Hipsters Vs. Real Fans

ANI-MOVIES, *The Peanuts Movie

Being it 35 years since their last animated movie, the Peanuts gang is back in their first film featuring the title of their comic strip. Blue Sky Studios took a break from doing Ice Age sequels to make this 3-D CGI feature-length production and latest animation featuring Chuck and the gang outside of insurance commercials. This acted as a retake of the stories, not acting as a continuation from any previous works.

Charlie Brown is a young balding boy who despite having a decent group of friends and an overly-imaginative beagle named Snoopy, he suffers from low self-esteem. The arrival of a new neighbor/schoolmate referred to as the Little Red-Haired Girl give Charlie Brown the determination to get her to notice him. This goes from trying to win the school talent show, and working with her on a book report. Most of his efforts go fall to either Charlie helping out his sister, or loosing his book report to a model airplane. Snoopy meanwhile tries to write his own story of himself as a WWI flying ace patrolling for the infamous Red Baron who kidnapped his imaginary love interest Fifi(voiced oddly enough by the movie's only celebrity voice actor, Kristen Chenoweth). Charlie Brown does eventually gain the attention of the Little Red-Haired Girl, but just as she's going away for summer camp.

The Peanuts Movie works as a perfect time capsule for the entire print run of the original comic strip, as its could take place during anytime in the last 50 years, not alluding to anything specifically recent or trendy, making it very innocent and open to all-ages, also one of the few G-Rated mainstream movies to come out in a while. The CGI works great and achieves a significant stop-motion look to it. It stands out as a timeless modern day classic for fans of a simple story or something for the whole family.

If you see the Jem movie, you're gonna have a bad time

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SHUT THE FUCK UP OR I'LL MURDER YOU AAAAALLLL!!!!!!!

OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Slayers: The Book Of Spells

The first Slayers OVA series was based on the Slayers Special prequal manga taking place before the first Slayers TV anime. It was 3-episodes long, which was first released in English through ADV Films as two separate VHS volumes(Dragon Slave and Explosion Array), and then later in a collected DVD titled Slayers: The Book Of Spells.

Taking place sometime after Lina and Naga reunited from Slayers Excellent, their first adventure has Lina almost dying of the sheer shock of a crafty alchemist who created ten clones of Naga to subdue Lina to use her as part of a crazy looking giant chimera to take over the world. The real Naga eventually catches up to them and her clones bond to her like bees to a queen, and they go to rescue Lina. The next adventure sees our heroines being hired to help an aspiring wouldbe knight to join the royal guard, but continuously being confronted by his mother makes the situation nearly impossible. The final chapter has Lina and Naga hunting down a renegade sorcerer who plans to use a magic mirror to make reverse copies of any adversary he comes across, except that when he uses it on our girls it produces embarrassingly peaceful versions of them who do nothing but cry and plead for peace, leaving the world with yet another wandering Naga copy.

Slayers Special(as its originally called in Japan)works out as a good intro to the world of Lina Inverse in her travels, even though the OVAs and movies operate on a different tempo than the TV series, sometimes taking a little more time in drawing out the comedy instead of following along with a season-long story arc. The animation is just as good as the first few Slayers movies, although the third episode seems to suffer a little too much like being a promo for the OVA soundtrack with some AMV segments added in for padding. Worth a look on its own, or combined with the Slayers Excellent OVA collection.

ANI-MOVIES, *Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo

As the third installment of the Rebuild Of Evangelion 4-part movie series, this chapter completely removes itself from the original Neon Genesis Evangelion storyline and catapults it into a totally alternate storyline. The established plot that the first two movies were adapted from is given a fresh take with a radically different look at the Eva world.

Taking place 14 years after the end of the previous movie, the Third Impact was pre-empted with the arrival of Kaworu from the moon who impaled the awoken Unit 01 with the Lance of Longinus. Now, Asuka and her Eva partner, Mari(introduced in the last film), are retrieving Unit 01 containing Shinji. During this whole time, none of the Eva pilots have aged because of some side-effect. Shinji awakens to find that Unit 01 has been used as the prime engine for a new airship called Wunder operated by WILLE, a group of ex-NERV members dedicated to stopping SEELE's attempts to bring about the next impact. Misato is now captain of this ship, and places an explosive collar on Shinji that prevents him from ever piloting an Eva, but he's rescued by Rei in Unit 09. Shinji is taken to the remains of NERV headquarters which is only inhabited by his father Gendo, Prof. Fuyutsuki, and Kaworu. Gendo needs Shinji to co-pilot the new Unit 13 with Kaworu to retrieve the now two Lances of Longinus. Showing mistrust in his father's work after he learns that this Rei is really another clone of his dead mother, Shinji befriends Kaworu after he removes his collar and puts it on himself. The two operate Unit 13 two get the Lances from Central Dogma embedded in the remains of the 12th Angel that was stopped in Evangelion 2.0, and merge them with Unit 13. But Asuka and Mari interrupt their mission to stop a possible Fourth Impact. During the battle, all the Eva units are destroyed, and Kaworu gets his head blown off. This leaves Asuka, Shinji, and the "replacement" Rei to rendezvous with WILLE.

As part of this Evangelion remake, the third chapter takes some serious risks in shaking up the status quo with the characters and situations. The downside though is that not much changes with most of the previous cast who were around during post-Third Impact, not including the fact that some of them didn't physically age at all, or were in stasis during that time. A lot of questions remained unanswered, which obviously leaves room open for in the final movie, but stuff like what happened to the other cast in the missing 14 years is left mostly unexplained(least of all what happened to Pen-Pen!). This movie does expand the characters a little more as far as their goals and their ability to adapt to the ever-changing world they live in, either always fighting for their beliefs or just struggling to stay alive. Since the series director and creator Hideaki Anno is now working on the new Japanese revival of Godzilla, its hard to say when exactly we can expect Evangelion 4.0 to wrap all this up, but hopefully it won't be left with as many question marks like the last Eva anime did.