Damn, I am so freakin’ tired…and have been for the past week. That last Production assignment absolutely killed me. And I haven’t even finished the damn thing yet! Yeah, it’s STILL rendering as we speak. It’s way overdue and of course my marks are automatically deducted a lovely 30%…30% off…sounds more like some boxing day sale to me. But fair enuff I guess, coz it is late. I gave up on getting decent marks for this anyway the moment I discovered halfway through the render that the stupid animation in my scene was jumping around like crazy, so I literally had to restart my whole damn render. There’s somethin’ seriously eff’d up with my scene. Hell, it takes me more than 20 minutes to even get 1 frame in the render view.  That’s just sad. I’ll never look at an underwater scene the same way again. Damn you caustics, environment fog, fish, ocean shader, and everything else to do with that underwater scene!…With all this “toned down” profanity, you can obviously tell how frustrated I am with this. Well, at least I learned my lesson the hard way. EARLY. Let’s just hope the lesson sticks. Knowing my memory capacity though, it looks doubtful.

Anyway, I’ve always wanted to talk about the anime series, Basilisk. This is by far, one of my favourite anime series of all time. It’s a 24-part series based on the novel “The Kouga Ninja Scrolls” published in the 1950’s (btw, it’s the same inspiration for the feature film “Ninja Scroll”). It’s about the story of two lovers from rival ninja clans. Just before their wedding, the long-standing peace treaty between the Kouga and Iga clans is broken by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the reigning shogun. Ieyasu meets with the elders from each clan and orders them to pit the ten best warriors of each clan in a battle to decide which of his two sons would succeed him in power. Yeah, it’s kinda cruel, but the clans are actually up to the task since they’ve been loathing that peace treaty and have wanted to get at each others’ throats for the longest time anyway.

This series is best enjoyed for its elaborate action scenes. Gonzo (the production company) has always been putting out consistent, high production, feature film quality animation, and they definitely came with it on this one. That’s the great thing about this series: every single episode is consistently beautiful, fast-paced, and just plain fun to watch. Unlike other shows, where they have so much filler crap, and clean up their animation only on the major episodes (That’s right I’m talking to you, Naruto!!!). The story itself is pretty engaging as well. All I can say is, my wife was in tears by the end of the 24^th episode. We’ve watched the whole series twice so far. She cried both times. If you see it or have seen it already, you’ll know what I mean.

Here are a couple of clips. The first is the trailer. The second is a clip of one of the best scenes in the series, so it contains spoilers. View at own risk.