The first time I watched Spirited Away, I came away with a so-so opinion of the film. On one hand, the animation was rather amazing and stylized, the story seemed to have some good moral messages going, it was generally entertaining; on the other hand, it was just plain weird.
It probably didn’t help that I was distracted and only half paying attention to the film. It’s still quite a surreal experience, but things tend to mesh a bit better on the second or third viewing.
Every once in a while we get a Transformer’s toy that doesn’t actually Transform into anything. Alpha Quintesson (Alpha Q) is one such Transformer. We first met the Quintessons back in Transformers the Movie. They led a pack of hungry Sharkticons and liked to toss random bots into pits of doom. As it turns out the Quintessons were more intertwined with the history and origin of the Transformers race then was originally believed.
These two are actually more or less the same series. Rally Vincent appears in both as more or less the same character (they look different), and Bean Bandit appears in the Gunsmith Cats comic. Also they are done by the same creator (Kenishi Sonoda). The point is they really fit together. Like Apples and… slightly… differet…Apples.
Lio Convoy
Beast Mode
Wow, it’s a bit bigger than I expected it to be. The white fur and gold mane really look nice on it, he looks very noble. As some people have mentioned though, the plastic seems kind of low grade compared to other toys.
Minuses for this mode: the robot mode arms seem to have a bit of trouble keeping attached to the inner gray piece. This isn’t helped by the mane pieces getting in the way of attaching them to the gray piece. Also the single joint on the front legs is kind of loose, so it can be difficult to get it to stand up, but I haven’t had much problem with it sliding forward once the toy is standing.
There was a short period in gaming time not too long ago where many hyped up games we released all around the same period of time. These include games like Oni, Deus Ex, and Shenmue, to name a few. These games all have one thing in common. All had mediocre everything with one amazing shinny new gimmick. In the end you get a game that more or less sucks except you still feel the need to play it because of this one gimmick. Oni had it’s whole weapons and hand to hand combat thing, Shenmue had it’s whole free range suckage going on, and Deus Ex is sort of a FPS RPG hybrid.
I had planned to see this movie opening day for the sake of whatever but for some intelligent reason the local theaters decided no one wanted to see it after 5 PM so I was stuck working while it was actually playing. It turns out they were probably doing the right thing since there were only like a dozen people in the theater when I finally say it the Saturday after opening weekend. Then again maybe people just don’t go see fucking movies at noon.
