Sho Fukamachi Online

I was pleased to see that the girls in the Production I.G. animation Real Drive are drifting more in line with reality in terms of the female japanese physique:

That’s much more in line with the chubby sailor-suited figures you’ll see on the yamanote line than the usual super-skinny animation girls, which stretched credulity even for westerners.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what Real Drive is even about, despite watching 3 episodes so far. Some kind of point about how “diving” (VR access) in the “meta-real” (some kind of cyberspace environment) is analagous to diving in the actual ocean – which, by the way, seems to have come to life? It is incomprehensible. Looks nice, though, and it’s always interesting to see Masamune Shirow and Production I.G.’s vision of the near-ish future.

A more interesting reading might be that ubiquitous networking, now and in the future, is becoming such a fixture in the modern world, and such an unknown technology for the majority, that it is now being treated in fiction as a kind of naturally-occurring environment, with all the emergent behaviour that entails and even being accessed in a similar physical way. This isn’t new, of course – the mapping of physical gestures onto actions executed in a cyberspace context dates back to Neuromancer and maybe beyond. But it’s certainly becoming more common – this is the second animation series I’ve encountered in a year which revolves completely around the concept of unexpected emergent behaviour in an omnipresent networked environment.

On another note, in my opinion, sometime in the last year average fansub animation downloaded using bittorrent has exceeded DVD quality in both picture and subtitles/extras. A 350M mkv file, which typically includes excellent peer-reviewed subtitles and is compressed using H264, is higher resolution and generally just looks, sounds and is excellent. It is available sooner, is typically replaced if problems are found, and has fantastic high-speed distribution. Bluray might be better but is completely unavailable, and would be overpriced and months or years late if it did appear.

Nice going, media companies – another reason not to buy your tacky plastic disks, delivered years late, with shoddy production values and at eye-watering prices.