MIT Anime Club Showing #535 Friday 11 April 2008 Spring Showing #8 Note: this showing is in room 6-120 at 7:00PM 7:10 Infinite Ryvius 1-2 8:00 Pizza token sales (for the first 5 minutes) 8:10 Infinite Ryvius 3-4 9:00 Intermission 9:20 Ergo Proxy 13-16 11:00 Short intermission 11:05 Strawberry Panic 1-2 *********************************************************************** Contents: Geneon going-out-of-business DVD donation drive Membership Pizza Pizza Ordering Procedure Library Silence Programme ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Spring Showing #8 Another great week of anime for you guys. In addition to the regular great anime we'll also hopefully attract a few prefrosh to come see what sort of great things we play. That being said, if you see any new young looking people, act cool. :P ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Geneon going-out-of-business DVD donation drive So if you've been thinking about sponsoring a disc but haven't now's your chance, what better way to prove your love for a series than buying it for us. ^^ In late September, 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Membership Did your club membership expire in January? 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 have been using for awhile: we'll sell tokens two episodes before intermission 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: - Hawaiian (ham + pineapple) - Hamburger - Sausage - Grilled Chicken ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 next two showings (4/18 and 4/25) will have a substitute librarian. Things will mostly go as usual, but you'll need to submit your requests earlier: no later than 4pm, and as always you can help us serve you best by making requests by Thursday. After the usual drought in February and March, the traditional beginning of the Japanese year in April brings a bunch of new series, just now starting to be fansubbed. We're starting early with a fairly short digisub sampler disc this week, to whet your appetite and because the librarian's schedule means it will be a while before we can produce the next one. 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: Chi's Sweet Home 1-4 Kanokon 1 Kure-nai 1 Macross Frontier 1 Mnemosyne 1-2 Special A 1 To Love-Ru 1 Vampire Knight 1 Zettai Karen Children 1 You can request one of these DVD+RWs in the normal way. 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 If you talk during the anime, you'll be trapped on a spaceship in the far reaches of the solar system, with a crew consisting of only MIT undergraduates. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Programme 7:10 Infinite Ryvius 1-4 Two centuries hence, space travel has become commonplace; on the training station Liebe Delta, 16-year-old Kouji Aiba and friends are getting some time off while the station takes a maintenance break. But things don't go as planned: saboteurs attack the station, almost destroying it and forcing the cadets to flee onto a training vessel. Stuck there without their instructors, can the crew of almost 500 teenagers manage to survive and make it back home, without being at each others' throats? Besides Kouji's level-headed roommate, moody younger brother, stereotypical childhood friend, and a spacey girl with a pet ferret, the large cast also includes a gang of punks, a team of elite second-year cadets, a mysteriously appearing girl in pink (who will not be explained in these episodes), and a bunch of other bit characters. This original Sunrise series from 1999 has a similar spirit to the more recent Zegapain that we showed earlier this semester: you won't be blown away by the originality of the premise (credited to the institutional pseudonym Hajime Yatate), but the creators know how to build a good story on it. This was the first series helmed by director Goro Taniguchi (Planetes, Code Geass), and the screen-writing was lead by the omnipresent Yosuke Kuroda. This show just predated Sunrise's adoption of digital ink and paint, so the character designs by Hisashi Hirai (Gundam Seed, s-CRY-ed) don't meet modern standards of flashiness, but there's careful attention to atmosphere: to match the plasma "sea" the station dives into, many scenes feel like ones from a submarine drama. At intermission, we'll be giving away our accumulated stash of Infinite Ryvius merchandise, including a plushie of the pet ferret Rafra, and some pencilboards. In honor of our CPW guests, we'll open the raffle to anyone in attendance, but please bring your club ID if you have one to help things go smoothly. 9:20 Ergo Proxy 13-16 In a dystopian future domed city where robots and immigrants do all the hard work, a mysterious humanoid monster is on the loose, and the only one who can stop it is Re-l Mayer, an inspector of the Citizen Intelligence Bureau who also happens to be the granddaughter of the city's regent. This stylish sci-fi thriller has a distinguished pedigree, produced by Manglobe (Samurai Champloo), directed by Shukou Murase (Witch Hunter Robin), and written chiefly by Dai Sato (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, among others). Between the "Cogito" virus that's infecting the city's robots, and the "Ergo" in the title, you shouldn't be surprised to see philosophical themes of self-awareness under the action; a number of characters are also named after French post-structuralists. And, speaking of affectation, Re-l has a heavy touch with her blue eyeshadow. 11:05 Strawberry Panic 1-2 When her parents move abroad for work, first-year high-schooler Nagisa Aoi transfers to St. Miator Academy, an all-girls Catholic boarding school located next to and sharing dorms with two other schools of the same type. She gets lost on her first day on campus, but is rescued by Shizuma Hanazono, a striking upperclasswoman whose gaze is enough to paralyze Nagisa and whose kiss causes her to pass out. Nagisa's roommate Tamao Suzumi is helpful enough, though it seems like she also might have an interest in Nagisa that goes beyond simple friendship. This fluffy tale of yuri (female-female) romance, adapted from light novels by Sakurako Kimino (Sister Princess), is derivative of a number of other yuri titles, most blatantly Maria-sama ga Miteru (which will finally get a US release as "Maria Watches Over Us" this summer). The most charitable reading, though not universal, is that it's a parody. (To take one example suggested by Erica "Yuricon" Friedman, the title of MariMite refers to a statue of the Virgin Mary that seems to watch over the students at their school. You'll also see a statue of Mary in this series, but it has a different expression, perhaps averting her eyes from Strawberry Panic's more blatantly sexualized relationships.) But whatever the original creator was thinking, it's all in good fun, as long as you can manage to suspend disbelief. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (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.