Today, USPS made me to pick up a box with the R5 release of Haibane Renmei by Reanimedia.

The box was far too big for a DVD set, because it contained a poster.

To the box set and the poster, Reanimedia added a stack of mini-calendars for anime they released. The girl with a mop is DieBuster 2. Yes, I'm still confused.

The real treasure is the fabulous booklet. Althogh it largely repeats the contents of booklets in the Pioneer release, Reanimedia had to make the format bigger and create a new layout from scratch, because Russian is a verbose language.

BTW, I'm not bothered by the two first DVDs sharing a spindle. There were not any scratches.

The aforementioned poster goes up immediately to improve my humble abode.

Now, for the contents. The infamous DVD menu is... pretty nice.

The rest is... very strange. I like the voices (except Nemu -- phoned in by Yekaterina Toborovets). Reki (Veronika Raytsiz) and Rakka (Marina Yur'eva) are just about perfect. And it is quite tickling to hear their ideomatic expressions. For example, Reki opens with "вот это да... ничего себе..." for the "こりゃ、たいへんだ" of the original. Priceless.

Finally, it took me about 5 minutes to see something weird: a subtitle that says "младокрылам", which, as far as I know, is not a valid conjugation of anything. It should probably be "младокрыльям" or "младокрылым". But hey... I can watch it raw anyway.

Or I would, except that the v.1 DVD produces rather severe vibrations in my player. It's out of balance. And I failed to find any home remedies for it. Reanimedia is actually quite good with replacements, and from postings on their forum I gather that the first print had its share of issues, but I don't want to go there. I mostly bought the box for the goodies anyway, and DVD vibrations can easily be worked around with a visit to Boxtorrents (Bakabt).

UPDATE: The vibrations appear to be caused by the software making the drive to spin too fast. I just checked the last volume, it's better balanced, but the motor sounds from the drive are just as bad.

UPDATE 2: Discs provide a hint about the licensing regime: they carry a logo of Geneon-Universal (with a globe and "Universal").