The Last of Sensei's 2012 Upgrade Thread: Mayan Doomsday!

[rosesleep]

What great additions! I am definitely lovin' your cel of Malta! The film, in general, is just a rare treat and a gorgeous film. It is like a combination of Pokemon and The Little Mermaid Again, great update!

[sensei]

Haven't been around in a while, but it's nice to see a quality update as one of the first threads I check.

Welcome back! I'm glad that you stopped by now and not during a thread when people were complaining about how all the good stuff has dried up. It is a tighter market than it was ten years ago, thankfully for my budget, but the watchful eye keeps turning up gems.

I am definitely lovin' your cel of Malta!

Thank you! (And Malta waves happily to her role model in your avatar!) I am looking for a moment to watch the DVD from start to finish. Certainly the online reviews of "Syrius/Sea Child" (98% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) are often quite impassioned. The early 80s was an exciting time for Japanese anime, and probably there ought to be more attention paid to some of the major projects.

I still remember wandering into "The Mouse and His Child" on the Disney channel by happenstance. (TM+HC was a 1977 Sanrio project, though directed, dubbed, and released in the US) I kept wondering over and over, "What is this?" and was not surprised decades later to find it was very early anime.

[sensei]

My long-awaited “May Madness” upgrade is finally up. (For relative newcomers, this has been an annual gallery event since 2004. The original “madness” was courtesy of the spectacular clearance sale held by AnimeChaos as the concern closed out its direct sale services and became the deputy service Shopping Mall Japan. But after that I found that if I took a break from browsing and buying during Lent, I could afford a somewhat splashier set of purchases after Easter.

Admittedly, a splurge on my modest income is probably spare change for many serious collectors. But even if the additions are not as high-impact as others, I get a lot of enjoyment in gathering the new additions and writing them up for my gallery. So I hope others come for the event, even if some of the series that I collect are not as widely followed as others.

Starting with the more familiar series...

Cardcaptor Sakura :
My special gallery devoted to The Fly Capture gets an especially important upgrade, thanks to my acquiring the entire genga set (and a copy of the timing sheet!) for this crucial cut. A good place to start is with my reanimation of the cut. (It’s a totally demented piece of animation, fully validating the name of the studio responsible, done 24-to-a-second for nearly all of its 9-second course.)

The CCS episode 01 gallery gets another nice addition:
Sakura reacting, first cautiously, then with curiosity and pleasure to Kero-chan’s suggestion that she try out using the new card she’s captured.

Other CCS sketch additions are worth a visit: A pretty portrait of Sakura in her school uniform, probably by the episode’s animation director, Masaru Kitao, subsequently character designer and chief animation director for Death Note.

The layouts that go with my Ep. 57 “elm leaf” cel of Syaoran and Sakura

Meilin as Maleficent in the famous Ep. 42 school play of “Sleeping Beauty.”

Tenshi ni Narumon OP sequence: adds genga sets of
The (apparent) villain Dispel and

the mad scientist Ruka/Lucca

TnN Ep. 26: adds a sketch set showing

Noelle happy with her angelic transformation and

a cel from shortly afterwards showing the angelic Mikael

Asatte no Houkou (“Living for the Day after Tomorrow”) gets a drift of new sketch sets, all from Episode 7 (one of my favorites). My favorite is
Poor Shōko being scolded by chef Karada for melting butter the wrong way.

Hyper Police :
a dynamic cel of “the other” Sakura in a tense bounty-hunting encounter.

Some of the strongest gallery upgrades concern some fairly obscure series that I collect.

Condition Green OVA, gets a monster upgrade, thanks to the courtesy of a European collector who was willing to take an offer. These include:

Bad Girl dueling with Keith Winter (wishlist!)

”Mr G” with a psychedelic squirrel (wishlist!)

Maeterlinck's Blue Bird also gets new cels, including two biggies:

a lovely OP cel of the sad-eyed Bird of Happiness and

a very scarce cel of the Aoitori-tachi’s most powerful helper, “The Light”
(CAUTION! THIS CEL COULD BE CONSIDERED ECCHI! yes, but wishlist!)

One or two of a Kind gets a Cutie Honey cel of
Honey Flash ready to rumble.

Slayers gets
a cute reanimation of a sketch set of Amelia and a friend.

Usagi-chan de Cue!! OVA gets a number of new cels, thanks to Soda’s gallery offer. My favorites are:

Koshka realizing that the risqué posing contest she's entered won’t be as much of a walkover for her as she’d initially thought

the innocent Mimika coming to terms with the intensity of Ms Prim-and-Proper Miku’s sexual fantasies and

Mikami getting the upper hand in a martial arts battle with Koshka
(CAUTION! 18-AND-OVER ONLY! CERTIFIABLY HENTAI FOR ABOVE-THE-BELT NUDITY! yes, yes, but wishlist!)

Finally, the “Quirky Gallery Tour,” an eccentric set of wormholes into little visited recesses of my gallery, has been renewed as Only You! A quirky Tour of Quirky Acquisitions, a celebration of items that I cherish for reasons that sometimes I can’t quite explain.

Come have a look! And enjoy spring!

[Macron one]

Excellent additions, Sensei!
That CCS genga set of The Fly getting captured is certainly the highlight of your update. Such an elaborate and visually striking scene!
I also love the little animated sequence from Slayers and that weird cel of a Mad Max style guy holding a pink squirrel.

[sensei]

Thanks for stopping by, M1! For a while I was sure I'd have to eat all those cupcakes and drink all that spiked punch by myself while huffing helium from the balloons and imitating Donald Duck.

Sensei slips the bunny girls and the rock band a couple dollars so they'll stick around for a couple more minutes.



Yes, I was only cautiously hopeful when I got the Fly Capture gengas, as the dealer flagged the set as incomplete and said there were 約30枚 ("about 30 in number") in the batch up for auction. (I counted 59 in all, including 27 of the set that I reanimated plus swooshies, Sakura's backside, etc.) The copy of the timing sheet (three pages full) was in itself worth the winning price. Certainly validates my instinct (which I see from my way-back records dates to May/June 2002, nearly ten years ago) to pull together the scattered cels from this cut into a little tribute to this totally demented animation sequence.

The Slayers sketches I've had for nearly 5 years, a set that got shuffled aside during the big move to Cephiro. I think they look happy not to have been forgotten forever. They're certainly happy to be free of several yards of celotape.

And thanks for having a look at "Mr G" aka "George Gardino" aka Gyolge Garedean aka several other efforts to back-render his name from katakana. I love the character design of both the commando and the little squirrel, and so this is a cel I'm quirkily ecstatic to have. I'm even tempted to pay up the cash to have my laser disks of Condition Green (which I got for 500 yen plus etc.) transferred to VCDs so I can have a look at this series in raw Japanese. It's allegedly "cheesy" (according to the one English review from someone who saw it) but that could be a plus in a lot of people's eyes.

[Quacker]

A fantastic update Sensei!!

Like Mac-1, your animated Card Captor genga of The Fly's capture is an absolute standout! I can only imagine how thrilled you were to have acquired it. Thank-you for taking the time & effort into re-animating & researching the various intricacies of this scene. Your other Card Captor additions are also quite note-worthy, especially the Meilin cel.

A close second favourite is the 'other Sakura' from Hyper Police, I have not seen 'Hyper Police' for quite some time now, but strangely seem to remember that scene (at least I think I do?).
Congratulations for all your latest acquisitions.

[tex-chan]

I'm not too late for the party, am I? *grabs a drink and listens to the rock band*

Love the May Madness update!! Some worthy and wonderful acquisitions, as always -- something that always makes me look forward to your May update. I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite out of them. The Fly sketches are amazing. I just love watching how fluid and gorgeous that animation is, over and over. And the sketches are amazingly detailed. All the CCS sketch additions are so lovely. Those eyes -- just: Wow!

Speaking of eyes ... The TNN sketch of Noelle and Yusuke is gorgeous. Such liquid, beautiful eyes. Stunning. And I love, love, love the set of Ruka with the test tube. It's too bad you didn't also get the little green critters that come out of the pink smoke. Would have been awesome to see a good sketch of those guys, since they go by so quickly onscreen.

I love the expression on Shoko's face in the featured Assate no Houkou sketch. So emotive and expressive. A perfect combination of "grown up" and "childlike" all in one image.

I might have to break down and say that the cel of Sakura from Hyper Police is my favorite from the update. I just love the intense expression on her face and how it juxtaposes with all the motion of her hair and tails. Stunning, stunning composition on that one. And the sketch is equally as gorgeous.

Love the Condition Green additions!! I've visited that story board several times, never failing to be amused by it and by your comments. It's wonderful to see such moving and dynamic cels from this show entering your collection, too. I know you had to be thrilled at getting them.

And the "Blue Bird" additions. Just ... wow. Also among my favorites in this update. The images are so simple, and I think this is where their beauty comes from. There's nothing "flashy" to distract us from the pureness of those images. I love the extremely expressive image of the Bluebird. And this is contrasted so beautifully by your addition of The Light, which is a strong and formidable image.

Love the Slayers reanimation. So cute and fun!!

I know nothing about Usagi-chan de Cue!!, but the cels you've added from it are wonderful, as well. I love the fight scene one. Perhaps "hentai" ... but dynamic and beautiful as a frozen moment in time.

Congrats on another wonderful update!!

[sensei]

Sensei starts sweeping up the discarded carrot stubs and broken guitar picks.

Thanks, Spoiler and Tex. It's a lot to look through, and I appreciate the time it takes. (And, yes, it takes time to scan and prepare an update like this, which is why I was glad to get half the material before Lent started so I had the extra time to research and annotate.)

Hyper Police is one of those anime series that's like Forrest Gump's mother's box of chocolates. Some episodes are just OK, no better than they have to be. Which makes it all the more surprising when you come across one that is really very adventurous and more stylishly done than others. Ep. 3 (the one that my cel comes from) is one of the more eyecatching ones, so it's not surprising that it sticks in your memory, Quacker. Ep. 19 (There is No Tomorrow for the Cats?) is another unforgettable one, done by the same episode animation director (Takeyuki Yanase).

The overall plot has lots and lots of holes and broken threads, but, as one reviewer noted, somehow you find yourself really starting to care about the individual characters. Even poor sly Sakura, in her endlessly frustrated efforts to murder her bounty-hunter partner and so complete the ninth of her magical fox tails.

Thanks to Tex for the time and patience in looking through all the new stuff. (We saved you a half box of cupcakes and a carafe of coffee in case you find your way back to the entranceway.) Yes, I dearly wish that we could get even a half-decent version of Blue Bird in English, even a fansub. Even in the Italian dubbed version, it's quite watchable, well paced and with frequently surprising animation. (I always thought the 3D segments of the CCS Maze episode, where the characters are all walking in different orientations, was a wonderful invention. Then I found that it was inspired by Tyltyl and Mytyl exploring the fairy Berylune's castle, where up, down, and sideways are similarly variable concepts, not to mention size.) The design is simple -- but even so it always surprises the viewer. Why should the Queen of the Night have such huge square shoulders? Why is the doggone Bird of Happiness always look so sad? What happened to The Light's clothes?

Thanks too for being understanding about the ecchi/hentai stuff. I'm not drawn to that style in and of itself. But Usagi-chan de Cue!! has the advantage of having very good character design and animation direction. So I find myself looking not just at the panty shots and cleavage, but also at the way in which the cels often really do express a lot of frozen energy. Even the facial shots are often remarkably dynamic. (One of the directors was Yuji Moriyama, who also did CD/AD for many other more respectable series including Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, Urusei Yatsura, and (yes...) Gensomaden Saiyuki.

And thanks to everyone who looked in for a while!

Sensei leaves a little bowl of mint-flavored M&Ms and a pitcher of lemonade in the entryway in case someone else stops by.

[sensei]

An interesting Mandarake win came in enough time that I could add it as a singleton "just one more" to my "May Madness" update:

Jack Oshinumi and Puck from Yōsei-ō

It's typical of where my collecting interests have gone lately. While still committed to my longstanding interests in cel-based and CGI anime of the late 90s and the 2000s, I've become intrigued by the quirky and practically unknown anime series of the 70s and 80s. So I've found myself looking for cels from "golden age" anime such as Microid S and the fascinating Office Academy adaptation of Maeterlinck's Blue Bird.

Yōsei-ō (or "The Fairy King") is another such. It's a 1988 single-episode (60 minutes) OVA based on a late 70s manga by Ryōko Yamagishi (subsequently recipient of the Kōdansha Manga Award and the Tezuka Cultural Award Grand Prize for the works she did after this one.) The plot is a quirky take on Irish myths and fairy legends, in which a seemingly ordinary human enters Fairyland and becomes friends with the legendary hero Cúchulainn, as well as the sly shapeshifter Puck (familiar from Shakespeare but also referenced in many other medieval and renaissance British sources). Queen Mab and her dark elves make trouble, and so his plucky human ends up in a quest to save the fairy realm.

The character design was by Takuo Noda, a tireless animator who began in the early 70s with Tiger Mask and Microid S and, as of 2011 was still at work on the Madhouse X-Men adaptation. Sadly, neither the manga nor the OVA are available in English, even in fan-scans or fan-subs. But the image was a real browse-stopper, and certainly makes me wish even more strongly that we had better access to productions from this formative time period.

If anyone is coming to AnimeNEXT next month in the New Brunswick, NJ area, I'll be on a panel talking about "under the radar" anime like this. Meantime, there's this nice cel to ogle, the only one from this series available in an online gallery, so far as I know.

[rosesleep]

WOW, your description is well-detailed It's a beautiful piece!

[sensei]

Thank you, Rosesleep! Trust a folklorist to have a lot to say about an anime that is based on ancient Celtic myths and legends. One wonders what an ambitious Japanese studio might do with the great Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, the reading of which was one of the highlights of my misspent undergraduate days studying medieval literature. (I actually read the whole Beowulf poem in Old English and can still declaim part of it, banging on a tabletop to mark the rhythm!)

[sugarcels]

Pretty cel! I love retro anime/manga (I even have a blog about it!), so at some point I'm going to have to check out the OVA. Thanks for the heads up

[sensei]

Thank you, Sugar. I think it's a knock-out cel and a mind-opener when I did the hacking around necessary to see what I had acquired. The manga seem pretty regularly available on YHJ, and there are DVDs (Region 2) for the OVA still available for around 3500 JPY. It seems to have maintained a small but steady demand, I'd guess due to Yanagishi's meteoric rise in the manga world. I'm often really surprised that mangaka who are really big in North America (such as CLAMP) are actually not very highly reputed among Japanese manga critics, while a superstar like Yanagishi is both unknown and unavailable here.

I'd be interested in working through your blog to date. Pass on a url when you have a chance (I'm rushing to prepare for AnimeNext right now, so no hurry.)

[sensei]

Just in time for the tenth anniversary of my Rubberslug gallery, I've posted my 2012.03 upgrade, a miscellaneous bunch but indulging my old and new passions with some nice pieces.

First, be sure to visit my renewed “Quirky Tour,” now titled Return to the Past: A Quirky Tour of Sensei's Core Collection. That focused on the little collection (mostly but never exclusively CCS) that I’d put together between my very first cel purchase (15 July 2000) and the time I rolled out my Rubberslug gallery on 03 August 2002. I did some digging in old records to remind myself of when and where I got these early cels, and found myself thinking of how I developed my collector’s sense of taste during these first two years.

That aesthetic is still at work today, as you’ll see from the new uploads. Money is tighter and the exchange rate less favorable, so now I’m trying to make every new addition count. Long-time favorites have not been neglected, such as

Cardcaptor Sakura:

Ep. 66: A very dramatic cel of Sakura yanking back the curtain at the end of the Maze of Illusion to discover who's behind all those "Presence of Clow" tricks that have been played on her.
Ep. 69: A moody and peaceful set-up of Yamazaki and Chihiro put asleep by Eriol's magic

Rozen Maiden

Ep. 2: An impressive pan genga of Shinku at a tense moment of her battle with Hina-Ichigo (Watch out, Shinku, that giant piggy bank has got your back!)

Ep. 6: Shinku grabbed by the zombie doll arms Featured is a lovely rough that I think is by the episode’s animation director, Kimiko Tamai. She’s not a highly regarded animator at present, but I’ve found each of the roughs I’ve gotten from Eps 2 and 6 (both of which she directed) to be knockouts. I bet we hear more from her in future.

Ep. 6: Shinku extremely surprised that she is still alive Caution: spoiler in description. This too is a huge pan genga of one of the big turning points in the first half of the season’s story arc.

Tenshi ni Narumon

Ep. 6: from a famous scene at the end of this pivotal adventure, Noelle underwater and Natsumi nonplussed by her reaction (Thanks to reithejelly for being willing to let these lovelies go from her collection!)

A Tree of Palme

Five new cels, of which my favorites are

A bloodied Palme determined to carry out his mission in the underworld and a rare scene from the ferocious female warrior Koram’s childhood, showing herenergetically saving her father’s life. And don’t miss the cute little aguri a few seconds before the puppet Palme learns to kill like a real little boy.

The rest is a miscellany, but many of them are well worth a glance. Representing my “golden age” (pre-90s anime) interests are

Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird: The adventurers’ quirky helpers, Water, Bread, Fire, and Sugar, sharing a hilarious moment

Syrius no Densetsu/The Sea Prince and the Fire Child: Malta relieved and delighted when Syrius comes to her for a meeting

Other new attractions include

Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne: A repro cel of Fish Fin, Jeanne’s tiny angelic helper (Thanks again, rei!)

Gegege no Kitarō: Kitarō’s female sidekick Neko-Mesume transforming into her monstrous yōkai form

Condition Green OVA: Another cel of Mr G and the psychedelic squirrel (I adore this moment)

Finally, a few mysteries

From an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s sad children’s story, The Little Match Girl (But which version? And is it even anime? All I know is that frames from the same adaptation were used as part of a Japanese staged production of the tale, publicity photos of which I found online.

From an unknown anime or perhaps a game, a mysterious little warrior fighting a pack of wolves on a glacier

Suggestions on either of these two puzzles are greatly appreciated.

Meantime, enjoy! And stay cool during the rest of this summer.

[ReiTheJelly]

That squirrel-thing from Condition Green sure is cute!