An anime called Chobits

Chobits

This is one of the many animated series that started as a manga (aka comic book) and was later turned into a show by that lovely company named funimation.
Chobits starts off innocent enough. The main character is what I like to refer to as a country bumpkin out somewhere in rural China. He doesn't have anyone to talk to besides thr livestock so he has a bad habit or thinking out load.
Hideki Motosuwa wants to go to college but he doesn't get accepted so he decides to take what little money he has saved up and enlist in a prep school in town. Simple story line so far right?
Well his first day in the city he notices everyone has a personal android/robot/computer called persecoms. He really really wants one for internet exploring.....however he cannot afford one. The rest of the day he continues to talk outloud about wanting a persecom but not being able to afford one. Amazing coincidence happens soon...he is thinking out load about finding a cute persecom in the trash as he is walking past one laying in a pile of trash....he gets a few steps past and does a slow motion double take.
He realizes that these human shaped computers are quite heavy when they are not operating, but eventually he gets the unit back to his little appartment. It just so happens this persecom in particular is very cute and the main character is continuously affected by her looks. It takes him a while to figure out where he on/off switch is located and once he figures it out he almost has a heart attack. The main character is unable to see the persecom as a machine and keeps thinking it is a real person.
Okay so the plot is a little more interesting ...but still the viewer is confused by what is actually going on. I mean another anime about a boy and a pretty female robot??
If you have made it this far the plot begins to unravel around this urban legend about legendary persecoms known as.....you guessed it "Chobits". It seems as if Chi is one of these legendary machines however all of her data is heavily encripted..so it is difficult to know for sure. Eventually Hideki Motosuwa gets to see an email attachment with what looks like chi all wired up with a marking on her leg. The persecoms ARM is covering up the first letter but you can clearly see 'hobit' so its safe to assume the first letter is a 'c'.




Chi also begins to read these odd books about "the one for me and only me" ...its difficult at first to be sure but these books seem to be written for/about Chi.
There is now a plot and the anime is worth watching to see what happens to Chi...will she be abducted? Possibly taken back by her maker or so other unknown villan? Will she fall in love with a human? Will the human love her back?

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Darker than Black the anime

A night sky full of cries hearts filled with lies the contract--is it worth the price? a soul pledged to the darkness now I've lost it, I know I can kill the truth is just beyond the Gate

Another anime I have found thanks to netflix. This one has a plot right out of the gate. Plenty of action and the introduction isn't super lame like some other animes I know.
This anime takes place in a city somewhere in China. There is a massive wall that makes a boundry between the city and 'hells gate' ...which is an area where odd things happen. Apparently one day it just appeared and things began to change. The sky fell and all of the real stars vanished. The real stars were replaced by 'fake' stars, each one corresponding to a contractor.
There are these humans, kept secret from the masses, known as contractors and some know as spectors. Someone who is a contractor has some special ability, but at a cost. They are know to have an involuntary need to pay some price each time an ability is used. This is very interesting to see a reacurring idea of equal exchange across all sorts of stories. Contractors are known to be cold and methodical...with no regard to emotions
Anyhow the first episode show a man running from something and he is on a roof of a tall building, he gets cornered by some sort of police. The man begins to glow blue, which means he is activating his special ability, and he flies into the air. A few blocks away on another roof he lands and runs to a secluded area. This contractor then takes his own finger and breaks it. Our main character is there waiting for him and makes a remark about his 'price' ...the viewer now learns special abilities, like levatation, come with a sacrifice....sometimes that sacrifice is extreme and sometimes it is subtle. The man gets dealt with and the main character dissapears into the night.

Contractors are still mostly human...except they have lost all empathy and compassion for anything. Contractors are thought to be methodical and relentless by the rest of the world. While spectors on the other hand are more like dolls/robots with a human shape. Spectors can move outside of their body through a medium, water or even electricity, and can watch or spectate the things around them. The government has a massive network of these dolls keeping track of the contractors through some odd link to astrology. Every contractor has a star that appears in the fake sky that will 'activate' when that specific contractor is using a special ability. The story revolves around the a syndicate...some mysterious power pulling all sorts of strings. The main character is a unassuming school boy. However when he works as an assassin for the "syndicate" he is known as 'the black reaper'.

Examples of the price to pay:
There is a duo that works for the government and the male has the control over water....his price is smoking cigarettes. The female, who can manifest a storms, must drink beer. Those are the best prices I have encountered...

There is another male who works as a mercenary and his ability is to detonate any blood that is outside of his body...the price to be paid is the initial cut to get the blood flowing so his price is paid before he uses his ability. On the command of his finger snap anything that has his blood on it will explode.
Another woman has the ability to vibrate anything to any frequency using her voice....she has an interesting price. Her price is perpetuated from the previous life she lived....he daughter choked and died on cigarette butts and therefore he price is to swallow and hack up cigarette butts.

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The Cat Returns a studio ghibli film

 The Cat Returns





This is an earlier studio ghibli film and if you happen to have seen most of the other films you will notice a common character. This story is light, upbeat and generally humorous...if you like cats. There are many different characters but most are animals...this story doesn't exactly have an underlying value to teach except be careful who you save and know what your getting into before it is too late.
This story starts out with a young girl, pretty common studio ghibli cliche, walking to school with one of her girl friends. As they walk the one girl notices something odd about a stray cat. He was walking on his back legs...and also carrying a package in his mouth. The girl proceeds to absentmindedly have conversation with her friend but keeps an eye on the cat. Eventually the little rascal decides to cross the street without realizing a large truck would smoosh him to a pancake. So the heroine of the story grabs her friends field hockey stick and springs across the street to scoop the cat up, nearly getting hit herself. The cat then speaks with her for a while and proceeds as if nothing major just happened and disappears with the package.
If only the poor girl would have left the cat alone and gone to school on time...because she just saved the prince of the cat kingdom...yes somewhere hidden in the city full of people there was a place ruled by cats and only cats.

Anyhow this poor girl will now be praised by the royal cat family and showered with gifts. An ambassador for the cat finds her in the human world and deliveres an itinerary of gifts to be received. The girl is obviously in denial that a talking cat is going to give her presents so she goes home and goes to bed as normal...but when she wakes up her front lawn is overgrown with cat tails...and for some reason all the stray cats in the neighborhood start to follow her, she freaks out and runs to school to find out her pockets are filled with cat nip. Now she is beginning to get consirned. As she goes through the day doing normal girl stuff, crushing on boys she is to nervous to talk to, the ambassador shows up asking about the presents. The girl yells at him for a while making it clear she is not a feline and does not want a bunch of cat gifts. The ambassador invites her to the cat kingdom, but the request is just a formallity because she has no choice to go or not. Now she is taking these cats seriously as a bizzare threat. She trips and falls over and lands in a pile of trash, a voice in her head tells her to seek out a fat white cat that will protect her from the cat kingdom....and that is where the plot gets going.
On her wild goose chase she finds the fat white cat and eventually he leads her through a maze of alleyways to meet the baron.
She is in an empty plaza as the sun sets and all of a sudden light begins to shine through a window of a tiny building....this is apparently the baron coming to life but we never figure out what exactly is happening. The fat cat tells this new petite cat, the baron, to quit with the theatrics. The baron is an interesting cat dressed in a three piece suit with a cane. Before they all can get down to business however a whole bunch of cats appear and take the girl....the fat cat gives chase while the baron takes his flying mount, a raven, in pursuit of the young lady. The horde of cats begin to make these weird portals to jump through space and eventually they jump into their cat kingdom....the next part of the movie is interesting and silly. Not the best work by studio ghibli but not terrible either...I would probably watch it a few times. 5 out of 10

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Princess Mononoke - What is a Kodama? What is a mononoke?

Prince Ashitaka

In ancient times, the land lay covered in forests, where, from ages long past, dwelt the spirits of the gods. Back then, man and beast lived in harmony, but as time went by, most of the great forests were destroyed. Those that remained were guarded by gigantic beasts who owed their allegiances to the Great Forest Spirit, for those were the days of gods and of demons.

I have watched this movie time and time again to see if I could understand why it was called Princess Mononoke....but since the phrase was only refereed to once in Iron Town by the lady and the prince. I decided I would do some investigating to try and learn the whole story. First question for me to find was what in the world was a mononoke?

Mononoke - apparently a mononoke is a general term used to describe "a spirit of a thing" any sort of thing...an object or a monster or even a dead person. Usually the prisit of a bad or unfortunate unexplainable thing...so naturally the people of Iron town would consider San a spirit of something bad. The wolf girl is continuously trying to ambush and destroy Lady Eboshi, because the lady is trying to destroy the forest where the great forest spirit lives...so basically anything bad that happens is caused by malicious mononoke.
If you keep up with a Studio Ghibli you will notice that a Totoro is also a sort of a mononoke.

Forest God

 The Forest God may be considered a Mononoke...this god has the ability to give life and take life as he chooses.

Forest God

As he walks plants grow, but when he leaves
the plants wilt and die.

Kodama

Kodama -actually means "echo" but a literal meaning for the word is "tree spirit"...but because of the language it was written in could possibly translate into small ball or small spirit. If a kodama appears in front of you it is a sign of good luck and that the forest is healthy. In the movie Princess Mononoke there are literally thousands of these little spirits hanging around a great big tree. Kodama have the ability to turn transparent at will.
However some believe the kodama will lead the real forest spirit, a huge deer with a human face, right to them...

Princess Mononoke - Kodama

Princess Mononoke - kodama

Kodama

Forest Spirits

Prince Ashitaka and Kodama

The Hunger Games

The first book of the trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

Katniss

The Hunger Games

Compared to a Heinlein this book was written for middle school kids...and maybe it was written simply to appeal to the greatest number of people. I was out of books and heading into a long and arduous night at work so I decided to give Collins a try.

When I first started reading the novel I was almost bored...the story seemed to start like many others but with a few differences to set Collins apart. The world as we know it has failed and out of the ashes rose a new empire with 13 smaller districts...our heroine, Katniss, was from district 12, one of the poorest districts. She spends her day breaking the law by foraging and hunting in the forest beyond the gate with her friend Gale. We get some background story on the girl, her family and the boy and his family....nothing interesting happens until the day of the 'reaping' ...which is like a lottery except the person chosen must compete to the death with the other districts in "The Hunger Games". The heroine does not get picked however her twelve year old sister does and Katniss cannot let this happen so she volunteered to take her sisters place.