Category: Links

The Mikka Bouzu webcomic — documenting one man's futile search for enlightenment — has smashed through the one-year barrier like an iron fist through a polystyrene ceiling tile. A round of double-Zen applause (two hands clapping) to Ed O'Grady, the cartoonist behind it.

 

Angeline Jolie and Lucy Liu — together at last! This year Dreamworks will release Kung Fu Panda, a children's animation featuring the five animal stylists, and the eponymous panda. The staggering thing of course is that they seem to have passed by the possibility of using the floral styles. Not one of the studios has approached Fudebakudo for film options on that. Yet. Maybe it will be the sequel.

 

Last year I wrote about samurai crabs. This year starts with news of a crabfight in Hakodate — Shoplifting 'seafood samurai' attacks security guard with crab. Crabfighting aficionados will be appalled to learn that, according to that report, Japanese citizens these days use imported crabs for their crabfights.

Link via Japundit.

 

It's that time of year again, so I've put the Exploding Pen "Rudolph" animation back on the site.

 

I've just got back from a fairly long trip to Bangkok. There was a lot of training with my  aikido friends and teachers over there, as well as meeting old and special friends off the mat.

In particular I also caught up with René. René is the super-talented cartoonist who did the Fudebakudo animations. He's also the best storyteller I know and we share the same cartoon view on much of the world's strangeness. He's also unlucky in love — I mention this only so that this terrible afflication might be recorded in the internet's search engines and therefore become a universal truth. "You see?" girls will say, pointing at a hundred flickering screens, "it must be so . . . it says so on Google. I won't break my heart by hurling myself against his rugged and yet sensitive exterior because in the long run it will be pointless: he is unlucky in love." Then they will clasp their own bosoms and sigh, a hundred hearts breaking, disappointed. And he'll plod along seeing girls pointing and whispering behind their hands, and know it's because of the internet. Currently, you see, we don't know how they know. At least after this there will be an explanation.

By my calculations, we hadn't met for over four years, so we spent a lot of time hanging out. We even did a nostalgic trip back to the same Japanese restaurant where we regularly met while Fudebakudo was being finished. It's all changed now (well, actually it hasn't much, but they don't do the freebies they used to), and there's no plaque up commemorating the completion of the project. Way back in 2003 I had taken a folder with all the final artwork in it and — long story short — René accidentally constructed a syphon out of bent drinking straws which started pumping iced coffee over everything. Those were the days.

Anyway, from back around that time René and his brother Raúl did a little film that went on to feature in several animation festivals. It's called Sonidos de Otoño (that's "Sounds of Autumn") and is now on YouTube.

Incidentally, René and Raúl worked on the Fudebakudo samurai flick-man animation together. Raúl now works as an animator in Vancouver. If you play Company of Heroes and think the motion capture is well done, well, you're wrong: it's not motion capture, it's Raúl's team's skilfull animation.

René and I stood in an IT mall in Bangkok watching a tournament match of Company of Heroes. They probably thought we were in awe of their super-fragging gameplay. In fact we were marvelling at how the soldiers run out of step with each other and how the smoke works. Cartoonists, eh?

There are two questions everyone needs to ask about any martial art — "does it work on the street?" and "does it work on the catwalk?"  This video suggests that the answer to the second one, for Shaolin kung fu, is a resounding "yes."

 

I think there might also be a lesson here about looking where you are walking but, to be fair, maybe that's hard when spotlights are being beamed into your face. 

(via Japundit, who make some wry observations on karma, too) 

If you ever find yourself in a pinch with only a sheet of paper between yourself and your enemies, knowing a skill such as shuriken-folding could well save your bacon. So here's a link explaining How to Fold a Shuriken. 

Of course Fudebakudo has this to say about origami. There are also the remarkable downloadable slippers — once you've mastered that technique you never have to buy another pair of shoes again. In fact, there are probably cobblers out there whose businesses were ruined when Fudebakudo combined the technologies of origami and internet. Sorry cobblers.

 

Normally, of course, ninja bears practice secretly. In the woods. So this is rare footage. Or pawage.

  

The "Fight for Kisses" game trailer * features some nicely observed martial art details — no, not skipping with a bra, I mean the brightly coloured wooden beads on the mook yan yong — oh never mind. Just enjoy the animation.

 

* Warning — trailer contains gratuitous advertising.

Last weekend I went to the BAFTA (that's the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) on Piccadilly to see the UK premier of Hula Girls, a Japanese Full Monty (except it's girls instead of boys, and it's hula-dancing rather than stripping). Beyond the intriguing premise of building a Hawaian Centre in a bleak mining town (which happens to be the true part of the story), the film is fairly straightforward and at times labours the clichés a bit — it but it was an enjoyable evening, with an entertaining question-and-answer session with the director at the end.

Afterwards, I was standing by the entrance to the bar, waiting for my friends (girls, as ever, going to the toilet en masse), when the director and his party came through from the theatre. To set the scene, I should mention that I am over six foot even when I'm not wearing my black ex-British Army Boots. With shaved head, black combat adventure trousers, and black hoodie, standing by the entrance on my own (alert, no slouching), I unwittingly looked like the security hired for the evening. The party stopped at the door, and one of them leaned towards me (actually, my chest) and peered intently at the logo on my black hoodie — it's an embroidered Fudebakudo logo, in scarlet thread. She then asked me if the bar was open. Well, it clearly was open, but she asked me as if I knew.

Only after I had said that it was did I realise that she had thought I was "working the door." And then I understood what had happened — the Fudebakudo logo, with its samurai helmet face-mask, looks a bit like, well, a mask, which is also the logo of the BAFTA.

Perhaps I will be able to blag entry to the next BAFTA awards ceremony based on this useful deception.

Of course I now regret not having stopped the director from getting to the bar — if your name's not on the list, mate, you're not coming in. But I didn't realise I could pass off the Fudebakudo logo as a BAFTA badge until it was too late.

Incidentally, if you watch the eyeball-strainingly tiny trailer on that Hula Girls website, see if you don't read the line "The Girls Dance for the Sake" the way I did. It's, um, sake not sake. Whoops . . . changes the tone of the whole film a bit, heh.