seiyuu3

2007 Christmas week sees two big seiyuu DVD releases - Yukarin’s concert DVD “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” and Minorin’s first music clip DVD “Message 01″. So how do they stack up and are they worth the price of admission? Read on.

First, Yukarin’s concert DVD set containing footage from the 2006 Christmas concert “Pinkle Twinkle Party” as well as this year’s summer tour “Sweet Milky Way”. After a few fumbles in the beginning, the past couple of years King Record’s concert DVD products has improved dramatically and has remained pretty solid - both in terms of the quality of the actual content on the disk as well as the presentation of the package. “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” keeps up with the trend, so what you get for 6,800yen is a massive 3 disk set in a 4 fold digi pack, a nice thick booklet containing pictures and interviews, and a hard cardboard box to house it all. Click on the second and third picture for large size photo.

Just looking at the pictures, you can tell that King Record really knows the people they are selling to. It’s all good and well that the package is pretty, so how about the actual content? Again keeping up with their recent effort, what you get is the concert recorded in anamorphic widescreen with linear PCM stereo sound - this is about as good as they can get without moving to HD disks such as Blu-ray or HD-DVD (FWIW, Suara’s concert on Blu-ray was beautiful, so I’m eagerly waiting for a Nana-chan or Yukarin concert on a HD disk). The video compression is also good, so visually it is nice as well, check out a few screen grabs below (click for full size):

Some of you might have read my ranting against the Haruhi Gekisou DVD at other places, for reference’s sake, here’s a grab from the Gekisou DVD, again click for full size.

Compare the crispness of the screen grabs, added with the fact that the Gekisou DVD was 4:3 letterboxed (with insane overscan compensation) and I think it should be clear that the Gekisou DVD was a damn mess. Not to mention the difference in price was only a mere 800yen and I think you can understand my beef with the Gekisou disk.

As for the content’s side, we’ve talked about Yukarin’s live performance enough here but it’s worth repeating - she sings well and her MCs are fun, so you do get your money’s worth.

Moving on to Minorin’s “Message 01″

The packaging is not fancy - only coming in a standard CD size jewel case, no big deal, but my first big disappointment was the 4:3 letterbox video despite the fact that the entire disk’s video was in widescreen! On the plus side though there were no major problems with the video compression, so not all were lost.

This is the second Lantis produce DVD that I’ve bought - Animelo 2007 being the first which had bad video compression - and judging from this disk it looks like Lantis could learn a thing or two from King Record. Other than that though, the content itself was quite substantial with 96 minutes of running time, off setting the original fear of a 3,000yen price tag for 3 PV clips. The documentary section makes up the bulk of it and it will take me some time to get through the entire disk, though quickly skimming through the footage I found some nice gems in there including videos of Minorin’s street live days in Akihabara, definitely worth watching to see just how far she had came. Included with the DVD was a bonus audio CD containing one track titled “Contact 13th”. My first reaction was to ripped it and add it as the 13th track to the Contact album playlist, then I replace the mangled album version of “Shinji no Tabi” with the full version from the DVD and gave it a few play through and all of a sudden it made the album seem more complete. Surprising how one or two tracks can make or break an entire album. As a side note, Lantis collaborated with the usual anime goods stores for extra goodies and Animate was giving out special posters:

When I saw the sample on Lantis’ special page I knew I had to get the disk at Animate just for this poster, and I have to say it is one of the better free posters I’ve got from Animate for a long long time. Now I’ll just have to decide whether I want to use this poster in place of the Junpaku Sanctuary poster currently on the wall.

In conclusion, Yukarin’s DVD is another quality product that is highly recommended to anyone having a passing interest in her music career. On the other hand, Minorin’s DVD would not disappoint hardcore fans, however I don’t think it will be as worthy of a purchase to non-followers compared to the Yukarin DVD.

Believe it or not, I’m actually not the type that follows seiyuu radio shows. However this season had me following the Minami-ke radio “Minami-ke no Minakike”. I’m not sure why I’m attracted to this particular radio show - it’s probably the random-ness of it, as each episode has no particular theme to it and it goes in all sorts of direction, and the adlib nature of the radio show resembles the anime itself. Of course it has the added attraction of having two seiyuu that I’m interested in - Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori, and I’m starting to warm up to Sato Rina as well.

One example of the random-ness of the show was when they talked about the show-within-show, the love drama “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun”, that the Minami sisters watches. Since in the anime there really is no story to this show, one of the seiyuu, Inoue Marina if I recall correctly, suggested that they could draw a shoujo manga of the show, and they can each take turn drawing a chapter each week. To keep it short, the idea got the go ahead and they are now serialising the manga, so to speak.

Originally they were doing it for fun and they weren’t going to show it to anyone, but since Inoue Marina is such an excellent drawer, Chihara Minori’s childhood dream was to be a mangaka and apparently Sato Rina is said to be a good drawer too according to her wiki entry, it turned into something they didn’t quite expected, so they’re now giving the listeners a glimps of it by posting a couple of sample pages from their manga.

First you have Sato Rina’s:

And here you have Inoue Marina’s:

The three of them joked about publishing it in one of the episodes, maybe at Comiket or package it as a special in the DVD or something, and who knows, maybe just like this little idea it may come true.

Detective Conan author Aoyama Gousho and Conan’s seiyuu Takayama Minami had announced their divorce yesterday, reports Sponichi.

The two had met in “YAIBA” - another work by Aoyama - more than 10 years ago, and they were married since May 2005.

This marks another high profile seiyuu related divorce after Yamadera Kouichi and Kanai Mika’s announcement just not so long ago.

Chihara Minori announced 4 more sessions to her “Contact” live tour - according to reports it’s going to be at Osaka Nanba Hatch, Nagoya Diamond Hall and Tokyo Shinagawa Stellar Ball. At least this time the venues are of respectable sizes (all are 1000+ venues), and I get another chance at ticket draws as all my previous applications (5 goes) failed to get me any tickets.

Yamaha is releasing a music score book for Mizuki Nana. Apparently it will include some behind the scene off shots from live tours etc. I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent “I tried to play it” music boom on Niconico Douga - basically people who took videos of themselves playing their favourite anison with various musical instruments, and Hatsune Miku.

Some Nana-chan related “I tried to play it” links (requires Niconico Douga account)
1 Guitar player who played various Nana-chan songs
2 “Rush & Dash” drums
3 “Crystal Letter” on oboe
4 “Secret Ambition” on a koto

Old school famous seiyuu singer Kasahara Hiroko is re-releasing 5 albums from her earlier days. The trend of veteran seiyuu coming out and trying to recapture their music career seems to continue.

The Second Seiyuu Award has added a special new award - the Tomiyama Kei Award - to be award by the jury to the seiyuu that has the widest and broadest media reach as a seiyuu, or put simply the seiyuu with the most media “buzz” apparently. Personally I think the criteria is unclear and nature of the award seems iffy because it appears to be one of those “I can’t please everyone so I’ll just create another category” type of filler awards. Will wait and see who gets it and whether it turns out to be what I suspect the purpose of the award is what I think it is.

Jiyukokuminsha, which publishes a modern Japanese terms and slang dictionary, has announced a list of 97 key terms extracted from hatena diary keyword (a wikipedia-like, user-editable website) which they considered important and influential to include in their 2008 edition of the dictionary. Included in the list is the phrase 能登かわいいよ能登 (Noto kawaii yo Noto - lit. Noto is cute!) - which according to the hatena site, was originally a spiteful phrase used by haters of seiyuu Noto Mamiko, but somehow got adopted by her fans to become their battle cry.

Other notable net slang and terms, which some might already be familiar with, includes Hatsune Miku and itasha. My personal new favourite term would be 深夜34時アニメ (shinya 34ji anime) though.

The dictionary has been including terms from hatena diary keyword since 2005.

No not in that way - after turning freelance several months ago, Seiyuu Grand Prix’s website database now lists Hocchan under VIMS. VIMS is a special branch inside I’m Enterprise, which actually belongs to…. wait for it…. ArtsVision. Yes the same ArtsVision that was involved in the scandal which may or may not have led to Hocchan going free in the first place. So in the end this whole incident resulted in nothing more than a short round of musical chair. Absolutely fascinating.

I guess I’m suppose to give a review of this, but I’d rather let the pictures speak for themselves. (read: I’m lazy)

An update to Nana-chan’s official webpage has revealed the title of her long-awaited 6th original album, currently scheduled for a November 14th release. Named “Great Activity”, the titles of two new tracks on the CD were also released - “Orchestral Fantasia” and “Nostalgia”. “Orchestral Fantasia” instantly got my attention, since it’s a song by Agematsu Noriyasu of Elements Garden (Eternal Blaze, Brave Phoneix, Heart-shaped Chant, Pray etc), and having been so addicted to Heart-shaped Chant’s beautiful composition, I really hope the title reflects the style of the song. “Nostalgia” is written by an unfamiliar name - TLUST, might be a sign of something new from Nana-chan.

Also from Nana-chan’s blog, on the entry of the 26th she mentioned that she’s in the process of making her “third child” - this is of course referring to her writing her third song (first being Super Generation and second being Violetta). I liked Super Generation, but wasn’t particularly impressed with Violetta, so thus far it’s been a hit and miss with me for her own music. Let’s see whether she’s gotten better at this game or not.

This should be an interesting album.

Just a heads up that Yukarin’s first photo album “Sorairo” is now up for pre-order at Amazon JP. Go place your pre-orders now!

According to 声優ニュース.com, Tamura Yukari had annouced on her radio show that she will be releasing a photo album titled “Sorairo” on October 10th. Considering that Yukarin is one of the top idol seiyuu, which means being a big sales drivers for seiyuu magazines, especially hm3 which is famous for its gorgous seiyuu photo shots, it’s kind of surprising that it took them that long to come up with a photo album dedicated solely to Yukarin, as many other popular idol seiyuu such as Nana-chan, Hocchan, Enomoto Atsuko had released their photo albums already. What would be interesting though is the direction of the photo album. Yukarin’s trademark dress code - sweet lolita - is quite popular amongst the female otakus, and certainly a lot of Yukarin’s female fans does taken a similiar liking in their fashion choice. If they want to broaden the appeal of the photo album outside of the male fanbase, having a bit of a fashion angle to the photo album would certainly be a very big draw in my opinion. 　

No pre-orders are up yet at the usual outlets, but be sure to keep a look out for it all you Yukarin fans.