Officially guiding your way through the Disappearance

Today we continue down the month of March Megax reviews!

This edition looks at something that until the first week of February, I had no intention on buying. I do not have the capability to read Japanese; in fact, I just finished reviewing over hiragana two days ago. Once I saw the cover, I was sold.

The book itself is an A5 size book with 175 pages of full color illustration. It begins with the story of the movie and then goes into a bunch of interviews. Not knowing how to read Japanese, I will only be able to point out who is in each interview at this time. I do hope that by the end of the year I’d be able to read some of this. The rest of the content review will be captions with the pictures I’ll provide.

How the book comes (slip included)	The true cover of the book

The movie begins with the usual scenery	Day 1 begins!

 

Japanese reads right to left and top to bottom, so start your eyes at the top right and go left in the picture below.

A new adventure, right? Right?!

The usual scenery again	Interview with the novel author and both directors

Interview with Minori Chihara

There are interviews with each of the Seijuus, even though minor ones like Tsuruya-san are limited to a few questions. I figured with such a big following that Minori-san would be the best to highlight.

Character designs for Yuki (look at how to put a scarf on in the lower left)

Background art

Hey, remember this picture?

There are A LOT MORE pictures than just this. I couldn’t in good faith scan them all, but I knew this would be a hit.

PV Minori image

Thanks to all the people who worked on the film and book. Special thanks: All Fans

I do feel that this is an exceptionally well-made book. The cover has Yuki and Kyon in a significant point in the book and is removable if you were insane and wanted to remove it.

The illustrations printed and the screens from the movie look absolutely amazing. I sped read the pictures and was amazed at the quality put into this book.

If you are on the fence about the book, I’d say to get it. It’s a steal at 1200 yen and is amazing.

All images are copyright of Kadokawa Shoten. Images are used for previews only. Please support the great people who have produced Haruhi since before 2003 in any way that you can.

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Sigh….Koizumi saves the day again!

About 10 hours ago, I made a post where I detailed the extent some people go to obtain a film bookmark of a scene they really enjoyed. While I admire the willingness to pay that much for an item, it’s often better when you get one by surprise, as happened today for me. Let’s begin the March Month of Megax Reviews!

Amazon Japan shipped out my Sigh III and IV DVD last Friday in Japan and I received it today. With the leading actress in the movie starting on the cover of the first DVD, the leading actor should star on the following one and Koizumi looks marvelous on the cover.

This set includes the episodes The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya III and IV. After the Endless Eight incident and the slow start of this novel, these two episodes really start to pick up the 2009 new episode run with the Mikuru Beam and the showdown between Kyon and Haruhi.

As always the animation is top notch (being that it was actually animated in HD). One of the shots I captured was a screenshot where Haruhi fires the BB pistol and you can see the smoke coming off of the BB as it was shot. Kyoto Animation deserves a lot of credit for the fine work they did in these two episodes.

As a fan of Koizumi, the start of Sigh III begins a lot of screentime for him (coincidence that Haruhi states that he’s getting more in the cafe perhaps?) and it really shows a lot of his character. He’s always there to give a hand, as seen when he helps Mikuru gain composure after being smacked with the microphone.

As well he helps to save the world by preventing Kyon from hitting Haruhi and details how much the world is changing afterwards. He attempts to get Kyon to cheer Haruhi the next day, but to no avail. It’s nice to see him be so active in these scenes.

The special features on the DVD are the same as always. We have two stations’ TV spots for the re-airing, a staff location scouting, and the making of the Super Driver PV. This time the staff go to the shrine seen in Endless Eight V and Sigh III. It’s a beautiful shrine and I hope to visit it sometime. The Super Driver making clip actually has Aya-san go onto a TV show to advertise the show and her CD.

On the Limited Edition DVD, we have the soundtrack, Taniguchi’s Mysterious Voyage, and the SOS Dan memory album again. There’s a lot of upbeat tunes this time, which more than make up for the two discs with mysterious music from the Endless Eight bunch. For Taniguchi’s travels, he visits a rocket museum and a kart track.

One of the special things about Haruhi DVDs is the random extras you can get. In the 2006 DVDs, there were extra sticker sets. In this set you have special coasters and film bookmarks. Yes, they are the same style as the Disappearance bookmarks in my earlier post today. Koizumi-kun just so happened to bring one to me today, which thrilled me. It’s the family watching the Mikuru vs Yuki battle at 9:08 in Sigh III. Not an exciting one, but I’m not turning down a film bookmark!

So there is one final DVD to obtain. Sigh V will be on the 5.99999 volume out later this month. Kyon has the final cover and I can’t wait to finish this set.

As always, I’ve uploaded many more pictures and screen captures here in order to save Toonleap some bandwidth. It’s going to be a busy busy month. Look forward to a surprise review later this week! I didn’t even plan on buying this until about three weeks ago and it’ll be here soon!

Edit: This volume of the Haruhi series sold 12,320 sets in Japan over the weekend. Another increase from the previous volumes, but still down about 9,000 from Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody. It doesn’t help that Sigh isn’t a very popular story, but compared to Endless Eight, it is.

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A film bookmark of Yuki: priceless

This past weekend in Japan, the Haruhi movie ran a campaign designed to get repeat viewers into theatres. If you gave a ticket stub for a showing before Saturday as well as the stub for Saturday’s showing, you would get a film bookmark. This campaign worked incredibly well as four ranking websites have the Haruhi movie in 9th place for the weekend.

Surprisingly, that’s not the news this post was meant to deliver. The movie was put onto one film roll and cut into 5 image slices and distributed. This means that was a limited chance you could obtain the scene you wanted to obtain. If you didn’t obtain it, you had to hope one lucky person put it up for auction and you could outbid everyone else to obtain it.

I present to you three otakus that have more money than common sense:

The lines go as follows: “Winning Bid” “Auction Status” (all are “ended”), and “Number of people bidding”.

For the sake of people who haven’t read the novel and are unlucky enough to not be in Japan currently, I’d like to ask for no spoilers for the scenes shown. Personally, none of these interest me enough to pay 1000 yen for it (if it were a fabulous picture of Koizumi, maybe then). How much would you pay for a physical slice of the Haruhi movie?

Images compiled thankfully at Yunakiti’s 2ch blog (warning some spoiler film strips are at the site). Much credit given!

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What a surprise! New Haruhi novel part in June Sneaker!

Since it’s the last week of the month, the magazine from Kadokawa Group Publishing entitled “The Sneaker” is delivered to stores and sold. This magazine has been the home of the Haruhi novels since 2003 when “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” was published. The novels are part of the “Kadokawa Sneaker Library.” Imagine my surprise when looking for movie news and I get to see this picture:

“The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya” will be in the next edition of the Sneaker released on April 30th (coincidentally the day that the special covers go off sale). After reviewing some more translations, it appears that the first part of the book will be revealed in the Sneaker issue in June.

It’s great news for fans who have been waiting since 2007 for Tanigawa to finally put out a new novel!

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