Here’s something that I found highly amusing – an announcement at the Anime News Network of a new anime called “Library War.” I’ve never heard of Chocolate Underground or Prince of Tennis, the director’s other works, but I guess this is a big deal in the anime world, of which I am embarrassingly ignorant.
The movie clip is in Japanese, so most of us won’t know what the characters are talking about, but it appears that all the young cool characters don green uniforms to defend libraries and bookstores against a repressive force (boo! hiss!) in brown (mauve? I couldn’t tell) uniforms. There’s a young teen girl among them who seems to be driven utterly wild when a hulking soldier tries to take her books away. Here’s the description of the film:
The action comedy anime adapts Hiro Arikawa‘s popular novel about battles fought to preserve libraries when a new law threatens to clamp down on freedom of expression in 2019.
I’ve never heard of Hiro Arikawa. I wonder if any of his stuff has ever been translated into English?
April 22, 2008 at 3:11 am
Just an FYI, Chocolate Underground hasn’t even been aired yet. By the looks of it, it’s still in pre-production and they’re only just starting to announce the cast now.
Prince of Tennis is pretty popular, but its fanbase mainly consists of a lot of girls that follow the plethora of male characters in the series along with all of their image songs, video games, and live action incarnations. Unless you’re a female that’s into that kind of a fandom or you know of girls that are into it, you probably wouldn’t have heard of it before. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that Prince of Tennis doesn’t have other things about its actual story and such to offer, but one of the blaringly obvious things about it is its fanbase and all of the associating merchandise for it.
June 17, 2008 at 8:33 pm
It’s quite good actually. Befitting you should have a article here. http://www.sidereel.com/Library_Wars?loomia_si=t0:a13:g2:r2:c0.0919467
here you can find an episode list and a summary of the new series.
June 17, 2008 at 8:35 pm
…and it is subbed in English for those not fluent in Japanese. (like meh) The new episodes take about a week to be subbed by a professional ‘subber’. But you can entertain yourself with the other episodes until then.