Technology Marches On

When softsubbing first became possible and then fashionable, it involved a number of compromises. Fancy sign typesetting wasn't really doable, and elaborate karaokes seemed to go the way of the dinosaur. The technology for elaborate typesetting, and the performance of softsubbed playback, simply wasn't there.

Well, time marches on. PCs have become powerful (I write this on a quad-core i5 that spends 99.9% of its time doing nothing). More importantly, the software for typesetting and subtitle playback has improved considerably. As a result, sign typesetting is approaching the glory days of hardsubbed AFX signs, and complex karaokes are rising from their graves.

For typesetting, the key development has been the use of motion tracking software, combined with automated frame-by-frame transforms of a base sign based on the tracked motions. This allows frame-by-frame typesetting of signs that move in non-linear ways, with none of the hassle associated with the manual process. Back in 2009, I set a 50-frame moving sign in Orphan's Hand Maid May by hand, and it took me hours, with manual computation of the position deltas between frames. I did a similar effort with a non-linear sign in Orphan's Space Neko Theater; after that, I swore off the practice. But with new software technology, it's no longer necessary.

The motion tracking software is based on the sorts of techniques used in motion-capture special effects. After designating an initial set of points to be tracked, the software follows the image (in this case, a sign) through subsequent frames, generating coordinates. Those coordinates feed an Aegisub automation script that applies the coordinate changes (including changes in angles) to an initial typesetting specification. The result is a frame-by-frame sign that accurately tracks the motion on the screen.

Complex softsubbed karaokes are a more recent development. When Polished released a DVD version of Tokimeki Memorial a few years back, the initial version, which emodied C1's hardcoded karaoke in the script, simply wouldn't play. Polished had to redo the scripts with a simple, line-timed karaoke. The problem wasn't the speed of PCs; it was the subtitle rendering software, vsfilter, which suffered from a number of design bottlenecks. Recently, the community became sufficiently fed up to code up a replacement, called xy-filter, which is significantly more efficient.

I saw this in action with the recent DVD redo of Rescue Wings. When topf(h) added the typesetting, he simply incorporated the Ureshii karaokes verbatim — even though some of them to thousands of lines. With xy-filter, they play back as smooth as butter on almost any modern machine. Now fancy karaokes are making a comeback. GotWoot's opening for the season's hit show, Magi, runs to 6500 lines. I'm sure more will follow.

These developments will not be without their detractors. Viewers with old PCs will be in trouble. Non-techies will have difficulties in figuring out how and where to install xy-filter. As with the advent of the MKV container, replacing OGM; of h.264, replacing XviD; and 10-bit encoding, replacing 8-bit; the fansub community will by and large ignore them. One hopes that recoders (who typically change the original format to MP4 for playback on tablets and phones) can provide relief to technology laggards.

So with beautiful signs and complex karaokes again with reach, I think it's time for updated versions of some classics. I'd love to see Amatsuki, Yume Tsukai, Nodame Cantabile, and other classics from Ureshii or C1 redone, with their original karaokes. (Some are probably still beyond reach: the Skip Beat OP karaoke is more than 8MB long.) If you've got the interest, and the raws, I have the scripts.

Summer's Over

Fall has arrived in New England. The days are cool and crisp; there's more rain. The nights are longer than the days and downright cold. While the leaves haven't started turning, the ferns are turning brown and folding up. Summer is over.

So it's time to take a brief look back at the Summer 2012 anime season. I don't have much to say, because I found most of it unwatchable. My favorites:

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita. Quirky, maddening, and hilarious by turns, Jinrui was my favorite show of the summer. It's a ferociously angry satire about the human condition, and its fractured story-telling and bizarre changes of tone only added to its appeal. The nameless narrator ("Watashi" - "I" in Japanese) provided a sardonic, bemused tour through a fallen human world and its new inheritors, the adorable, dangerous, and malleable fairies. Some of the set pieces - like the headless chickens plunging to their doom to the strains of "Ave Maria," or the spectacular self-immolation of robot Bread-san - left indelible impressions. Alas, the BD sales for volume 1 are only so-so, so I think we've seen the last of Watashi and her world.
• Binbougami ga. A mostly over-the-top, take-no-prisoners comedy filled with bizarre characters, parodies, and the like. There were occasional dips into seriousness - sometimes with disastrous effects - but mostly it was non-stop slapstick, much of it politically incorrect. I mean, seriously, an S&M-loving dog-god and a perverted monk who sing a hymn of praise to "oppai" (boobs) to open an explicitly labeled fanservice episode? gg did a great job localizing the show and the gags.
• Hyouka. A carryover from the spring season, Hyouka worked at multiple levels: as eye candy, as a study of high-school aimlessness, as (occasionally) a mystery show, but mostly as a character study. The quartet of leads were interesting and complicated, and the series gave them time to show their characters developing and changing. Even Miss "I'm Curious," Chitanda Eru, was shown to have greater depths that the adorable, somewhat ditzy personality she showed on the surface. The show was beautiful to look at (KyoAni, natch), but it was also worth looking at.
• Moyashimon Returns. Those talking microbes are irresistible; must be the science student in me. I wish the show hadn't left so many threads hanging, but it was fun to hang out with the gang for another season.

That's pretty much it, as far as I'm concerned. I lost interest in Natsuiro Kiseki, Joshiraku, and Utakoi fairly quickly. Hagure and Dakara were too shoddy for even the abundant fanservice to compensate. Many of the other shows (Kokoro, Oda Nobuna, Tari Tari, Koi, Campione, Arcana Famiglia) seemed like retreads of retreads. Accel World and its sibling Sword Art Online also get the DTD (done to death) award. I didn't finish the first season of Rinne no Lagrange, so the second season didn't work either. And as for the end of Sket Dance... there was much rejoicing.

Of the ongoing shows, I continue to look forward to Polar Bear's Cafe, whose droll style and shaggy bear stories seem to improve week over week, and Poyopoyo, which is truer to life that most cat fanciers would care to admit. If the fall shows prove disapointing, I may go back and start on Space Brothers, which failed to catch my eye the first time around.

See ya!

Rescuing "Rescue Wings" Redux

It should be no secret to readers of this blog that Rescue Wings (Yomigaeru Sora) is one of my favorite anime series. It's a terrific story about the Japanese Air Rescue Service and the people who serve in it. It's a show about and for grown-ups, but it should appeal to younger viewers as well. It has a great balance of action and character development, and the stories blend tragedy and hope in equal measure.

Rescue Wings was one of the first series I worked on when I joined the Ureshii fansub team. The project had a checkered history, with almost as many near-death experiences as in the stories it tells. Ureshii started subbing the TV broadcasts but fell further and further behind. The project was restarted from DVD sources, but after a great start it suddenly stalled out after the sixth episode. The core problem was that the translator didn't like doing songs, and there were a lot of them. Long gaps occurred between episodes six and seven, and seven and eight, and then nothing.

Almost two years later, I persuaded some friends from another group — in particular, a new translator — to help Ureshii finish the series. This required rebuilding the team from scratch, in particular for typesetting. The karaokes were done by cut and paste until the team got to episode 12. There we were stymied by inclusion of verses that had never been used before. Because the original karaoke typesetter was long gone, I ultimately wrote a C (!) program to build the typesetting for the missing section, and the project came to a successful conclusion. It look more than two years to finish a 13-week series.

There matters rested for four years. Three weeks ago, a resubber decided to redo Rescue Wings from the DVDs in modern encoding technology at larger file sizes. However, all he had to go by was the dialog script in the Ureshii releases, so he omitted every single sign in the release. Someone promptly offered this version on BakaBT.

At this point, I went ballistic and posted a bit of a diatribe on the BakaBT forums. It pointed out that the signs carried much of the story and were critical to understanding the timeline of the rescues. Further, I had offered the Ureshii script archives to anyone who wanted to make a legitimate effort at redoing a series with better video, as Jinsei did with Nana. (That offer still stands, by the way.)

Well, sometimes things do work out. toph (or tophf), who did the terrific rips of the Tezaka Osamu "adult" anime films I'm working on, saw my note and volunteered to typeset the signs — including the ones that were originally done with AFX. Within a matter of days he had new and very complete scripts for me to check.

I went back to look at Rescue Wings for the first time in four years. With fresh eyes, the cracks in the edifice were very obvious. Rescue Wings had been done over a long period of time, with two or three different translators, and at least four editors. There were numerous consistency errors in spelling and terminology as well as some stylistic variations in tone. toph(f) gave me stern advice on avoiding "editor's remorse," so I focused on only the most essential changes.

I should mention that toph(f) not only preserved the complex Ureshii karaokes, he fixed an issue that had nagged me for a long time. The ED was done without official lyrics, because the scanned booklet was missing the lyrics page for that song. As a result, the last "Engrish" phrase (Eternal Wing) was rendered as "Eternally" in most of the episodes. I thought the karaoke too complex to alter, but toph(f) fixed them all, seamlessly. So this new version of Rescue Wings, although not definitive, is a significant improvement on the original subs.

(I'm amazed that these complex karaokes play so smoothly in softsub. Viewers will probably need xy-filter and a decent multi-core processor to avoid significant lagging.)

Viewing Rescue Wings again for the first time in four years renewed my admiration. This is not a typical shounen series about a young man's journey from nerd to superhero. The protagonist, Kazuhiro Uchida, starts out full of doubt about his vocation and slowly builds his competence, and confidence, through hard work and harsh lessons. At the end, he's not a superstar but rather an accepted member of a highly professional team. The "antagonist," an older and somewhat embittered veteran pilot named Shuujiro Honda, is shown as a fully rounded character, with a convincing back story to explain his hard-bitten attitude. He doesn't mellow into a father figure but remains true to himself, while gradually accepting that Kazuhiro is mastering the job. The rescues are exciting but not uniformly successful, just as in real life.

I also want to note the exceptionally effective use of music in the series.  The ending song is an emotionally overwrought ballad that, despite its histrionics, fits the tone of the series well. There are several different versions, using different verses, a fact that gave the translator and the karaoke artist fits. The OP and the insert songs are appropriate. However, the most interesting use of music is in the central arc (episodes 6 and 7), which provide Hongo's back story. The episode 6 OP is an irrepressibly bouncy piece of j-pop called "Madcap Island" — but it plays over a black-and-white flashback of a funeral, where it seems totally out of place. By the end of episode 7, where it is used in the story and also over the credits, the song has come to symbolize the spirit of the rescue squadron: to never give up in the face of adversity.

If you haven't watched Rescue Wings, I urge you to give it a try. It's available in a variety of formats: Froth-Bite's hardsubbed mp4 version, compatible with mobile devices, and this new, entirely softsubbed version with state of the art video. You won't go wrong with either of them. I still have a soft spot for the original Ureshii version, and if the softsubbed karaokes and signs won't play on your computer, you can still see how they looked.

The (Endless) Circle of Shounen

The long-running anime Bleach recently ended, after 366 episodes. The long-running manga Naruto is rumored to be ending soon, and the anime should follow after it exhausts the source material. Among the numerous fans of these series, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But in my neck of the woods… there is much rejoicing. I have only one question about the demise of these shows: what took you so long? And when will One Piece, Sket Dance, Toriko, Fairy Tail, and the rest exit stage right as well?

Of all the tropes in anime, I detest the endless shounen shows the most. They are, simply put, repetitious and boring, because they all follow the same basic pattern, which I call the (Endless) Circle of Shounen:

1. Plucky youth discovers he has some special ability.
2. Plucky youth meets some supporting characters.
3. Plucky youth goes out to battle and defeat the Bad Guy.
4. Plucky youth strengthens his power(s).
5. Plucky youth discovers there’s Another Bad Guy (the Next Boss) above the last one.

Repeat steps 2-5 until nausea sets in.

This cycle is nothing new. In fact, I encountered it back in the Dark Ages when I first read EE “Doc” Smith’s legendary (as in legendarily bad) science-fiction series Lensman, which dates from the sci-fi pulp magazines of the 1930’s. In each volume of Lensman, our noble hero encounters and defeats dastardly villains from outer space in the name of Truth, Justice, and… oops, wrong series… in the name of interplanetary harmony. But at the start of the next volume, more powerful and dastardly villains appear to upset the apple cart, and the plot starts all over again. “Meet the new boss… same as the old boss.”

More recently, I saw this in the manga of Kekkaishi. I have a soft spot for the anime series, because it was one of the first long shows I edited from start to finish. However, as I’ve continued reading the manga (the anime ends at volume 13 of 37), the repetitive, cyclical structure has become very apparent and extremely dull.  Our teenage hero defeats a villain, powers up, and promptly runs into the villain behind the previous villain. All of the original charm of the series – the comedy, the quirky character traits, the fledgling romance – is lost in the endless action of the endless Circle of Shounen.

Now, I understand why shounen manga authors repeat the same basic plot. It’s very difficult to create a linear narrative extending over dozens or hundreds of episodes. The great geniuses of 19^th century literature, like Dickens, Tolstoy, and Hugo, could extend a plot over hundreds or even a thousand pages, but that would only fill fifty or sixty episodes. The mangaka or screenwriter has to fill in a far longer canvas with some degree of continuity. In that context, step and repeat makes a lot of sense.

Further, long-running shounen series, in both manga and anime form, convey great economic benefits on the creators – not just guaranteed income, but tie-ins from merchandise, movies, DVD and BluRay releases, foreign licensing, etc – not to mention doujinshi. In industries fraught with uncertainty and badly impacted by the recession and digital media, long-running shounen series provide an annuity income stream and some precious security. It’s only human to pursue these goals.

Nonetheless, these shows are a blight on the anime scene, sucking up dollars and creative oxygen that might go into more imaginative shows, and contributing to the descent of anime into repetitive trash. I treasure the one season of Usagi Drop or UN-GO or Tsuritama, or the intermittent seasons of Natsume Yuujinchou, more than the whole corpus of Naruto and Shippuuden.  There’s more wit in the thirteen episodes of Fireball or Fireball Charming or Yondemasu Azazel-san than the six hundred plus episodes of One Piece.

So, otaku of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your mental chains. Support term limits for manga and anime series. Dump those shounen shows, and the moe-blob shows, and the rest of the repetitive dreck you’ve been watching, and demand something better, something creative, something original. Your mind will thank you, at least eventually.

A Delicate Subject

This blog is about the rise of fansubbed hentai anime. H-animes are a somewhat delicate subject in the fansub community; hence, the title of this essay.

Five years ago, fansubbed hentai anime was comparatively rare. There were no groups really dedicated to the idea. Some fansub groups had an h-anime "division" which produced the occasional episode. Lunar did a few; Shinsen did the first two episodes of Kage (Shadow) and then abandoned the project. Almost all h-animes on the Interweb were rips of shows that had been licensed in the US and released, with subtitles and/or dubs, on R1 DVDs. For one thing, only the R1 DVDs were uncensored. All Japanese DVDs were and still are censored, with pixellation over the really "naughty bits."

However, since the middle of 2009, this trend has been dramatically reversed. Based on an admittedly unscientific survey, it appears that in the last three years, fansubs of unlicensed shows have outnumbered rips of licensed shows by more than five to one. There are groups dedicated just to fansubbing unlicensed h-anime, such as Erobeat, SubDESU-H, PixieS, and Fakku. What has changed?

One thing that has not changed, at least not for the better, is the "quality" of the shows. Current hentai shows are cheap and essentially plotless, a concatenation of sex scenes with minimal connective tissue. Gone are the romantic comedies with a final sex scene, such as Canvas, Yesterday Once More, or First Love, or the intense action and terrific artwork of Kage. (Actually, what was classified as 18-restricted in the 1990s is far less explicit than modern "mainstream" anime like Yosuga no Sora or Aki Sora.) In fact, fansubbing modern hentai is not really necessary. The dialog is, to put it mildly, beside the point. So what is driving the boom in fansubbed h-anime?

One possible answer is the rise of file-sharing sites, particularly sites that compensated content uploaders for downloads, like FileServe. Erobeat was the first group to realize the potential. The major bottleneck in fansubbed hentai was not lack of demand - the fansubbing audience being mostly otaku males - but lack of translators. Most fansub translators looked down on hentai and refused to work on it. (So did many timers, editors, and encoders, for that matter.) Erobeat use the money raised from file-sharing sites to pay for DVDs and translations. This in turn generated more content, which generated more money, which paid for more DVDs and translations - a virtuous circle. Erobeat used the file-sharing sites strictly to pay for expenses. Once a show had paid off its costs, it was released as a torrent instead. Erobeat dealt with the (lack of) quality in modern shows by focusing mostly on the back catalog, providing, for example, the first accurate translation of 1987's ecchi classic Junk Boy.

Other groups, notably SubDESU-H, picked up the model and ran with it. These groups used a variety of raws as sources, not just DVDs, which allowed them to work on even more shows, and more recent ones, driving up volume and the revenue stream from file-sharing sites. The MegaUpload shutdown interrupted the picture briefly, but new sites have arisen to fill the gap, and the flood of animated, subtitled porn continues unabated.

From a technical point of view, fansubbing h-anime is easier than mainstream shows. The most difficult part is finding staff, particularly translators. Once a translation is available, the rest is straightforward. The scripts tend to be short, with long sequences of just heavy breathing and sound effects. That simplifies timing. The dialog is cliched, mostly verbalized monologues of the action on the screen. Editing is reduced to finding different phrasing for reactions and body parts, to vary the monotony. There's no typesetting, beyond the title and the choice of a font style. So it's step 1: find a raw; step 2: create a simple script; and step 3: profit.

Exceptions exist, of course. Kage had a dense plot that required careful translation and editing, as well as beautiful visuals that needed first-class encoding. The great Tezuka Osamu's ventures into h-anime (Cleopatra and Sen'ya Ichiya Monogatari) haven't received the translations they deserve, although excellent encodes are available. But today's h-animes are interchangeable and disposable.

As with mainstream anime, h-anime has its orphans. Some of these are shows that were only partially licensed in the US, such as Beast City, Kiniraru Kimochi, Lunatic Night, and The Last Kunoichi.  All of them are missing the concluding episode. Izumo and Kodomo no Jikan (the h-animes, not the TV shows) are fansubs, but they too were abandoned one episode short of completion. There are undoubtedly others.

So here's another example of the technology and finances of the Interwebs interacting with the fansub community to alter what shows are subtitled and how. Whether you think the alteration is good or bad is up to you. Technology has no inherent intent; how it's used by people provides that.

Summer's Here, and the Time is Ripe...

...for a quick summary of the spring season. As usual, I'll discuss my top picks, and then the rest of the shows I watched.

My personal top five, in alphabetical order:

• Acchi Kocchi. What seemed like a typical moe-blob show evolved into a charming and sly slice-of-life comedy. The characters were interesting, and the gags ranged from good to great. Yes, it helped that Tsumiki seemed to be some sort of cat, but it was really the interaction among the five leads that made the show shine.  There was even some character progression, if nothing conclusive.
• Haiyore Nyarlko-san. The subversive comedy of the season, if not quite as anarchic as Yondemasu Azazel-san. Chock-a-block with parodies, references, political satire, and shattered fourth walls, Nyarlko-san was far better than the Flash-based shorts that preceded it. The show never took itself seriously, which allowed for absurd plots to climax in even more absurd denouements. (The summary for several episodes was, "What a terrible punch line.")
• Nazo no Kanojo X. Like most viewers, I'm still put off by the drool ick-factor, but that aside, Nazo was a charming and honest exploration of the head-heart (or hormone-emotion) conflicts of teenage romance. If the hero, Tsubaki, was a bit generic, the heroine, Urabe, was an original creation, brilliantly voiced by a new seiryuu. I wish we could see how this all turns out.
• Polar Bear Cafe. This droll, slow-paced comedy seems to be an acquired taste, but it suits me fine. Polar Bear's constant trolling; Panda-kun's childisth narcissism; Penguin-san's romantic anguish; and the general absurdity of animals and humans interacting naturally while still remaining true to their natures; all tickle my funny-bone. The last couple of episodes have been unexpectedly "sincere" without becoming maudlin.
• Tsuritama. Probably my favorite. A show that began as character-driven and transitioned to plot-driven without missing a beat. All of the characters change and grow - and grow closer - while pursuing that least-interesting of sports (fishing) and a Macguffin of a fish that legend says they must catch. The interactions among Yuki, Haru, Akira, Natsuki (and Tapioca the duck) drive the show and shape the plot as well. Tsuritama was visually innovative and a pleasure to watch. Unfortunately, it truly wrapped up conclusively, so no second season or OVAs seem possible.

The others that I watched or am watching:

• Accel World. I really have trouble with the lead character being drawn as a dumpy chibi. It makes his friendships with Snow Black and the others seem unrealistic. Or will we discover that the "real world," as the hero sees it, is also a virtual reality of some kind? In any case, I find Accel only intermittenly interesting, as the VR trope has been done to death.
• Ginga e Kickoff. I started watching this because of Guardian Enzo's recommendation, and I'm still watching it, despite my distaste for both shounen and sports anime. It's not sophisticated, or brilliantly animated, or all that original. However, it has sincerity and enthusiasm going for it, as well as likeable characters and realistic situations.
• Hyouka. Or, the mystery of "Much Ado About Nothing." I was okay with the show's trivial mysteries when they only lasted an episode, but the current four-episode arc is trying my patience. It is totally dependent on what Roger Ebert calls the Idiot Plot device: if they ask the screenwriter what she intended, the show is over in 30 seconds. But meanwhile, it's beautiful eye candy and interesting on occasion.
• Kimi to Boku 2. If you enjoyed season one, you liked this; and if you didn't, you didn't. I did, although the show is sometimes so laid back as to be soporific.
• Kore wa Zombie 2. The same comments apply to this sequel. If it was no better than season one, it was no worse, either.
• Kuroko no Basketo. This started out well, with an interesting premise and set of characters, but now it is caught up in the Endless Cycle of Shounen: in each show, the basketball team must draw a new rabbit out of the hat to confront the Next Boss. I'd like to see more character development, particularly of Kuroko, who remains a cipher.
• Lupin III: The Woman Called Mine Fujiko. Stylish, sexy, and totally over the top. The author's fetishes are on full display in this series, but to me, that just added to the interest. I particularly liked the dark side that Lupin and the other characters displayed. This wasn't the G-rated Lupin of the later TV series and specials: Lupin wanted into Fujiko's shorts, and Zenegata actually got there.  The animation style was different, gritty, and well-suited to the material.
• Medaka Box. There are better shows about high-school student councils. Much better shows.
• Mouretsu Pirates. This show seemed thematically conflicted. On one hand, it was about cute high-school girls doing cute things. On the other hand, it was about galactic conflict. On one hand, there was lots of slice-of-life comedy. On the other hand, ships got blown up and people killed. The show never really came to grips with the life-and-death nature of piracy and treated it, until the last few episodes, as a form of cosplay. Still, the heroine was plucky and likable, the supporting characters interesting, and the animation good.
• Sakamichi no Apollon. I'd like to add to the near-universal chorus of praise this series received, but I felt it fell apart at the end. Probably there was too much material for a 12-episode show, but the breaks in continuity, and the deus-ex-machina events, of the last few episodes were very annoying. Kudos, though, for the music, the animation, and the direction; it was fun spending time with these characters.
• Tasogare Otome. This just couldn't hold my interest after the first couple of episodes.

I dropped Folkstales from Japan, Hiiro no Kakera, Natsuiro Kiseki, Saki Achiga-hen, Sankarea, and Zetman. I never started Aquarion Evol, Eureka 7 AO, Jormugand, Phi Brain S2, Queen's Blade Rebellion, Sengoku Collection, or Shining Hearts. Your mileage may vary.

Among the short series, I continue to like Poyopoyo best. Yurumates 3D was okay (although not as good as the OVAs), but Recorder to Randoseru fell back too often on the "he's a child molester" joke.

Wish List

I have a modest list of projects that require skills I don't have. Here's the list, with status (I have removed the completed items):

• Urusei Yatsura special: typesetting. This special, released by ARR, needs an overhaul for timing and editing. Even the "fixed" version on BakaBT is terrible. The retiming editing, and translation check are done, but there are now 22 signs of considerable complexity needing work. Status: in QC. I typeset what I could and used \an8 for the rest.
• Sotsugyousei: translation. This three-part OVA from ARR also has garbled subtitles. Status: first two episodes done.
• Harukanaru Toki no Nake de 2: translation. This three-part OVA is available with a German dub and subs, but the subs are much shorter than either the Japanese or German dialog. I'd also like to find an R2J source, as the PAL transcoding introduces serious artifacts. Status: in QC; using the German DVD source.
• Harukanaru Toki no Nake de specials: translation. Two specials from the original series have not been translated. One is a recap, the other has new content.
• Nagasarete Airantou BD: timing. This early release from Polished preserves all the timing and editing defects of the original Ayako subtitles. The series is 26 episodes, so it needs a proficient and efficient timer. Status: first 3 episodes done; stalled.
• Gosenzosama Banbanzai movie (aka Moroko): timing. This summary of the six-part OVA can be translated by reference to the OVA once it's been timed.

 So if you would like to help with any of these projects, drop me a line.

[Updated 27-Jan-2013]