First Impressions: Go! Princess Precure

Hello everyone! So the other night, after watching the first two minutes of a reaction video by one of the Lolitas I follow on YouTube, I decided to try watching a new series, Go! Princess Precure. Despite having vowed to never watch Shojo anime again (I know pretty much every storyline now...), I thought it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot as it's a magical girl anime and I tend to like that genera (Sugar Sugar Rune and Tokyo Mew Mew are my favorites n_n).

 Go! Princess Precure is a story about a girl, Haruka Haruno, who has dreampt of becoming a princess her whole life. When she was little, a young man named Kanata gave her a little trinket and told her she'd be able to become a princess one day and to not give up on her dream. Several years later, Haruka decides to go to a posh academy that she deems to be a good school to learn how to be a princess at. While being shown around the campus, Haruka runs into a couple of animal shaped faries that are refugees from a war in Hope Kingdom. Later on Haruka is forced to transform to save her friend after discovering that the trinket she was given is a key that allows her to become a Princess Precure, a magical girl in princess form! With her newly aquired powers, Haruka is able to fight monsters and free people's dreams from cages.

 Overall, I think Go! Princess Precure is an entertaining show. The animation is a mix between traditional drawn anime and anime styled 3D models as well as computer graphics, very similar to the graphics in Miku Miku Dance. While the switching between media styles bothers me somewhat, I'm pretty familiar with computer animation, so it might be more difficult for others to spot it. I'm probably not going to continue watching the series, but I would reccomend it to anyone looking for a new magical girl series to follow. The series is very new though, with only two episodes available on the site I chose to watch it on at the time I watched it.

Check out my Fanpage: facebook.com/CelesteChoCho
I'm on Twitter: @animlolicouture

Computer Generated Videos

This is slightly off from my main interests, but recently I've picked up an interest in computer animation. I've started using Blender to sculpt characters and put bones, or armatures, into those characters. I haven't started animating these characters yet, but you can view some animations that one of my friends has made using Blender here:
http://www.youtube.com/ninjaobsessed

I have also been using a program called Miku Miku Dance, or MMD for short. It is a free promotional program to try to get more people interested in buying the Vocaloid software, which uses computer generated voices to sing to your own music. Unfortunately, the only computer I have that MMD works on runs really slowly when I'm trying to use MMD. Currently I am trying to figure out how to import the character files from MMD, pmd files, into a format that is usable in Blender so I can more easily animate the Vocaloid characters.

If you are interested in using either Blender or Miku Miku Dance, here are the download links. Both programs are free to download and use and many resources can be found for them on the web.

Blender:
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

Miku Miku Dance:
http://www.geocities.jp/higuchuu4/index_e.htm

Enjoy!