Wolf Around the World

I watch animé. That, Lego blocks, and video games are the three child­hood vices I never out­grew. It’s just that my hob­bies have matured along with me. I now pre­fer games that are rated M even though I still enjoy those that are rated E. I now pre­fer Tech­nic sets over LEGOLAND Space sets. I now pre­fer animé that deal with mature themes (e.g. Say­onara Zetsubou Sen­sei, Seirei no Moribito) over those that are juve­nile (Poke­mon). I wish more ani­mated shows in the US were more like those from Japan.

Most US ani­mated fea­tures are just deriv­a­tives of live action sit­coms (The Simp­sons, Fam­ily Guy, etc.) or pur­pose­fully aim at a younger audi­ence as a means to mar­ket toys. That’s not to say the Japan­ese don’t do it. You only have to look as far as Bandai and Gun­dam to see they do it too, but at least some of the series they’ve pro­duced aren’t dumbed down and actu­ally have rec­og­niz­able (if not Oscar-caliber) char­ac­ter and plot devel­op­ment (Gun­dam 00, Gun­dam 0080, etc.). Which is why I applaud Warner Broth­ers for tak­ing a queue from Japan, when they pro­duced Ani­ma­ni­acs and the more recent DC Comics series. It doesn’t hurt to put some smarts into your shows. Same goes for Pixar. Nick­olodeon takes the crown, though, for their epic series Avatar: The Last Air­ben­der. It’s appeal­ing to adults the same rea­son Harry Pot­ter is; it’s just good old fash­ioned sto­ry­telling. Not since The Mys­te­ri­ous Cities of Gold has Nick had such a great show. To put things in per­spec­tive, it was 15 years from when MCoG ended to when Avatar started, and MCoG orig­i­nally began air­ing in 1982!

In any case, even though I do pre­fer smarter, more mature ani­mated fea­tures, I do occa­sion­ally watch shows that don’t fit in that cat­e­gory. For exam­ple, I’ve watched Kanon 2006 and I’m cur­rently watch­ing Clan­nad and Shaku­gan no Shana. They have a high level of pro­duc­tion. I’m also in the mid­dle of Spice and Wolf (Eng­lish). It’s some­thing to watch as the win­ter sea­son winds down and until the spring sea­son starts. It doesn’t hurt that the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the female pro­tag­o­nist appeals to me—sassy and smart. Plus being a wolf god­dess and cute, I was inspired to turn her into a Fire­fox icon—a small piece of func­tional fanart. It gave me a chance to flex my (mea­ger) Pho­to­shop skills. Those who watch the show will rec­og­nize Horo from the end­ing cred­its where she’s hug­ging a giant apple. After mak­ing the icon and I can’t help but think that a com­plete Spice and Wolf Fire­fox theme would be kind of cool, or per­haps a full Gnome/KDE theme. Maybe some­one can take this icon and run with it. The zip file con­tains .png icons at var­i­ous sizes and should be com­pat­i­ble with Gnome and KDE. I don’t feel like mak­ing an .ico file for Win­dows. A Pho­to­shop 7.0 file is included. The file can be imported into The GIMP, but you’ll need to adjust the sat­u­ra­tion of the top layer to some­thing between 60 and 80 to match the Pho­to­shop set­ting of 40.

 firefox-horo.zip

Enjoy!