This is a fairly obscure little movie but it's absolutely charming! It deals with a lot of serious issues for seeming to be so... cutesy. This is a great find, and much thanks to honobono for subbing it for us. (in seven different languages no less!!!) Definately don't miss this.
- littlecrow@boxtorrents
I just finished watching this amazingly rare gem of a movie. For a title that's over 20 years old, it hold up incredibly well against most of today's works. The story is adorable and fascinating at the same time - a very different take on the "cat girl" design, her personality and manerisms are more feline than "human" which helps to remind the audience that you are watching a cat.
- robin@animesuki
Meet Chibi-neko again! This anime is old and new. More info.
Changes from v1 include:
v1
v2
I happened to find this new review dated Jun 12, 2006 on SoC, one of our fansubs:
THEM Anime Reviews 4.0 - The Star of Cottonland
This movie is probably the best definition of a "hidden gem", as many people have never heard of it. Indeed, I had never heard of it before seeing it on AnimeSuki one day. I was intrigued by the title, so I went to a page about it and fell in love with the beautiful artwork and the interesting-sounding story. It was then that I decided to see this movie.
First off, an important note. Although Chibi-Neko is depicted as your traditional anime catgirl, this is only how she imagines herself. The human characters in the story only see her as a regular cat and not in her catgirl form. Likewise, the other cats in the story are depicted the same way – they look like humans with cat ears and cat tails to Chibi-Neko, but to the human characters they look like ordinary cats. I thought this aspect of the story was very unique, although it may be confusing to other viewers at first. The story is also a rather deep and philosophical one. It may look like some doinky cutesy anime on the surface, but there are actually many profound metaphors to adolescence and growing up and coming of age and trying to find your place in life. I really appreciated that aspect of the story.
Another review: The Star of Cottonland - Buried Treasure - Anime News Network [may not be very helpful due to the confusion between the so-called moe and “49ers” shōjo manga & misinformation about the non-existing French version]
It was in John's Viewing Journal (from Ask John), dated 6 September 2005, about 10 days later after we released SoC on 24 August 2005.
At last I had time and opportunity to watch the vintage Star of Cottonland movie. As was the case with Sasuga no Sarutobi, it's interesting to watch older anime like this to see their influence on modern shows. In this case, how much Star of Cottonland was obviously an influence on Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto. But Star of Cottonland is still much, much better than the Taruto anime was. Cottonland is adorably cute, but in a traditional shoujo style, not in the self-conscious and artificial style of shows like Bottle Fairy and Mao-chan. (Not that I'm saying self-conscious cute can't still be enjoyable.)
About The Star of Cottonland in English
About The Star of Cottonland in Spanish
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=36460
It was down yesterday.
fyi, SoC is on boxtorrents too.
The files linked to below are the current version as of writing (summer 2005), and they are too old now. Some links might be even broken. Newer versions of MPC, ffdshow, VSFilter (Lazy Man's MKV), etc. are in the "files" section of the main page.
The Star of Cottonland [h-b] 7 languages [1B5836F0].mkv is a Matroska (MKV) file. It is softsubbed in 7 languages, and you can switch the subtitles.
How to play it on Windows 2000/XP: Gabest's Media Player Classic (MPC) is recommended, but you can use Microsoft Windows Media Player 9/10 too (ZoomPlayer should work too; mplayer and VLC work; BsPlayer is buggy). Install Lazy Man's MKV unless you want to use Haali's splitter (if you are not sure, just install Lazy Man's MKV). ffdshow is recommended, but you can use XviD decoder too.
For the best result, try true color by checking only RGB32 and RGB24 in the ffdshow video decoder settings (Start | Programs | ffdshow | video decoder configuration | Output).
If your CPU is powerful enough, try VMR9 (renderless) on MPC; otherwise use Overlay Mixer. (Hit [o] to open the Options box on MPC.)
VMR9 (renderless) enables MPC's internal sub renderer, which is the highest-quality especially in the full-screen mode. However, you might want to check this checkbox so that the reuslt will be compatible with VSFilter (DirectVobSub).
Also, if you are going to use MPC's sub renderer, you should disable subtitles from VSFilter:
If you use VSFilter, unchecking "Pre-buffer subpictures" (see the picture above) will enable dynamic effects such as fading, karaoke (not as CPU-intensive as MPC's renderer). On MPC, Number of subpictures to buffer ahead (see the picture below) is 3 ~ 6 by default. If your CPU is really fast (2GHz+), set this value 0, and dynamic effects are enabled in softsubs.
For the best result, Maximum texture resolution should be "Desktop" but if your CPU is not very fast, use smaller values.
To get the easter-egg wall papers, hit [Shift]+[F10] on MPC, or use the shell extension.
See also:
Highest Quality Playback w/ VMR9 mode
and Forum posts
The Star of Cottonland (SoC, aka Wata-Kuni) is actually already ready to release. However, we are waiting for a while because yet another langauge, Italian, might be added.
The final version will be muxed on Monday, 22 August 2005 (UTC). If the Italian translator makes it, Italian subs will be added.
So, unless anything unexpected happens, SoC will be out around Wednesday.
SoC.mkv has 6 easter-egg (hidden) wallpapers as matroska attachments. These sample pictures show how they would look like on your desktop (Click to enlarge).
And although totally unrelated, this is an IE7 beta1 screenshot, tab-browsing honobono.cc. Just like IE6, IE7 beta1 is much worse than Firefox when it comes to web standard compliance. Don't use IE. Period. If you boycott IE, MS people might think twice and try to fix all those messed-up problems.
The Star of Cottonland will be probably released around this weekend.
This file (near-final) was muxed today:
The Star of Cottonland [h-b] 6 languages RC2-pre.mkv 699MB
The video quality is very good, considering that this show is from 1984. Multisubbed in English, French, French (Canada), Dutch, Spanish (Mexico), Russian and Slovak. Datails later.
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