The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya camera rip, filmstrip video, and artbook scans

I’ve come across more goodies for the Haruhi movie, which probably won’t get a DVD release until fall at the earliest. Among other things, the long awaited camera rip for the movie is now available…

A camera rip for the movie came out a few days ago, but not too many fans have found out about it yet. One of the reasons is probably because it was posted on Tokyo Toshokan on April Fool’s Day, right amongst fake torrents, which led fans to believe it was fake, too. But the main reason is that the torrent for the camrip has since “disappeared” from where it was posted on Nyaatorrents, and the link was just removed from Tokyo Toshokan as well. However, I believe the info-hash for the torrent still exists. So if you’re interested in downloading it, here it is:

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A link to a torrent download can be found on the MAL forums here as well (courtesy of Game8910).

UPDATE – 04/05/10: AniDragon.net is currently hosting streaming videos of the camera rip as well. They can be viewed here (they’re divided into two parts). Thanks to HaruhiSuzumiya.net for the link.

A few words of caution about the camera rip before you decide to download it. It’s a whopping 5GB and is unable to be altered without losing quality. But for such a large size, it didn’t take too long to download – took me about 5 hours yesterday.

A sample screenshot from the camera rip

Unfortunately, the quality of the camera rip is not the greatest and it has this annoying flickering effect going on. So if you feel like you can wait until later this year for a good quality DVD rip, you probably should. But if you’re a hopeless fan like me and you can’t wait, a low-quality camrip is better than nothing =P Watching the camrip first won’t ruin my enjoyment of a good quality DVD fansub in the coming months, and I’ll definitely buy the U.S. DVD when it comes out.

I plan to attempt to watch the camera rip in its entirely later tonight. If I’m able to get through it despite the headache-inducing flickering, I’ll update this post with my thoughts (but I won’t post a full review of the movie until I see the DVD version).

UPDATE – 04/05/10: I finished watching the camera rip. You kinda get used to the flickering after a while (I recommend watching it in a lit room a good distance away from the screen). Besides that, the quality isn’t too bad. The audio is pretty good, though the picture gets blurry at a few points. Basically, it’s not the ideal viewing experience, but it works. As I said, I’m not going to review the movie until the DVD comes out – all I’ll say is that it was just as brilliant and amazing as I thought it would be. Hopefully I’ll now be satiated until the DVD release =)

UPDATE – 04/09/10: Mazui has just released a fansub of the camera rip. I haven’t yet watched it myself but apparently they were able to get rid of the annoying flickering. A torrent for their fansub of the movie (about 1GB in size) is available here.

However, if you don’t want to deal with the annoyingly large, flickering camera rip, there’s another way you can sort of “watch” the Haruhi movie. Thanks to Cartoon Leap for bringing it to my attention, the Spanish site AniDragon.net is currently hosting videos of the “filmstrip version” of the movie, which was put together using all of the commemorative filmstrips that moviegoers received when they went to see the movie in Japanese theaters (as well as images used in Lantis’ promotional video).

The project was launched by 2chan to gather all the filmstrips available for the movie, scan them, and put them together chronologically in a pseudo-camera rip video. You can watch the filmstrip version here on AniDragon.net (it’s divided into six parts. There’s also a condensed version that’s only 26 minutes).

Of course, since it’s just made of scanned filmstrips, there’s no dialogue or actual animation (the creators did add background music though). The quality of the images is also inconsistent, since it uses scans from many different people. But I think in some ways it may be better than the actual camera rip.

And lastly, if you don’t feel like seeing any videos for the movie yet, but are interested in images, Ultimatemegax from Cartoon Leap was kind enough to make scans of the official artbook for the movie.

Page 40 of the artbook

You can download all the scans for the artbook here. Beware, even though they’re not videos, they contain images up until the end of the movie and are thus majorly spoiler-filled.

And if you haven’t already seen it, a while ago I posted a “sneak peek” of the Haruhi movie using screenshots from Lantis’ original promotional video. You can download the images on the post here.

If a better quality camera rip or any other major goodies for the Haruhi movie crop up, I’ll update this post. Hopefully we’ll have news of a DVD (and U.S.) release date sometime soon.

And don’t forget that supposedly The Sneaker will have new material for the Haruhi novels at the end of this month. I hope that’s still true!