No, That’s Johnathan’s Cheek, Not Dio’s Thigh! JoJo Puzzles with Nice Art

These are mini, 150 piece jigsaw puzzles. I bring them up unlike most products I bring up not because they’re weird like the frog or Johnathan Joecat but because the character art isn’t art I remember for a lot of previous JoJo anime products and it’s really good looking. Before I read the description, I thought they were posters. These are the sorts of drawing I would have expected on that trading card game from a few months ago. I like the amount of arms and crackers they put on Joseph, I like Dio’s floating knife because he’s a vampire and they can make knives float, and I really like how bored Cars looks in comparison to everyone else. Johnathan’s raging to go for a fight, Joseph’s being totally sweet, Dio’s going vampire giddy, and Cars looks like he’s doing this for the paycheck. It’s also interesting that the heroes get a red JoJo logo and the villains get a green one because Araki loves green.

I’m not sure if anyone’s up for buying puzzles, but if you’re interested in the artwork, they’re going for ¥630 ($6.33) each. The Johnathan one is here, the Dio one is here, the Joseph one is here, and the Cars one is here. You could always buy a jigsaw frame and hang the picture up like a poster. Then you could go to sleep every night under the watchful, protective eyes of newborn vampire Dio.

(From the official JoJo website. © Araki, LuckyLand, davidproduction, Warner Bros., and Shueisha)

JoJo raDIO Episode 11 Transcript… Sorta

JoJo fans are often the best. You remember JoJo raDIO I take it? When it was first announced, I was hoping that someone would pick it up for translation but knew that wouldn’t be that likely since it would be a massive block of dialogue being a radio show. Well, maybe I was being a bit pessimistic. Drakonia Tumblr has, for a bit now, been releasing synopses of the videos. Here’s the most recent one for Episode 11 where they had Takehito Koyasu on. Quoted directly:

JOJOraDIO vol.11!

This week’s guest is Koyasu Takehito, the voice of Dio Brando himself!

Ueda-san starts off with a listener’s message from a 30 year old male who became a JoJo fan back when Part 4 was still being published, and his wife got hooked by the new anime.

Then Ueda-san invites Koyasu-san (mentioning how he himself is nervous and excited). Koyasu-san says that many of his fans mentioned JOJOraDIO, how interesting it was and how they wanted him to be one of the guests. Then they have some laughs about how this radio always gets funny when you try to talk seriously. Koyasu-san says that he’s known JoJo for a long time, he started reading it even before becoming a seiyuu, but wasn’t much of a fan. He attended auditions for the new anime and he decided for himself that if he gets a role, it has to be Dio. He also mentions how as a child he thought that JoJo manga was more of a horror kind (the stone mask scared him quite a bit), but when he reread it as a grown-up he understood that it’s absolutely different. He also wondered what Araki-sensei (as an adult) thought while creating the manga and whether he wanted children to read it. Then Koyasu-san talks about reading works from the point of view of a character he’s going to voice (Dio in this case) and how it brings new colours to the setting. He says that for JoJo he only scims through the anime scripts without reading them thoroughly, because after reading the manga it’s enough for him. He just takes notes of short/long phrases, and then goes all out at the recording because the atmosphere in the studio demands just that – raw hotblooded action.

Koyasu-san says that working on JoJo anime was a pleasant and fun experience for him, mostly thanks to Okitsu Kazuyuki and his acting as the main protagonist. Initially Koyasu-san intended to give Dio the leading role but ended up having to keep up with Okitsu’s Jonathan, and it was really refreshing for him. He even thanked Okitsu-san for that after the recording.

Then Koyasu-san talks about the cast, how all the cast and staff members were “looking in the same direction” and aiming for the same goal (and this is what made working on JoJo anime different from his previous works where everyone seemed to work separately), and how tiring it was despite being interesting and pleasant. Then they discuss the recording process, differences in interpretation of character roles, Iwanami-san’s requests concerning certain lines and such. Koyasu-san also mentions how at first he thought that Dio was more cool and composed, but it turned out he was about as hotblooded as Jonathan (and even his inner monologues had to be loud and obnoxious).

Episode 3 gets brought up again (no surprise here, really), Koyasu-san says that it felt as if studio itself was on fire during the recording, he even had kind of a hallucination that they were really surrounded by flames, and felt like he himself was not Koyasu Takehito voicing Dio, but he WAS Dio and he WAS fighting there (a thing he’d never before experienced during 26 years of his career). Probably, the pacing and tempo of the anime itself helped build up the tension and gave them some kind of adrenalin rush, he says. It was also the most fun episode for him to work on, other ones didn’t bring that much joy and satisfaction, and Dio from episode 4 onwards was like a new and different character for him, one closer to Stardust Crusaders DIO (he even pronounced it as an acronym – dee-ai-oh).

Then they discuss Dio, how he doesn’t learn from his mistakes and remains too arrogant for his own good even through all of the Part 3, and how Jonathan always stands in Dio’s way and wastes his life interfering with his evil plans of world domination XD Also Koyasu-san said to Okitsu-san “You became so great all thanks to Dio. Be grateful to him! Be grateful that he made your life so fun and florid! And die feeling that gratitude!” (テラ子安www). Well, he does understand feelings of villains, after having voiced so many of them. “Do those heroes of justice have nothing else to do but mess with my villanous schemes? They really should get a life!”

Also, usually Ueda-san finishes the talk with “Next time <guest name> will speak about even deeper JoJo love”, but this time he changed it to “Dio love”. Nice touch.

Next week it’s still Koyasu Takehito.

Wow, this one turned out MUCH more detailed than usual Can’t be helped, though, ‘cause I adore Koyasu and I absolutely loved him as Dio.

Quite a brick of text, isn’t it? Not that that’s a bad thing by any stretch. If you’ve been interested in JoJo raDIO but haven’t been able to pick it up, go give Drakonia Tumblr due attention for putting these out and give the synopses a read through.

Now Everyone Can Have a Friend Frog

Everything that is JoJo’s culminates in this product! Well, not really, but of all the things that can become products. And you use it exactly how you expect it to.

Oh yes. No more stress rolling balls or squeezy toys. Just just one fist and one frog. You even get a bonus of Yoku Shioya, voice actor for Will, yelling his frog punching quote, “Power! This is the power of ripple energy!”

It’s going to be released in July for ¥2,415 ($24.95.) You’ll have to pay a decent shipping price, but can you really afford to pass up a product like this?

Edit: Oh, I should probably link you to the product page. That would make sense for me to do.

“This is my son, Jonathan Joestar, and this is my daugter, Stone Mask.”

JoJo products are fun and numerous. I try not to talk about all of them because this would be a blog about cups and underwear, but there are plenty of products that catch my attention like the Seiko watches. Those caught my attention because they were cool.

And this catches my attention because I think it’s funny. These little Phantom Blood plaques/picture frames are going to be released by Medicos Entertainment as prizes in ¥300 capsule machines across Japan. I’m not sure if you’d be able to use a Japanese purchase service like Japan-Life to go around looking for them. I like these because they look like ornate picture frames you’d have on your mantle of pictures of your family. Considering they’re a figure, you probably can’t take the image out, but I’d love to be able to and put in pictures of maybe cosplayers or just have your pet dog be the new Speedwagon. Might want to keep that away from the Dio plaque, though.

(© Shueisha and Hirohiko Araki)

“I heard your parents are dead.” Phantom Blood The Abridged Series Episode 1 Now Out!

Also known as Johnathan Joestar vs. Modern Culture.

This may end up being the quickest paced abridged series ever made what with Phantom Blood being nine episodes, but whatever. It’s not often that you get an abridged series with a line that makes you think, “Huh. Yeah, that’s exactly what I imagine he would say after that.” It’s a Dio line. You’ll know what it is when you hear it.

“Some Poses are Physically Impossible” Making of the JoJo’s Opening Sequences

I’m glad they released this as a news article. It seems like the sort of thing that would be a Blu-ray extra, probably towards the last disc.

CGWorld has released an indepth look into the making of the Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency opening sequences. It’s a whole special about how it was made to the creative process behind certain chosen scenes. You even get to see Caeser’s motion points under his model.

There’s a lot of technical discussion, too. Plenty of information about what kinds of software were used to get the right effects. After Effects, Photoshop, certain video editors and all that. We get to get down to the grit of drawing a 2D scene and the layering of different parts of the drawing.

And that’s only a few of the steps

It’s cool to see where they had to get tricky with the models and lighting. There’s a whole section about the police shooting Dio scene and the difficulties of getting things like the lighting to work and playing with the models so they’d all function together. There’s even some things I would never guess. The arms that reach out for the Red Stone of Aja in the Part 2 sequence? Photoshopped picture of a real arm.

Still, the thing that caught my attention the most was Caeser’s pose when Joseph and he confront the Pillar Men on top of their rock.

Innocuous as this pose is for JoJo’s of all things, the article notes that this arm position is a little impossible for the human body. You can’t take it out, though, and swap it out for some pedestrian pose where his arms are just sort of around. Posing is part of “JoJo’s Charm” as they put it. So what do you do?

Break anatomy a little. It’s ok; this probably falls under the same position as Zoom Punch and Caeser’s able to do that because of the ripple. That or he’s a secret Pillar Man who already became an ultimate lifeform and is trying to stop the others because only one person can stand at the peak.

It’s a cool article. There are even more pictures, insights into the creative process, and weird models of characters they could recycle and probably make into an indie XBLA game.

I love the stretching boxes around the sound effects

Make sure and check out the full article here.

(Images Copyright Kamikaze Video, Luckyland, Hirohiko Araki, Warner Brothers, and CGWorld. Thanks to Graphic Jon, the guy who made the OPM Facebook page you should totally be a part of, for sending me the original)

JJBATAS Official Opening

Quick update from everyone’s favorite internet scientist/voice actor, Phantom Blood Abridged has it’s official opening sequence.

Made by the internet man who makes the D. Gray-Man Abridged series. Looks pretty good. Wonder if we’ll get an ending clip with “Roundabout” since I don’t know if abridged series even do ending sequences having only watched three ever.

Well, spread the news. The more little bits released, the closer we are to the show starting.

 

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure The Abridged Series Part 1: Phantom Blood Coming Soon!

OH MAH GAWD

It’s happening. It’s happening soon. I don’t know when soon is, but it’s happening at that time which is soon holy crap. We all knew it would be happening deep down, but the confirmation is like Super Christmas where Dio is Santa and he brought you a stand for your birthday. If that didn’t make any sense, it’s only because I’m super hyped, and you should be too.

Edit:

He also made a quick promo with the intro. It’s more hype gathering, so go give them hype to gather.

Aniplex Presents Its Very Own Pickup Artist: TOMMY on the Next STUDIO MUSIX!

Have you ever heard of STUDIO MUSIX? It’s a special Aniplex program run on the first Sunday of every month MCed by J-POP artist May’n. There are special interview segments with the guests and a stage performance by them afterwards. Guess who’s going to be on the April Show.

Good ole Hiroaki “TOMMY” Tominaga. He’ll be there performing “JoJo: Sono Chi no Sadame” for everyone. I bring it up for two reasons. One is that his official listing is “Pick Up Artist,” which may mean that he came in and just decided to be on the show, but I like the idea that he’s on the show because he’s such a smooth talker and his pickup lines are so awesome. The other reason is that if you look up STUDIO MUSIX on Google or YouTube, you’ll find a whole lot of videos of the show. If you’ve been looking for a live TOMMY concert to yell JOJO at, it should be coming soon.

 

JoJo Blu-Ray Volume 2 Changes and Improvements

Ready for a few more changes? It gets shiner and more violent as we go on. Someone on Nico Video was cool enough to upload a comparison video between the original broadcast and the episodes on Vol. 2, episodes 4, 5, and 6. You’ll need to follow the link because it’s visible through Polsy and I can’t embedded it, but here’s a few quick shots I grabbed.

Most of the changes are in the censorship, like with Jack the Ripper coming out of the horse, or tuning up, but the Wine Ripple Cutter looks like they just redid the whole clip for how much more attractive it looks. I know it’s mostly particle effects and shininess, but it’s so dull in the TV version. It’s incredible how the comparison looks so much better.