Man, last night was quite the way to end the Propeller Anime Club's meetings for 2010! In true fashion, we had to find a new room yet again, and we also had a casualty in lacking Sword of the Stranger to show!
However, we were lucky to have seen instead Trava Fist Planet, four animated shorts directed by Takeshi Koike, set in the same universe as the recently released Redline! In addition to Trava Fist Planet and Redline, Koike has notable credits as Key Animator in Dead Leaves and Animatrix's World Record. Trava Fist Planet was light on plot but heavy on style and action. Needless to say, it's a nice warm-up for Redline.
We also finished Bastard!!, which pretty much ended like any big battle in Dragonball Z. There was plenty of monologuing and bigass energy attacks and explosions. Luckily the characters have a little more personality, but you've got to wonder about Dark Schneider and his insatiable lust for the ladies. Granted, he's not humping toilets like Kentaro from Golden Boy, but we're all pretty sure that after the fact he will try to get some action with his own daughter. Yup.
And then there was Tokyo Godfathers! What a fun way to end the final club meeting! Leave it to Satoshi Kon to turn the homeless that society looks down upon or ignores into heroes of Christmas. With that, we have seen all four of his movies. Unfortunately, he passed away in August with Dream Machine unfinished. I'm glad that we were able to enjoy his films this year.
I do want to shed some news before I give my final words of the year. We had a raffle with two tickets to the live-action film showing of Gantz on January 20th. I want to give congratulations to Althea and Izzy for winning those!
We also had a flyer and t-shirt design contest. Erik B., Jean Louis, and Izzy entered those! Jean-Louis did win both contest but Erik and Izzy gave an impressive showing as well! We will use part of Izzy's t-shirt design for the back of the flyers we'll make because it's pretty cool. Good job, guys!
Next year will be pretty awesome! At the end of the meeting, we picked our series and features for the first quarter of 2011. After finally doing club democracy correctly, we ended choosing Cromartie High, Black Lagoon: The Second Barrage, and Mobile Suit Gundam: The 8th M.S. Team! So we have a manly comedy, a crazy chick with guns, and epic war drama with mecha; that sounds like a winning team to me!
This past year has been crazy. We've seen a lot of cool anime and have leveled up considerably as fans! We've had some great hangouts, we've made friends and lost some along the way. We've even shown some duds at meetings. Nothing is perfect and this past year has been a very good learning experience for me. Hopefully, lessons learned and some time to rest will make for an even better club experience next year!
I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for attending the meetings and gatherings we've had and supporting the club with great excitement. While there were some rough bumps this year, I think how we finished last night has really shown how well we have done as an anime club. I truly think we set the bar of what other anime clubs should try to achieve and I want us to keep doing that.
Here's to a grand 2011!
Kent Ward
Founder of the Propeller Anime Club
