#BLUE GIANT

[monokkuro]

[videoclubs]

[quiltofstars]

The star Sirius, α Canis Majoris // Spencer Collins

The name Sirius comes from the Ancient Greek word seirios, meaning "glowing" or "scorcher". It may also have an etymological connection to the Egyptian god Osiris.

[zerohirrotries]

Lmk s5 Sandy and Mk screenshot!!

I loved that Sandy finally had a whole episode with him and Mk bonding. He is just his big uncle that tries to give him therapy.

LOOK AT IT!!! I love them so much!!! Mk is so happy to have the solo hug from Sandy here and he needs it!!

[leegyuu]

Dai Miyamoto with No.5

[burgers-in-anime]

Blue Giant (2023)

[canmom]

Animation Night 191 - Yuzuru Tachikawa

this is what it's like to play jazz.

OK, so, you know Mob Psycho 100? Maybe I don't even need to say more than that...

Yuzuru Tachikawa! If you're a sakuga type, perhaps a familiar name... if not, let's take a moment to rewind the clock to the strange ancient times of 2013, where there was a certain something called the Young Animators Training Project. Which was a project to train young animators. More substantially, as kvin writes here, it was a project designed to address the collapsing training processes of the anime industry... a project which fell rather short of its aims in many ways.

But in its earlier days, it did fund a couple of very interesting, unique short films. One of them was the original Little Witch Academia, which went on to expand into one of Trigger's flagship series. And the other... was Death Billiards, directed and written by a certain Yuzuru Tachikawa, rising episode director star, at Madhouse.

The premise of Death Billiards, and the later expanded esries Death Parade, is that the dead find their way into bars whose bartenders judge whether they should be reincarnated based on 'death games'. What's a death game? Well, standard bar stuff: billiards, darts... the title is in fact very literal. And it slapped. kVin writes:

Death Billiards was nothing short of a passion project for Tachikawa, who wrote, directed, and storyboarded it all. It was his opportunity to make a stance. To prove he wasn’t just a great ally for other creators, or even a suitable second in command, but rather someone deserving of helming his own titles as he pleased. In his second showing as director—the one fan of the 2012 multimedia project Arata-naru Sekai happens to be a friend of mine and he’ll kill me if I don’t mention it—Tachikawa held nothing back. Death Billiards’ exploration of ambiguity and moral failings that had always intrigued Tachikawa stuck with people all around the world too, and its presentation was so stylish that not even Yoh Yoshinari’s dazzling LWA managed to overshadow it. The OVA immediately put Tachikawa on the map, but truth to the told, that’s far from the extent of its success.

And indeed, Tachikawa - and producer Takuya Tsunoki - went on to do many great things, building up a strong gang of animators around them, many of them associated with the young Studio NUT. Of course, their best known project is Mob Psycho 100, a popular comedy-shōnen manga by One (same mangaka as One Punch Man) which plays around with chuunibyou (in the original sense) ideas of psychic powers in, ultimately, a very grounded, affirming way - and to this Tachikawa et al. brought a slightly sketchy, experimental style which led to some pretty crazy action animation. Mob was a crazy hit; later came their long-term passion project DECA-DENCE, a very fun scifi piece about humans trapped in an elaborate physicalised game, rebelling against the system and staging prison breaks, full of slick zero-g action sequences...

Course while we're talking about NUT, we gotta mention their first work Youjo Senki, perhaps the most outright loathsome anime I've ever seen. Not to beat this dead horse. I can only imagine that the staff working on it were like... somehow oblivious to the blatant nazi barely-even-subtext of what they were adapting? (In keeping with the unfortunate ways that otaku culture plays with nazi imagery.) I just can't square it with any of the other stuff they've made, Deca-Dence in particular. Tachikawa at least was only peripherally involved in that hot mess.

We're not actually here to talk about Mob or Deca-Dence though - they're both way too long for Animation Night. Instead we'll be rolling the clock forward to Tachikawa's most recent project at NUT: an adaptation of Blue Giant, about boys playing jaazzzzzz.

also eating burger.

Blue Giant follows Dai, an aspiring saxophonist, as he grows up and toots despite the hostility of the patrons of his local music shop. The film adapts some of the later volumes of the manga, in which Dai has already made some progress in his playing. Dai falls in with two other jazz players: the experienced and arrogant Yukinori and novice drummer Shunji as they form a band. Before long, conflict brews over just how hardcore you should go.

The film is, naturally, a celebration of jazz, full of elaborate scenes of performance, described as being like "a full-blown music video" to really sell you on how moving and awesome jazz movie can be. Jazz and anime can be a great combo (just ask anyone who's seen Cowboy Bebop or Gundam Thunderbolt) and I am pretty curious to see what they come up with here.

Honestly, while I've enjoyed Mob and Deca-Dence, I definitely feel like I'm sleeping a bit on Tachikawa - so tonight I hope to remedy it by checking out where he came from and where he's currently going, with a night of Death Billiards and Blue Giant! NUT's animation is always lively and stylish - they're also the studio where the master of anime-industry animation tutorials, Dong Chang, works - so I think we'll surely see something cool.

Animation Night 191 will be going live shortly at twitch.tv/canmom, I hope to see you there! And apologies for the late start - without going into too much of what's happening behind the scenes here, we should (touch wood) soon be able to get back to an earlier schedule, but for now we're still on witching hours.

[cinematicjourney]

Blue Giant (2023) | dir. Yuzuru Tachikawa

[steakkid]

mini sketchbook dump!! (also read/watch blue giant!!!)

[wordswhisperinthedark]

hands of a jazzman

[deductivisms]

🎹🎷🥁

[mysticalflyte]

Thank you Blue Giant for getting me more into jazz. 🎷🎷🎷

Twitter | Instagram

[videoclubs]

[quiltofstars]

The star Vega (α Lyrae) // Michael W. Dean

The fifth-brightest star in the night sky, Vega traces its name from a transliteration of the Arabic word wāqi' meaning "falling" from the phrase an-nasr al-wāqi' meaning "the falling eagle". It is about twice the mass and size of the Sun, thus radiating about 50 times more light than the Sun at a temperature of about 10,000 kelvin. The star is relatively close at 25 light years away.

[zerohirrotries]

LMK background characters appreciation post Other designs of different characters that look interesting and the beauty of the show. The animation is so good looking!

[leegyuu]

🌕