Unplanned Video Filler

Sorry guys but both my camera and my SD card are elsewhere as I type this so I have little recourse but to do a quicky video post.

Real posts to resume next week gang.




I'll start us off with this marvellous tribute to Super Mario Bros rendered through Japanese puppetry. With roots in bunraku,a style of puppet theatre, modenr Japanese puppetry probably provides the most spectacular special effects that can actually be done on a stage. Recreating something as abstract and cartoony as the world of Super Mario in real life is an amazing artistic achievement.

Funny as hell too.





Excel Saga is a "Quack Experimental Anime." Basically a surreal comedy series that satirises anime tropes and in which anything can happen. The series is loosely about the ideological organisation ACROSS, a severely understaffed super villain outfit that aims to eventually conquer the world but for now is focused on just conquering F city F prefecture. the staff consists of Excel, a hyper-fast talking, energetic but hopeless idiot and Hyatt, a naive alien girl who dies every episode (beating kenny to the punch by a few years). There's also a mad paedophile scientist, a poor doomed dog called menchi and many other hilarious characters.

The theme tune's lyrics were apparently written by the director on the train ride to the recording studio to record the theme and bear no relation to the plot whatsoever. Good sight gags though.



The end theme is rather brilliantly sung by Menchi.

The title of the song is "and so you are going to eat me."



In contrast to Menchi's eventual fate, to be eaten by Excel as an emergency food supply, Chi, the star of "Chi's Sweet Home" gets, well, a sweet home. This anime, about a stray cat adopted by a family and told from the cat's point of view is without question the cutest anime ever made and possibly the cutest thing on the planet.

I should note that the subtitles on this version are not especially good as they editorialise far too much to make the English seem more natural. However it is the only embeddable version of the song that I could find.

Better post on Saturday I promise.