New Licenses
 Another two titles for the Crunchyroll mill, who are streaming so much at the moment that I have no chance of keeping up. The latest additions are La Maison en Petits Cubes, winner of the Best Animated Short Film at this year's Oscars and therefore one to see (it's only 12 minutes), The Diary of Tortov Roddle (another short), and the latest Studio Fantasia series, Glass Maiden, whose first episode aired on Wednesday.
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 FUNimation have announced that they'll be releasing Sands of Destruction, a 13-episode series based on the upcoming Sega RPG game of the same name, which is due for release on Nintendo DS next year. Expect a story that involves large-scale destruction, I'd suspect...
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News & Events
 Joost has announced plans to close their public streaming service, which has taken a battering in the US from Hulu which, thanks to its connections with major media companies, has developed a stranglehold on both rights and advertising. Joost will now turn its focus to providing services to other companies wanting to provide online video.
But what about UK users, who haven't had Hulu as an option? Well, in rather coincidentally-timed news, Hulu have confirmed plans to launch in the UK in September, although whether they'll have as good an anime catalogue on the UK service as they have in the US remains to be seen... |
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 You may have noticed that FUNimation's video portal hasn't been playing ball with UK users since it came back online - they've implemented geographical filtering that at the moment blocks the UK for all shows. Fear not, though - shortly after the portal came back, the company's Twitter feed (@funimation, unsurprisingly) noted that shows would return to the UK once the necessary clearances had been sorted out, and that's now be confirmed on the company blog:
Unfortunately, UK-based visitors to the FUNimation video portal will be temporarily unable to access our content.
We are in the process of opening the video of each series which is approved for streaming in the UK, and this will take additional time to complete. Again, this is only temporary and we fully intend for these series to return for our fans in the UK.
That's a bit vague on timescales, sadly, but many of the affected shows are still available through FUNi's YouTube channel.
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Uh-oh. It's a videogame-to-anime conversion, something that (with only a few notable exceptions) has a really bad record with me. This one brings us angels, demons, and a thinly-veiled Flash Gordon, though, which on the face of it certainly sounds promising...
Seems a bit strange coming back to this now that the remake's on the scene, but there you go. Full Metal Alchemist is one of those shows that impresses more and more as it goes on, and this closing set boosts it into one of the best anime series I've watched - and I've watched a lot. Throw away your preconceptions about who's good and who's evil, as the series kicks into high gear...
