Category: Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin

Remember the third Anime no Chikara project last season that turned out to be a little bit of a surprise hit? Well, the first two volumes of DVD/BD releases have been available for some time now, and included with the first one is an anime PV of Hikasa Youko’s cover of Morning Musume’s 1999 hit song “LOVE Machine”. For those with a 3DTV, the Blu-ray release also included a 3D version of this little bonus, which is a part of the character cover songs included in each volume. The theme for the character songs in this series is covers of popular songs from the 1990s simply because the series takes place in 1999. Unfortunately, the later ones don’t feature PVs of the other characters’ songs, but the second volume does include the first of four mini side stories. The first one is titled “Welcome Tsucchii” and is more or less an animated short akin to what you’d expect from a picture drama, and shows Maya with Ami when they were kids and found a legendary snake known as a Tsuchinoko and made it their pet. It’s cute in the sense that we get to see more of Maya’s occult fascination when she was a kid, but doesn’t really add anything to the overall story. I actually prefer the video above with the characters all busting a move near the end of it and Fumiaki freaking out about Junichirou’s corpse’s head falling off. See the full post for some caps of the side story.

Nakagawa Shoko’s latest single “Flying Humanoid” was released back on August 18th, whereas the music video for it you see above was aired on TV prior to that. The PV itself is a surprisingly pretty good one as far as Japanese music videos go, and I particularly like the use of CG in addition to Shoko and her band changing into samurai outfits near the end. Is it relevant? Not really, but it’s good for variety sake given how animated she is singing this song. The clocks are a nice touch too, since they’re reminiscent of Occult Gakuin’s opening sequence. As for the song itself, it’s grown on me a fair bit in the past two months while watching the series. Fullmetal Alchemist’s fifth ending theme “RAY OF LIGHT” was a nice slow song, but Shoko’s more upbeat music is always a good listen too. While the TV size version of Flying Humanoid is a good cut that got me into song, I must say I really like the full version a lot more. The main reason being, the TV size kind of ends abruptly and always leaves me wanting to hear more. In her live performance a couple of weeks ago on Music Japan (not on the same one as May’n), Shoko performed this shorter version. It featured a longer instrumental outro, but was otherwise a prime example of me hinging on hearing the next verse of the song. See below.

* Music Japan live performance video after the jump.