Displaying items by tag: FUNimation

As of February 14th the, .hack series has returned to American audiences nationwide in the form of a three episode long OVA series called .hack//Quantum. FUNimation Entertainment announced they had grabbed the license for this particular installment in the .hack world during Anime Atlanta last year, and have just released the OVA as a pretty Blu-ray/DVD combo. It has been awhile since I’ve seen anything related to the .hack series since I watched the first episode of .hack//roots when it first aired in Japan. However, I have been a big fan of .hack//sign and was eager to give .hack another try.

For many fans, Trigun was a very memorable series due to its lovable protagonist, Vash the Stampede, and its futuristic space western setting. Unlike another popular space western series, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun definitely had seemingly entrenched itself in the actual feel of an old-time spaghetti western rather than focus on the future. As Vash traveled in search of his long-forgotten past on the planet Gunsmoke, while being joined with cast regulars Meryl Stryfe, Milly Thompson and fan-favorite Nicholas D. Wolfwood, he was also being pursued by bounty hunters for the “60,000,000,000$$” price on his head as well as a more nefarious group. During his travels, Vash usually came off as a clumsy, foolish young man to many people but more often than not, he would display his exceptional skill as a gunman - particularly as he often employed non-lethal means of disarming his adversaries.

Way back during the Nineties when the VHS was king and not Blu-Ray/DVD, there were tons of classic and beloved anime that were released into the United States.  One particular series, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, holds a special place in my heart as one of the first anime series I really got into and one of my personal favorites. It is also perhaps one of the first anime brought over here to the West to incite the cyberpunk genre fandom for English speaking audiences.

If you had the power to delude anyone into seeing the world the exact way that you want them to, what would you make them see? Studio Madhouse's (the Girl Who Leapt through Time, Chobits) adaptation of Nitroplus' (Demonbane, Saya no Uta) 2008 visual novel Chaos; Head, the first entry into their dark-and-gritty science fiction visual novel line, attempts to answer this as well as other philosophical issues on existentialism and the nature of being. All the while mixing it up with a romantic subplot revolving around an otaku protagonist. Sounds a lot like your typical anime fan's dream philosophy class, doesn't it?

Via Anime News Network, Funimation has recently sued 1,337 Bittorrent users for illegally stealing episode 481 of One Piece. Whether this is a reaction to the recent Fractale debacle is unclear, but the events seem too closely related for Funimation's legal action to be coincidental. The suit requires the defendants,

"shall destroy all copies of Plaintiff's [videos] that Defendant has downloaded onto any computer hard drive or server without Plaintiff's authorization and shall destroy all copies of those downloaded [videos] transferred onto any physical medium or device in each Defendant's possession, custody, or control."