extended weekend. There's also a fair number of events this weekend.
Events this weekend:
anime expo chibi runs Friday November 7 - Sunday November 9 at the Ontario Convention Center. Tickets are around $42 for all 3 days, $32 for any 1 day. To help you decide if you're interested, the artist icons on the Artist Alley page link to pages for the artists, so you can see the sort of art likely to be on sale. The subpages in theExhibitors section mostly do something similar, except for the "18+ zone exhibitor and artist" listing.
As an aside, you can tell this convention is becoming more of its own event since SPJA decided it should have its own domain name instead of just being a small section of the general Anime Expo site. Or maybe it has its own organizers and they're just getting more influential in SPJA? I kind of hope that's the case - they seem to have much better on ideas on how to build and present their program guide.
Closer to our regular showings Anime Pasadena will be held at the Pasadena Convention Center Saturday November 8 - Sunday November 9. Their site does have a list of exhibitors and artists, but without links - I've been working on creating an Artist Alley list with links but haven't had time to finish. Admission is around $42 for a single day, or $58 for all 2 days - noticeably more expensive than ax chibi before looking at time and other costs of transportation.
On the other hand, Anime Pasadena is very close to our Saturday showings, and also near a couple theaters screening Chainsaw Man. I expect I'll try to hit Anime Pasadena for at least a few hours before Saturday showings.
Chainsaw Man - the Movie: Reze Arc is still in wide release through at least Thursday, November 13. If you happen to be coming from Anime Pasadena, there are subtitled screenings right across the street at the Regal Paseo.
If you're still in the Pasadena area but you don't want to spend quite as much to see it - maybe you hit a couple Artist Alleys too hard - the Regency Academy 6 on Colorado is only a mile away and has screenings which price out to less than $10 per ticket (including the convenience fee). These showings are dub-only - it's like a callback to the pre-DVD era of anime, when dubbed versions of anime were cheaper than subtitled.
Yasuomi Umetsu's anime film Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl has limited theatrical screenings via Fathom Events on Tuesday, November 11 (subtitled) and Thursday, November 13 (dubbed). The anime itself apparently has a runtime of 35 minutes ("Clockwork Girl" seems more like the first installment of a Virgin Punk series, like an OVA but with theatrical releases and much longer production timeframes). Theaters are listing a runtime about an hour longer than that, which is presumably covered by the theatrical-exclusive behind-the-scenes content with from the director and Studio Shaft.
The 4K restoration of Angel's Egg is getting early screenings on Wednesday, November 12 followed by still-fairly-limited screenings the following week - mainly just Wednesday 11/19 and Thursday 11/20, save for one specialty video store in Eagle Rock on Saturday 11/22.
Attendance:
Notes: Alan was having a bunch of trouble trying to remote into the machine which actually handles streaming the shows, but it turns out the problem was with the M1 Mac used to remote into the streaming machine; switching to the 2013-era Mac Pro solved the issue.
Attendance:
Notes: Tonight's comedy samplers had decent concepts, but would largely have been better as half-length episodes.
Anime events this weekend? Nah, let's go for rain instead. Maybe even some flood watches through Saturday night.
Oh, I guess our schedule is also in flux right around now. We finished some shows last weekend (Mynoghra; Murder Drones; and Milky Subway) and are finishing more this weekend (Witch Watch; Friday samplers; some show that must be about Elmer Fudd because it's about a Rascal and a Bunny; and My Hero Academia: Vigilantes) to make room for the back half of our season: Secrets of the Silent Witch, Kaiju No. 8 S2, and more Go Go Loser Ranger (which Hulu insists is actually just the continuation? conclusion? of season 1).
Events this weekend:
Chainsaw Man - the Movie: Reze Arc is still in wide release through at least Thursday, November 20. There are still 3D showings in some locations, as well (dub-only) screenings under $10 at the Regency Academy 6 on Colorado.
GKids has Miyazaki's last film (for now!) The Boy and the Heron screening in theaters November 15-18.
Crunchyroll is hosting a 1-night-only screening of Last Night to Login: OVERLORD 10th Anniversary Celebration (2025), which as I recall is mostly supposed to be a compilation of the first 7 or so episodes of season 1? Seems an odd choice for something to put in theaters, but maybe it'll turn out to be one of those compilation movies which have 5 minutes of new, very good-looking animation.
The 4K restoration of Angel's Egg has limited screenings Wednesday 11/19 and Thursday 11/20 at both 7 and 9 PM - take that, Fathom Events! (Showtimes are slightly different at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown LA, but are pretty consistent at other local theaters). If you miss those, there's one final theatrical screening Saturday 11/22 at 9:45 PM, hosted at Vidiots in Eagle Rock. As an aside, they're actually more of a video rental store (yes, some still exist), and searching their video rental catalog for "call: ANIME" returns 400+ results, most of which appear to be actual anime DVDs and Blu-rays.
Attendance:
Notes: The forecast for tomorrow calls for well over 2 inches of rain in Pasadena, after 1+ inches today. Arthur is planning to stay home, and Brian is going to base his decision based on how it sounds like the weather is throughout the day. We'll have to figure out if we want to attempt in-person showings at all this Saturday.
Wandance seemed unusual for a TV anime in a couple ways. One is that credits were displayed like in a movie: as a continuous scroll rather than a page of text (imposed over background animation images in either case). Another was the amount of music it credited that wasn't written for the show or intended as a collabortion, especially given one particular choice of music to use in the video: Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop), which is unusual for not so just for being included diegetically with the classic 1994 music video, but also for actually being analyzed by the main character in the context of his own situation and bringing up information unknown even to those of us who remember the era when that video first came out.
Attendance:
Rascal Does Not Dream of an Anime Club Being Caught Up On His Series, but it happens anyway this Friday. Also this Friday: Lupin steals the sampler slot, though we expect by next week he'll leave it (and the now-empty Rascal timeslot) for us to get in a few episodes of various shows right at the end of our season: TO BE HERO X; Urusei Yatsura (2024; aka the 2nd half of the UY remake from 2022); and Spice and Wolf: merchant meets the wise wolf. Meanwhile, our Saturdays are unchanged...for now.
Oh, I guess our schedule is also in flux right around now. We finished some shows last weekend (Mynoghra; Murder Drones; and Milky Subway) and are finishing more this weekend (Witch Watch; Friday samplers; some show that must be about Elmer Fudd because it's about a Rascal and a Bunny; and My Hero Academia: Vigilantes) to make room for the back half of our season: Secrets of the Silent Witch, Kaiju No. 8 S2, and more Go Go Loser Ranger (which Hulu insists is actually just the continuation? conclusion? of season 1).
Events this weekend:
Chainsaw Man - the Movie: Reze Arc is still in wide release through at least Thursday, November 27, but they're starting to thin out quite a bit - by Thanksgiving, it may be in fewer theaters than the still-running Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle (2025).
The 4K restoration of Angel's Egg has a final few very limited screenings on Saturday 11/22 and Monday 11/24 - Wednesday 11/26.
There's a whole bunch of (pre-) Black Friday sales going on. As time permits I'll try to link to some of the anime-relevant ones here and/or on the Discord.
Attendance:
Notes: We skipped Demon Lord 2099 because we were running behind schedule. We made it through A Ninja and an Assassin, then when we were just about to watch the conclusion of Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Clause Crunchyroll completely died on us. Well, it died on everyone apparently - it would load pages well enough, but when it tried to get episodes it couldn't even pull a list of them, which drove it to claim the show wasn't available in our territory. Arthur did a bit of digging only to find this was happening on basically every show for pretty much everyone trying to access Crunchyroll.
Crunchyroll's issues showed no sign of being resolved in a reasonable timeframe so we went looking for something else to slot into our remaining time. Based on Adam's suggest, we sampled The Amazing Digital Circus (YT), which appears to be about being isekai'd to some sort of Hell (specifically, one dressed up as an environment from the era of primitive CG).
Attendance:
Notes: The issues Crunchyroll had Friday night had been resolved, and it worked well as long as we streamed tonight. That was a good thing - although we had found alternate sources for our CR shows, we had forgotten to re-mux some files to have our preferred language and subtitle default settings, which meant Loser Ranger needed settings tweaked at the beginning of playback for each episode (fortunately, Slayers had been muxed correctly).
Our samplers were interesting, though had some issues. Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainness was fun but also seemed to be moving quickly, less in terms of moment-to-moment action and speech (as with Teekyu) than in terms of feeling like a lot of the connective tissue between events was just being skipped over: almost like we were missing transitions between some scenes. Plus-sized Misadventures in Love had much more solid pacing and didn't rely on as many recently-overused tropes, but the toxic office politics was a bit off-putting. It was a refreshing change to see a character who had emerged from a traumatic event with such overwhelming positivity that she could basically just power through all sort of internal and inter-pseronal nastiness. Finally, Forget that Night, Your Majesty had episodes so short they created their own pacing episodes: events weren't progressing too slowly on a minute-to-minute basis, but we hadn't reached the premise by the end of the first episode.