The cinema just down the road from my house had an Anime day today, part of the annual Leeds International Film Festival. I'd only ever seen one Anime film (Akira), years ago, but it seems to be something that many geeks are into, so I thought I'd give it a try. I ended up seeing two films: Escaflowne and Metropolis.
Escaflowne is all about a girl called Hitomi who somehow gets ‘beamed up’ to the magical world Gaea, where she turns out to be the fabled ‘Wing Goddess’. There's a whole load of weird stuff about magic armour, ‘Escaflowne’ being one set of it.
The film has got some wonderful mythical ideas, and some of the imagery is beautiful. The first scene has Van (a feisty young Samurai type) free-falling through the clouds to land on a ‘floating fortress’, which reminded me of the last scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The music in Escaflowne is also beautiful, ranging from nice songs in Japanese to moody Gregorian chants.
Metropolis is a more sci-fi film, with lots of traditional sci-fi themes like robots taking over the humans who repress them, and questions about whether a robot could ever atain ‘humanity’. It's inspired, in part, by Fritz Lang's film of the same name, which was originally released in the '20s.
The Anime Metropolis has amazing animation, mixing CGI and drawing in interesting ways, with lots of nasty looking machinery and dark atmosphere. Much of the music is brassy Jazz or Sinatra-style crooning (which is particularly weird at the end where the city is collapsing).
Anyway, I've decided I should be watching more films, and the obvious answer is to get a decent file sharing system up and running :-) I've come across giFT, which on first impressions seems to work really well. I've stuck it on my gateway machine, and installed giFTcurs, which is an unusually good curses client to it. Things seem to be up and running, although the giFT website says that it isn't quite ready for prime time yet. For that reason they don't provide binary releases (although there is a deb for giFTcurs), so you have to download the client from anonymous CVS and compile it.
Hmm, since giFT isn't ready for prime time, and it uses its own network, it seems likely that most of the people on the network are hardcore geeks. I confirmed this suspicion by checking out the list of files being shared by one of the nodes I could access (the first one on the list). Sure enough, there were O'Reilly books on there, and a big collection of Feynman's lectures. Good stuff :-)