Tomarin is angry after losing money at a pachinko parlor in Teekyu season 9
I watched a few more new anime series last week but not as many as I wanted. Teekyu returned for its ninth season with a Tomarin-focused episode and an ending credits sequence depicting the girls as more realistic-looking teenagers with a portion where the camera pans across their towel-draped bodies. I guess the ending credits are a parody of other anime ending credits that have similar shots of their female characters but Teekyu’s credits unnerved me just like those other ones do…
I saw the first episodes of Anime Strike series Made in Abyss and Princess Principal with some online friends and enjoyed both of them for different reasons. Made in Abyss had beautiful landscapes and a fun adventure story setup with its characters. I liked Princess Principal for its dark, steam-powered London setting and background music directed by Yuki Kajiura; its soundtrack reminded me of Kajiura’s previous action series scores including Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Noir.
Please Tell Me! Galko-chan in anime and manga formats
I also worked a bit on my backlog of unfinished anime series by watching all of Please Tell Me! Galko-chan on Sunday afternoon. I’m in the process of writing a post about that and volume 1 of Kenya Suzuki’s manga of the same name, which Seven Seas Entertainment has been publishing in English. The twelve anime episodes, each eight minutes long, seemed to adapt most of the manga’s first volume.
Tim Rattray wrote a thoughtful blog post last week about four major anime streaming services – Anime Strike, Crunchyroll, Netflix, HiDive – and improvements each one could make to attract and retain viewers and paying customers. Before reading that post, I didn’t know Crunchyroll has been working on an HTML5 player. HiDive and its predecessor Anime Network both use HTML5 for video playback, allowing for viewing on many non-computer browsers on current video game consoles and smartphones/tablets and also not requiring the services to develop platform-specific applications.
