AI Upscale Project Completion Notice:
Hello!
This review is simply to inform everyone that my brother has just completed an AI upscale of August in the Water. The original Japanese DVD release was used as the source. The result of the project is a nice picture quality improvement over previous uploads found on YouTube and elsewhere. To be clear, it's far from a true restoration, and hopefully soon we will get just that from the director and a Blu-ray release…
Japan Cuts 2020 - #2
While not as innovative and memorable as his smashing debut, One Cut of the Dead, Shin'ichirô Ueda proves with Special Actors that he is no one-hit wonder. It's well-crafted on a technical level and the ensemble gives off that same sense of camaraderie that helped make One Cut of the Dead exude so much charm. I was also pleased with the unexpectedly heartwarming ending.
Japan Cuts 2020: #21
You can really feel the amount of effort that went into this one. According to the Japan Cuts website, this film "was completed over the course of seven years with over 40,000 hand-drawn frames handled almost entirely by director Kenji Iwaisawa himself." Now, I'm no snob when it comes to computer-animated films. I've been amazed by the visual artistry of quite a few of them. But just in comparing this film to another recent animated property…
