Subject: [MIT Anime] 8/31/2007: R.O.D, Origin movie, Riding Bean MIT Anime Club Showing #510 Friday 31 August 2007 Post-Activities-Midway Showing Note: this showing is in room 6-120 at 7:00PM 7:10 Read or Die OVA 1-3 (complete) 8:50 Intermission 9:20 Origin: Spirits of the Past movie 11:00 Short intermission 11:05 Riding Bean *********************************************************************** Contents: Membership Vericon VIII registration now open Pizza New Pizza Ordering Procedure Library Silence Programme ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Post-Activities-Midway Showing Welcome to new students and welcome back if you've been away for the summer. This week, we'll play a couple of favorite OVAs and a new movie. Our ongoing semester series will start next week with the first four episodes of Paradise Kiss, which will be followed half-way through the year with Kashimashi ~Girl Meets Girl~. On alternating Fridays, starting in two weeks, we'll be showing Pani Poni Dash! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Membership Is your club membership expiring this August? Renew now for uninterrupted member privileges. Or start a new membership for the term, the year, or a longer period. Ask for a form at the showing or print it in advance from our web site at: http://web.mit.edu/anime/register/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vericon VIII registration now open Vericon is a science-fiction, fantasy, gaming, and anime convention held annually at Harvard University. Pre-registration is now open for Vericon VIII, coming January 25-27, 2008. The program will be headlined by guest of honor Orson Scott Card, but a full anime showing track has also been confirmed. More information at: http://www.vericon.org/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Pizza We'll be using the same token-based pizza sales system we first tested last week: we'll sell tokens after the first episode of Read or Die (about 7:40) that you can exchange for slices during intermission. This week's pizza options are: $1.50 Plain cheese $2.00 Pepperoni $2.00 Grilled Chicken (this week's feature flavor) Future weeks will feature: - Buffalo Grilled Chicken - Hamburger - Bacon - Hawaiian (ham + pineapple) - Feta Cheese - Pastrami - Sausage - Grilled Chicken ----------------------------------------------------------------------- New Pizza Ordering Procedure To bring you a more reliable pizza experience, we're going to be taking orders using a new procedure. Instead of taking a poll on the blackboard and then selling slices for cash, we'll sell tokens early in the evening which can be exchanged for slices during intermission. If there are extra slices, we'll sell tokens for them at intermission, but advance orders will get priority. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Library The library is running as usual this week, and a new sampler DVD+RW is now available. For the best service, send your requests to anime-library@mit.edu by the day before the showing. This week's DVD+RW digisub sampler finishes off most of the series that were fansubbed from Japan's summer (July) season. As always these are not intended to be playable in stand-alone DVD players: they're intended for computers, like our CD-Rs, but have a higher capacity. This week's sampler will contain: Baccano* 1-2 Buzzer Beater (2007)* 1-2 Doujin Work 1-4* Mononoke* 1-2 Nanatsuiro Drops 1-2* Potemayo 1-2* Shiguri 1-2* Sky Girls TV 1-2* (Kenko Zenrakei Suieibu) Umisho 1-2* (Asterisks indicate whether the series is completely new this time around, or what's new is more episodes) You can request one of these DVD+RWs in the normal way, but since we need to burn them in advance, supplies will be limited for requests made at the last minute. The discs are counted separately from the other limits on borrowing, but you should only ever have one out at once (we won't keep old ones circulating, since we want to reuse the discs). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Silence The natural order in a showing is for the anime to make noise, and you to be quiet. If you disturb the natural order at our showing, you may find yourself being strangled by a mutant tree limb. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Programme 7:10 Read or Die OVA 1-3 (complete) Yomiko Readman (code name: "the Paper") is an obsessive bibliophile, to the point of having room for little else in her apartment. She spends her days as a substitute teacher, wears thick-rimmed glasses, and is often seen in a frumpy jacket. But don't be deceived by appearances: she's actually one of the most powerful agents of the British Library's special operations unit. That's because she's a "paper master", someone with the ability to bend paper to her will, using it as a weapon, a shield, a vehicle, or anything else the situation demands. Yomiko is lucky enough to score a rare book in a Tokyo store, only to have it almost stolen by what appears to be the resurrection of a 19th-century French entomologist riding a giant grasshopper. This turns out to be part of a worldwide conspiracy that Yomiko and her team must stop before it's too late. The R.O.D franchise started with a series of light novels by Hideyuki Kurata, who is also a prolific manga and anime scriptwriter (Excel Saga, GUNxSWORD, Hellsing, Kamichu), before being adapted into two manga series, this OVA, and a full-length TV series. But they each have separate stories that stand on their own. Especially when viewed in one sitting, this three-episode series has the pacing of an action movie: you could be forgiven for thinking of James Bond, except for some unusual characters and situations that could only exist in drawn form. 9:20 Origin: Spirits of the Past (Gin-iro no Kami no Agito) This 2006 release was the first feature film by Gonzo, the studio responsible for series like Last Exile, Gankutsuou, Trinity Blood, and Romeo x Juliet. An environmentally-themed post-apocalyptic drama, it showcases the studio's talents with lush backgrounds and the fluid animation of a big-budget production, and we think you'll find the visuals particularly impressive on a big screen. In the future, genetic engineering gone awry will produce a strain of trees so awesomely powerful that they take over most of the planet. In the arid areas where a forest doesn't grow, the remains of a military-industrial civilization plot revenge on the trees, but don't have the technology to pull it off. Perched in between is Neutral City, where young boy Agito lives. Agito was just fooling around as kids are wont to when he accidentally awakens Toola, a girl who has been in cryogenic storage for centuries. Toola might just be the key to a technology that will decide the battle between industrial humanity and the trees, but is destroying the forest really what's best for humanity? 11:05 Riding Bean Bean Bandit is a courier. From robbing banks to transporting dangerous criminals, no job is too small, if they can afford his $40,000 shipping fee. He is the scourge of the Chicago PD, and Detective Percy, who has dedicated his life to capturing the "Roadbuster" as he is sometimes called. On his latest job, he discovers that he has been implicated in the kidnapping of a young girl. Now, he has 24 hours to prove his innocence, return the girl to the cops, and stop the bad guys from getting away with 2 million dollars. Riding Bean, in large part an homage to "The Blues Brothers" (including a chase scene under the El ending in a multi-car pileup), is an anime classic that helped break Ken'ichi Sonoda out of the character design business (Otaku No Video, Gall Force, and Bubblegum Crisis) and into the anime and manga big time (notably Gunsmith Cats, which is the sequel to Riding Bean). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (This showing is made possible in part with funding from Finboard and the Undergraduate Association of MIT.) You have received this message because you are on the MIT Anime Club's email list for showing announcements. For a change in your subscription, please send mail to anime-inquiry at mit.edu.