MIT Anime Club Showing #515 Friday 05 October 2007 Fall Showing #5 Note: this showing is in room 6-120 at 7:00PM 7:10 Chobits 1,2,19,22 8:50 Intermission 9:20 Paradise Kiss 9-12 (concludes) 11:05 Elfen Lied *********************************************************************** Contents: Geneon goign-out-of-business DVD donation drive ADV club discount Membership Pizza New Pizza Ordering Procedure Library Silence Programme ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fall Showing #5 This week is exciting in a few ways. First, there's a super long weekend that I get to enjoy. Moreover, we get to see the stunning conclusion of Paradise Kiss. In our excitement, let's not forget to take a moment and mourn its passing. . . . That's enough, in two weeks we start Kashimashi which is incredibly fun and will fill the hole left by Paradise Kiss, nicely. Elfen Lied is a favorite of mine, but it's not for the sqeamish. So, if you're young or don't like blood and/or nudity, leave early. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Geneon going-out-of-business DVD donation drive Last week it was announced that Geneon, one of the largest US anime companies, is getting out of the DVD sales business. Unfortunately, there were still a lot of DVDs we wanted to buy from them! To supplement our normal acquisitions budget of money from the UA, memberships, and refreshments, we're also asking for your help in picking up good series that might be going away for good. For more information, see: http://web.mit.edu/anime/www/donations/geneon-oob-2007.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ADV club discount The club is affiliated with ADV Films' "Anime ADVocates" program. Besides a newsletter and sampler DVDs you can borrow from the library (under Miscellaneous), this also entitles you to a discount at the ADV online store, recently increased to 40% off non-sale items. Please e-mail anime-inquiry at mit.edu to obtain the code; you'll need to enter it as a coupon code When ordering. http://www.advfilms.com/shop.aspx Though if you happen to be in the market for ADV products right now, you might also want to check out the sale running through this Sunday at RightStuf: http://www.rightstuf.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Membership Did your club membership expire in August? Renew now for continued library checkouts and other membership 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/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Pizza We'll be using the same token-based pizza sales system we first tested a few weeks ago: we'll sell tokens after the second episode of Chobits (about 8:00) that you can exchange for slices during intermission. This week's pizza options are: $1.50 Plain cheese $2.00 Pepperoni $2.00 Feta Cheese (this week's feature flavor) Future weeks will feature: - Pastrami - Sausage - Grilled Chicken - Buffalo Grilled Chicken - Hamburger - Bacon - Hawaiian (ham + pineapple) - Feta cheese ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 the recent sampler DVD+RW is still available. If your membership expired in August, you'll need to renew it before picking up items. For the best service, send your requests to anime-library@mit.edu by the day before the showing. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Silence Don't talk. Our lovely diclonius guests don't take well to it at all. Needless to say, I've seen them disemember people for lesser offenses. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Programme 7:10 Chobits 1, 2, 19, 22 In a world whose technological development was slightly different from our own, personal computers ("persocoms" for short) are being widely used in homes and businesses, but they aren't impersonal boxes and keyboards: they're androids with triangular data ports instead of ears, or doll-sized laptop models. Country boy Hideki Motosuwa has just moved to Tokyo for a year of cram school before trying again to get into college, and he'd like nothing more than a persocom, but he can't afford one. That is, until he finds a cute-looking female one seemingly abandoned by the trash. He takes it home and turns it on, but it seems to lack an operating system, and all it can say is "Chi". The "guy falls for cute robot" genre is a crowded field (compare: last week), but the visible hand of original manga artists CLAMP (Cardcaptor Sakura, Angelic Layer, Tsubasa) sets Chobits apart. In addition to the main pairing of Hideki and Chi, a number of secondary characters explore other sides of the theme of whether cute robots can be a substitute for a human relationship, and there's also a good dose of the trademark CLAMP melodrama. The story takes a while to get serious, so our showcase includes a couple of episodes from later in the series. Episodes 1 and 2 introduce the basic premise, and have a lot of the nosebleed and nudity humor that every shonen romance needs. 19 and 22 are a mostly stand-alone arc centering on Mr. Ueda, the baker at a store where Chi has a part-time job. (The relevant majority of 19 is told in flashback; there's a frame story about Chi being missing that belongs to episodes we're skipping over.) 9:20 Paradise Kiss 9-12 "Paradise Kiss" is the brand name of a motley group of Yazawa Arts fashion students who work together on clothes for school projects and consignment sale. They're casting about for a model for an upcoming school fashion show when one of them runs into Yukari Hayasaka, a square and somewhat bored high-school student whose thoughts are mainly on entrance exams. Initially Yukari wants nothing to do with them, but she has second thoughts after meeting George Koizumi, the group's dashing lead designer. This short (12 episode) series has a more hip attitude than most anime, a trait it shares with director Osamu Kobayashi's earlier Beck and original manga-ka Ai Yazawa's more recent Nana. And like other series that Fuji TV has aired in its "noitaminA" block (Honey and Clover, Jyu-oh-sei, Hataraki Man, Nodame Cantabile), it aims for a more diverse audience in age and sex than just late-night otaku. Given that the manga originally ran in a fashion magazine rather than an anthology, it's not surprising to see a lot of work went into the costume designs, with textures supplied by a less distracting version of the pattern fill technique seen in Gakutsuoh. 11:05 Elfen Lied 1-2 I'll start off this blurb with a warning that this show isn't for kids. **************************************************************** ** WARNING: This series contains large quantities of nudity ** ** and graphic violence, and is suitable for mature audiences ** ** only. If you might find this kind of material disturbing, ** ** please plan to leave the showing before this part starts. ** **************************************************************** That being said, the show is really great. The premise of the show is that there exists a set of mutants named dicloni who are being contained by the government. They're super powerful and have invisible appendages called vectors which can stop bullets and dismember people. This story focuses on the life of a particular diclonius who escaped her confinement, and the various adventures which then happen in the process of trying to capture her among other things. One of the best parts of the series is the interesting backstory which explained through various flashbacks. The first two episodes are a good intro to the series so if you've wondered about this anime in the past, now's your chance to see if you'll actually like it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (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.