Viki streams Blue Fire with English subtitles

It's been an infamous and oft-talked about live-action work within anime circles for some time now, but now thanks to crowd-sourced translation service Viki it's now possible to watch Blue Blazes (or Blue Fire, as it's now been translated to) in its entirety.

If you aren't aware, this live-action Japanese drama is based on a manga of the same name penned by Kazuhiko Shimamoto, and is a fictionalised account of his time at an Osakan university which he attended alongside a number of luminaries that would come to be pivotal in the founding of animation studio GAINAX - namely Evangelion director Hideaki Anno, Wings of Honneamise director Hiroyuki Yamaga and GAINAX board member Takami Akai.

Viki themselves describes the story:

What happens when you think you’re great at what you do — only to realize that there are many others who are just as good or even better?

Moyuru Honoo (Yuya Yagira) is a freshman at a prestigious arts university in Osaka during the 1980s animation boom. He aspires to become a manga writer and is pretty confident in his skills. He develops a crush on Tonko Morinaga (Mizuki Yamamoto) and decides to join the school badminton team to be close to her. When Moyuru gets his first assignment in class to draw a cut-off animation, he is very confident that he will be able to do well and gain recognition for his work. But his self-confidence is shattered when he sees the work being produced by his classmates, Hideaki Anno (Ken Yasuda), Hiroyuki Yamaga (Tsuyoshi Muro) and Takami Akai (Tomoya Nakamura).

Will Moyuru be able to follow his dreams of breaking into the animation industry in the face of such talented rivals?

All eleven episodes of this 2014 comedy-drama are now available and fully English subtitled, and you can view them all on the Viki web site.