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Anime World Order Show # 240 – Jazz Music? More like JASS Music

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:23:43 — 38.4MB)

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In this episode, Gerald jazzes up the proceedings by reviewing the 2023 theatrical film Blue Giant, released in theaters, home video, and streaming by GKIDS.

Introduction (0:00 – 42:01)
When we started this podcast, we felt that other anime podcasts spent more time talking about videogames than anime. So naturally, Daryl talks about videogames he’s been playing before the anime he’s mostly not seasonally watching at the moment. There are, at least, plenty of upcoming Animeigo releases (of things from 20+ years ago) and current manga releases (of things from 40+ years ago) for him to dive into, plus he’s finally got the 4K UHD of the (40 year old) Macross: Do You Remember Love? which is…yeah, not great. Fortunately, Gerald and Clarissa are more current. And yes, that is totally future dub voice of Heero Yuy in Gundam Wing, Mark Hildrath, dropping those sick Canadian white boy rapper beats as laid down by future Miraculous Ladybug composer Alain Garcia on a show that had episodes directed by a guy who would later go on to direct that cowbell episode of Utena. (Power Rangers/DBZ dub fans could already tell those were indeed Ron Wasserman synthesizers backing up the Cam Clarke narration.)

Review: Blue Giant (42:01 – 1:23:43)\
Blue Giant is a seinen manga released in English via omnibus editions courtesy of Seven Seas Entertainment, and this theatrical film arrives courtesy of GKIDS. Who else would even know what to attempt to do with a movie like this, anyway? Blue Giant is the tale of a trio of young adults striving to make an impact upon the Tokyo jazz scene, as high school seniors naturally tend to aspire to. And unlike those OTHER anime titles about bands trying to amount to something, these guys don’t just have one song followed by 7 CDs of soundtracks featuring a ton of music you never hear in the anime itself! Blue Giant is ongoing by way of sequels, but this two-hour film adapts the original 10-volume storyline thanks to some deliberate focused decisions on what to skip over or summarize and what to cover in detail.

It’s a monumental challenge to interpret these manga sound effects as the music heard in the animated film. Or it would have been, had it not been for one simple trick.

The trick in question is that the ultra-talented jazz tour de force that is Hiromi Uehara (known worldwide as just “Hiromi”) was a longtime fan of the manga and is the one handling all the music in this movie.

Blue Giant’s cinematography and framing is not done with portrait mode on your phone in mind, which is why this couldn’t work as the episode’s embedded artwork. Wait, don’t they require both widescreen and portrait artwork these days? And doesn’t the resolution have to be 10x what we provide? Maybe that’s why we’re not listed up top anymore. It couldn’t possibly be lack of popularity due to talking about things like this instead of doing recaps of Solo Leveling or whatever is going on.
What guys HAVEN’T had a meaningful friendship start from encountering a stranger in the public restroom and having this be said as the icebreaker?

The director is Yuzuru Tachikawa of Mob Psycho 100 fame, so expect some really innovative camerawork and animation techniques on display here. Though due to time constraints, there are some very brief uses of 3D CG employed. But how do they compare to the level of 3D CG we just experienced with Berserk 2016? We go into it.

Remember when Daryl said that at least this movie didn’t do the Berserk 2016 thing with its CG shots? He lied.
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Anime World Order Show # 239 – CLANG CLANG CLANG Went The Demon

Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:12:14 — 60.6MB)

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2025 is off to a terrible start, not just in terms of current world events but because in this episode Daryl follows up on his previous review of the 1997 Berserk TV series with this review of the decades-anticipated Berserk sequel TV series from 2016. Oh boy.

Introduction (0:00 – 56:51)
It’s finally happened, after years of waiting! All of Macross (almost) is now streaming in the United States…with closed caption-y style subtitles because it’s Hulu and some edits to content because um…Disney? It’s still a major step forward. In addition, the one that isn’t streaming–Macross: Do You Remember Love?–is also now out on 4K UHD and finally with official English subtitles after decades of waiting…and it’s an AI upscale, like how they did Macross Zero. The Summer 2025 issue of Otaku USA Magazine is now out, and we’ve got reviews in there for some highly anticipated titles such as the They Were Eleven manga; no longer must you pay hundreds of dollars for used copies of Viz’s Four Shojo Stories! Discotek Media annnounced a new set of licenses, so we recap their anime announcements. This time around, they were focusing more on live-action and US animation than anime, but there’s still some solid Japanese animation picks worth considering. We then talk about what we’ve checked out in this current anime season that’s just started, as one has to do every few months lest you fall too out of touch. Contrary to popular belief, the AWO is watching current anime regularly. We’re just mostly writing about it rather than doing podcast episodes, because we like to wait for things to be completed before reviewing them just in case the quality of the show varies relative to how it started.

Review: Berserk 2016 (56:51 – 2:12:14)
Now that we reviewed the original 1997 television series, it’s only fitting that Daryl follow up and review the Duke Nukem Forever of anime: the 2016 sequel that is a hybrid of 3D CG with some traditional 2D digital animation. Perhaps comparing it to Duke Nukem Forever is unwarranted. After all, even Duke Nukem Forever at least had Dr. Proton. Let’s not think too hard about the fact that Duke Nukem Forever is now such a long time gone that it’s been out for pretty much as long as people were waiting for it to come out in the wake of Duke Nukem 3D. Anyway, this Berserk 2016 TV show remains a meme, and it’s been almost a decade. Daryl elected to show Gerald and Clarissa–who’d never actually seen it before–the retail Blu-Ray version (which he owns!), since that’s the “fixed” and “cleaned up” version rather than the broadcast version everybody else gets their animated GIFs and screen grabs from since that was a massively anticipated simulcast once upon a time. There is probably nothing about this we can say or insight we can provide that hasn’t extensively been said before by others who know Berserk in far more granular detail than we do.

We imagine everyone who worked on this that wasn’t one of the 8 credited producers asked this daily.
Nine credited production companies brought this to you. None of them could successfully blend what they were doing with what the others were doing.
That was how we felt too, Farnese. But this was episode 2 of 24.
Every time they showed Sonia’s face in the credits, all I could think about was Osaka from Azumanga Daioh because of her agape mouth.
The end credits of the final episode are in a totally different, mostly 2D style. We feel like this is the studio saying “we would’ve wanted the whole show to be done this way, but we were too small to handle the production ourselves.” We have no evidence to support this aside from the scene existing as it does, where it does.