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colinr0380
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Re: Anime

#276 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Dec 11, 2018 2:31 am

Adam Grikepelis wrote:
Tue Dec 11, 2018 2:12 am
Anyway, so I just discovered that Star Blazers 2199 exists. Has anyone seen it and have an opinion to offer? I grew up watching cartoons like the original among other Americanised anime, and it sounds interesting if not typically expensive.
Star Blazers 2199 does sound interesting. Apparently it is a 2012 remake of the original 1974 Space Battleship Yamato series. It also came out a couple of years after the live action version in 2010.

Star Blazers was also the name given to the original series (comprising Space Battleship Yamato I, II and III) when it was broadcast in the US in 1979. Presumably that was partly to obscure the Japanese origins a little for its broadcast as a 'cartoon'! Although there might be cultural implications there too since Yamato is named after a class of Japanese battleship used in World War II, which inevitably adds a bit of an added political twist to the material!

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Adam X
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Re: Anime

#277 Post by Adam X » Tue Dec 11, 2018 8:43 am

Yeah, I figured I’d use the American title given that’s how it’s being sold, and “cartoon” because that’s what it was to the primary school me. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to see the Japanese version, though I have read about it years ago, thanks mainly to the stranglehold the US licensor has on the rights (much like Harmony Gold & Robotech/Macross).

From what little I’ve read, the ‘remake’ is pretty faithful, though tells the tale with a little more depth, along with adding more female characters (thankfully this doesn’t seem to’ve been viewed as a problem, by those who might). Tempted to give it a go, despite only finding info on an anime site & reviews on Amazon - hence my seeking out a more balanced view here.

It’s been a while since I took much notice of anime so I’m completely out of the loop. Just like everything else these days, there’s a lot more of it available than there used to be; there’s only so many things made by others that you can keep up with.

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Drucker
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Re: Anime

#278 Post by Drucker » Tue Dec 11, 2018 12:40 pm


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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Anime

#279 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Dec 27, 2018 1:34 am

Our family got to see Hosoda's Mirai -- but it entailed an hour long trip to a quirky newish theater , located in a renovated and re-purposed cotton mill in Lowell. A great family excursion -- and we discovered a wonderful Brazilian restaurant/bakery just a couple of blocks from the theater.

As to the film, it may well be Hosoda's best to date (and I've loved or liked very much all his previous ones -- though his early Digimon one remains unseen as yet). It is also, perhaps, Hosoda's most Kore'eda-esque film -- given its deep plunge into family dynamics. ;-) We saw the subbed version, which was well-voiced -- no idea what the dubbed Gkids version might be like.

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J Wilson
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Re: Anime

#280 Post by J Wilson » Sun Dec 30, 2018 12:39 am

My daughter and I saw the dubbed version of Mirai - it was much better than I expected. The dub itself, that is. John Cho and Rebecca Hall are the parents, which I didn't know ahead of time. We both really liked the film.

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colinr0380
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Re: Anime

#281 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Jan 17, 2019 12:41 pm

I was very glad to hear the news that Anime Limited are going to be releasing the early 90s OVA series Cyber City OEDO 808 on Blu-ray at some point in 2019, which is the ultraviolent cyberpunk series about a group of hardened criminals forced by the use of explosive collars to work for the government in tackling various cyber-crimes of the week. This is the one anime that I would recommend hearing in the English language dub version, and the UK dub version in particular as that has different voice actors (including Sean Barrett with his distinctive gravelly voice swearing it up 'American-style' in the character of Gogul. Barrett amusingly turns up after this as the male narrator on the BBC's People's Century TV series in 1995, did a lot of voiceovers for nature documentaries and is all over the audiobook scene, including reading The Name of the Rose! So its always fun to think back on his role in Cyber City when hearing his voiceover in other contexts!) and most importantly the fantastic Rory McFarlane soundtrack that is completely different from the US and Japanese one.

It is only three episodes (one focused on each of the main characters) and there is a bit too much emphasis on the swearing in the dub to make everything seem a bit more adult, but this (along with Tokyo Babylon, Doomed Megalopolis and of course Akira) was the series that really got me into anime in my teens. I particularly like the second episode Psychic Trooper, with its extended fight sequence in its second half that I have always thought could make for a fantastic live action film!

EDIT: Many of the other videos put up on that "Oldtaku" channel are from great late 80s and early 90s shows too, which is still my favourite era of anime. I particularly love the irreverently destructive take on fantasy worlds with the two Dragon Half OVAs! I really like the use of the pop of the characters into SD form (Super Deformed, i.e. extra cute and cartoony styled) when they have their most extreme moments which is often used for punchlines, both comic and violent! (Making that final exposing celebratory shot in the second episode stand out all the more for being, um, realistically drawn!). And I think I most identify with the evil wizard sidekick to the horrible King, who drags along his own bucket of dry ice to add extra impact to his appearances and then has all of his ingenious plans backfire on him through the episodes! (Plus it has the best wacked-out, mashed-up, gibberish lyriced take-off of Beethoven over the end credits!)

It was also great to see the first two episodes of The Enemy's The Pirates: The Cat's Banquet. I think this was a six part series but I had previously only seen the first two episodes, the same two presented on the channel, but my VHS copy (under the title Galactic Pirates) was of the English dubbed version in which Apollo the cat gets voiced with a rather sassy Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop-style voice, which only added to the hyperactive nature of the show! I kind of prefer this Japanese language version!

Black Magic M-66 is a great bit of sci-fi action which is kind of best described as Ripley from Aliens battling The Terminator!

And I also have to highlight the amusing Otaku No Video which takes a kind of 'mental hygiene' approach to anime nerds (the titular "Otaku") following the dark descent into anime fandom of a promising tennis ace as his decision to go home early from a party ("he's the only one who takes tennis club seriously" state his other friends about to go off to more bars) leads to him accidentally sharing a lift with a group of highschool dropouts who have dedicated themselves to every possible nerdy interest from wargaming to cosplaying (the soundtrack goes from lighthearted and happy to ominous and foreboding when the Captain Harlock stickers come out!). These anime sections alternate with live action 'interviews' with real-life Otakus about their 'deviant behaviours', who have their faces pixellated and voices altered, as if they were committing some offence so shameful that they need their anonymity! Most of those sections end with a too blunt interview question that leads to the equivalent of many "How dare you ask that! I have real friends and so what if I cosplay! This interview is over!!" moments! (It is interesting seeing your now relatively commonplace cosplay aficionado being given the (obviously satirical and irreverent!) brushstroke of being the equivalent of some kind a sexual deviant here! Ah, it all seems so charming and naive now in the era of Furries having taken everything to the next level!).

The foresaking of the outside world (and actual relationships, sex and procreation) for 2D animated antics gets a section to itself. There's the rather expected take on the 'having to camp out for the big film premiere' situation (in this case for the premiere of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind) while the more 'normal' friend passes by, girl on arm, to be incredulous about his old tennis loving friend doing something so crazy. That causes a moment of self-reflection, but only a moment as another member of the club arrives with purloined storyboards and character designs from the upcoming Macross movie!

The second episode goes full bore into the hopes and dreams as in response to 'otaku discrimination' our hero fully embraces his nerdiness and decides to become the "Otaku of all Otaku! The Ota-king!", starts a cottage industry, conquers the world through anime, makes a feature film and eventually runs a space programme to go off for space battles in the stars for real, whilst the live action segments start turning even more bluntly into reality television police chase style tracking and shaming of 'cell thieves' and vigilante justice meted out in hand-held style! Its quite a fun and complex piece of work, as the two worlds split apart - the anime becoming sci-fi fantastical and literally out of this world, the 'reality' becoming more bluntly, crushingly cruel - in such a way that makes unashamed fantasy seem like the only true response to petty and mundane day to day prudishness!

Anyway in twenty or thirty years time I fully expect to be interviewed about our criterionforum.org days and I demand the same pixellation and voice altering tactics used here to be fully employed as I talk about the way I meticulously order my shelves, and so on!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sat Apr 13, 2019 6:16 am, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Anime

#282 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Feb 11, 2019 5:22 am

I have progressed a bit further with the Fist of the North Star TV series (up to episode 33). After thinking that the series might have to deal with its repetitious nature soon, it both does this in an extreme way, as well as somehow staying exactly the same! 22 episodes in Ken finally battles his way through wave after wave of enemy clans that his nemesis Shin has put in his way (the variety of clans is the main focus of interest, with some goofier than others, though it always takes the form of fighting through the lower tier guards first, then up through the ranks until the clan leader) in order to reach the hidden city and reclaim his lost love Yuria, only to find that despite her promise to stay alive for him she threw herself from her tower in a suicidal plunge seemingly just moments before he arrived (oops!). Ken has the showdown with Shin but after the deathblow punch and before his body rips itself apart, Shin himself commits suicide in the same manner to both ‘cheat’ Ken of his victory and tie himself with Yuria forever.

“Yuria Forever…As Well As Shin!” is quite a surprising episode, as I had assumed that this conflict over a lost love would last the entire span of the series and instead it is over in a moment in an episode that leaves the nominal hero frustrated and aimless! At the beginning of the next episode the two child companions, Bat and Lin, are trying to move on but Ken is left at a loose end, having brief flashes of memories of recent events.

But this is both where convention reasserts itself and things get very strange, as in “Stormy Times, Titanic Battles! Is Battle All That Awaits Me?!” we get introduced to the new ‘enemy clan’ for the next arc terrorising a new village (the Fang clan, modelling themselves after wolves with lots of howling, who are quite goofy for the longest time and seem to have a strange bond as ‘brothers’ with their clan leader as their ‘father’) and then immediately to two doppleganger replacements for Yuria and Shin, with Mamiya and Rei. Mamiya is a feisty warrior with red hair compared to Yuria’s purple-haired princess locked away helplessly in a tower playing a harp; and Rei is very like Shin in hot-headed temperament and also matches Ken’s skills (in slicing people up into pieces rather than punching pressure points however), while being suggested to be pretty much a villain himself.

Rei is psychologically damaged by the loss of his sister (to a ‘man with seven scars’, which raises questions of what he will do when Ken reveals his own scars) and that causes him to perform some really villainous acts that mostly go uncommented on by the other characters, seemingly just because he is on their side. The most concerning moments involve Rei telling Mamiya to not get involved with fighting because she is a woman, including walking in on Mamiya and Lin bathing and ogling her, as well as a gobsmacking moment later on where as Mamiya is walking off to avenge her just murdered brother, Rei intercedes rips her clothes off and lets a wedding veil flutter onto her head, saying that it suits her better before walking away! Those are both somewhat iffy moments, though the emphasis is much more on Rei being psychologically damaged enough to be doing dastardly things like that, rather than endorsing his actions. More they go uncommented on, but Mamiya still insists on accompanying Ken and Rei into the Fang territory to wipe them all out.

Weirdly the Fang clan end up, still being murderous, but also a bit more sympathetic perhaps because they are not as complex as a character like Rei. They are simpler foes, who perform villainous acts and have terrorised the towns around them, but still mourn for the waves of their ‘brothers’ who have been killed by Ken and Rei (around a hundred by the time of the actual final conflict!) into having their anger and need for revenge seeming justified, which is probably the first time I felt more on the side of the villains than the heroes at a certain point! Ken, as with previous gangs he encounters, usually gives any lower tier bad guy the opportunity to run off (which they often do not take and end up being punched and exploding) as he is more focused on taking out the head of the clan. Here as Ken is confronting the clan leader as his minions run away, Rei takes great (perhaps too great) pleasure in cutting every last one of the fleeing clan members into pieces.

So Rei is pretty much teetering on the edge of villainy throughout, if not already over that line, though it is all implied to be because of the loss of his sister who reappears as a hostage during the final battle and pushes him into an almost uncontrollable rage. Mamiya pretends to be Ken’s fiancé and becomes a hostage to let Boss Fang wrongly think that he also has a hold over Ken, but does not entirely realise that the taciturn Ken sees her as almost a reincarnation of his lost love, so she kind of does have that power.

Lots of punching and slashing ensues (after a quite neat double bluff of both Ken and Rei seeming to have killed each other after being forced to fight to the death) and everyone comes out of it fine except for the completely annihilated Fang clan. But another one will be along soon, I’m sure! Interestingly the last few clans have moved away from being totally composed of Mad Max style post-apocalyptic punks to having a number of mutated figures, from ten or twenty foot tall bosses to the Fang clan actually having a kind of werewolf mutant in their number, which sets against that gothic vampire-zombie villager episode from slightly earlier in the series. Maybe even the super-punching powers of Ken himself are meant to be less a supreme form of martial arts than a slightly more benign and positive form of mutation?
___

Anyway, the Fang clan are dealt with, Rei has his sister back and Mamiya is able to slip out of battle gear and into a flowing red dress to match her hair. Ken reveals his scars to Rei but he is not the one who kidnapped Rei’s sister. Instead in another moment of doubling we find that someone else has been pretending to be Ken and turning him into a terroriser of villages as a method of flushing Ken out of hiding.

This turns out in flashback to be one of Ken’s ‘brothers’, or one of the other people who were being taught the martial art of the North Star. Only one can be taught fully and Ken was chosen, which caused the other three contenders to lose out, and especially make Jagi, the current terroriser, jealous. Ken makes pretty short work of Jagi and at the point I have reached so far has left his two child charges with Rei and Mamiya in that previous town to go and track down his other brothers and put and end to them. So after the loss of Yuria and saving this latest town, Ken is off on a new quest all alone.

___

I really love the idea of dopplegangers that is coming up at this point. As if Ken, Yuria and Shin were never really special in themselves, but their archetypal characters and conflicts are occurring over and over in different forms elsewhere. There are new starts offered by both Mamiya and Rei, but Ken foregoes these (and the new hope represented by the two children) to dive even deeper back into newly uncovered unresolved issues of his past. Ken seems defined by conflict both as a character and by the very nature of the show in which he is the main character. The iteration of the conflicts are both repetitive for TV series budget reasons and feel as if they are integral to the character just going from battle to battle, and I get the impression that this is a big structuring element similar to even longer running later anime series such as Naruto, Dragonball or even One Piece. Different but very similar arc after arc.

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Re: Anime

#283 Post by Boosmahn » Wed Mar 13, 2019 8:35 pm

UK company All the Anime is releasing an "ultimate edition" of Perfect Blue for those who want something more than the standard GKIDS variant. It includes the soundtrack, 384-page storyboard (Japanese only), and a 48-page booklet (translated), in addition to lectures and interviews on the disc. The only drawback: it's £90.

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#284 Post by Boosmahn » Tue Mar 26, 2019 10:21 pm

Adam Grikepelis wrote:
Tue Dec 11, 2018 2:12 am
Original SD Version of Feature (Japanese mono Dolby Digital 2.0 with English subtitles)
I wonder what this might mean for the film’s presentation, though... :-k
Screencaps are out and it looks like the new restoration features some heavy DNR.

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Re: Anime

#285 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:43 pm

Koe no katachi / A Silent Voice / The Shape of the Voice (Naoko Yamada 2016) (Shout Factory Blu-Ray)
Another recent, very fine non-Ghibli animated film from Japan. This focuses on a deaf transfer 6th grade student and her classroom tormentors. When the chief tormentor goes to far, and our heroine transfers, his classmates (also complicit -- actively or passively) ostracize him in turn. The film then jumps to high school, where our deaf heroine and her adversary (now drawn into his own shell) cross paths again. While a bit melodramatic at times, this is mostly effective and moving. While the animation is not quite at the level found in Hosoda's films (or, a fortiori, Studio Ghibli's), it is always decent and sometimes quite lovely. The Japanese voice cast is good, I didn't sample the English dub.

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Re: Anime

#286 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Apr 24, 2019 5:53 am

A few more episodes further on in Fist of the North Star and the doppleganger motif is getting very strong now. Jagi has been pretending to be Ken, and now the second brother Toki is focused on. Toki is described as being a pre-war healer, deciding to dedicate himself to using the power points on the body to heal others rather than tearing them apart during fights. He has created a 'Village of Miracles' but after an attack by bandits has gone completely insane and become a Moreau-style mad scientist experimenting on the village and creating monsters during his research into pressure points to make the North Star style of martial arts even more deadly. Ken cannot believe that the kindly big brother he looked up to has been so twisted and sure enough there is a big twist that Toki is not Toki but a jealous martial arts amateur who made himself look like Toki (including scarring his back to match the scar left after Toki saved Ken as a child), captured the real Toki and then took over the village himself to ruin Toki's caring name, in much the same manner that Jagi tried to make Ken seem like a violent monster. After a showdown the faux Toki gets defeated with the next quest now being to try and search out and possibly save the captured real Toki.

We are now at episode 36, which is where the English language dubbed version of the series comes to an abrupt halt. I suppose it is a natural stopping point as the doppleganger Toki has been defeated (and the next episode starts up a new interim villain arc, the interestingly provocatively named Warden Uighur, so to continue would involve a much longer commitment), but we are in the middle of the 'Ken and his brothers' arc still, so it seems a rather inconclusive stopping point, unlike the end of the Shin and Yuria arc of about ten or fifteen episodes before. Maybe the enthusiasm by the company to continue releasing the series in English petered out as the main quest for lost love ran to its conclusion, with Mamiya a difficult substitute for Yuria in Ken's affections? Ken is still having flashbacks to Yuria in episode 37, so she is still the love of his life that he is not wanting to move on from, it seems, even when presented with an eerie doppleganger of her to transfer his feelings over to.

Much like his inability to believe that Toki is so changed it is difficult for Ken to reconcile the version of a someone who was so important to him in the past, often vivid in his memories, with a real figure existing in the present who superficially seems to have all of the same qualities but is fundamentally an entirely different person, for better or worse.
___
EDIT 23rd September 2020: Another forty or so episodes on. Ken finds and releases Toki from his prison and we finally get to the third big brother of the North Star Raoh (or Ken-Oh as he is going by to his gang now) who rides a giant black horse that crushes people to death. Often his own followers! We find that Raoh is kind of the usurping brother who out of the three contenders for being the receptacle of the North Star martial arts did not agree to Ken being chosen and is attempting to rule the new post-apocalyptic world himself, contrasting against Toki being more than happy to not have to be the martial arts master of the North Star and instead devote himself to medicine and caring for others instead.

Whilst out rescuing Toki (who is slowed up by his wounds) and on the long journey back both Rei and Mamiya see the "Death Omen" star in the sky that means anyone who is able to see it is doomed. Mamiya's village gets attacked by Raoh and his men and whilst Ken is able to save the young child Lin from being forced to have to do a barefoot walk over burning coals, unfortunately Rei impulsively attacks Raoh and is punched in such a way that he will suffer an inevitable slow death over the next few days.

Rei's looming death takes up the next large chunk of the series, as he devotes himself to fighting another 'villain of the week' instead to keep Mamiya's village safe, and in retribution for Mamiya having been taken into slavery by this figure in the past. Once that figure is defeated Rei is able to retreat to one of the dilapidated houses and die in seclusion (in a beautiful episode that is both your standard flashback and re-cap one and all takes place inside Rei's reminiscences within that room as the rest of the cast mourn outside. The brief moment at the beginning of that episode with organ music and pan over the sparsely furnished room that will be the last place that Rei will see is probably the most powerful moment of the series so far, and a bit Tarkovsky-esque). That is how "Part 2" of the series ends, with Rei's inevitable death and Mamiya mourning him.

"Part 3" of the series (at episode 57) starts with another lull in the action, as Ken decides to leave the village and continue his wanderings. This is the point at which it became clear that we are seeing figures of the South Star martial arts being contrasted against the North Star ones. The North Star martial arts are all held within one chosen person, in this case Kenshiro, even though there is the conflict with Raoh being unhappy with that contrasting against Toki being OK relinquishing his claim to the role. I am assuming that the fight with Raoh is going to be the big climax of the entire series, especially after this initial encounter with him goes so badly for Ken and especially Rei.

The South Star martial arts however are split between six people: Shin (who was the big villain of the first chunk of the show, kidnapping Ken's love Yuria and leaving Ken with his trademark scars), Rei and the just defeated villain Yuda were three of them. So even this oppositional martial art is riven with factional divisions and seems to be illustrating that power shared is power diluted(?). The South Star representatives are skewed all the way to the good (Rei and the upcoming Shu) or bad (Yuda and the upcoming aptly named Souther), and it feels as if seeing these figures battle and destroy the multifarious South Star martial arts is meant to contrast starkly against Ken as the singular figure representing the North Star.

Anyway, Ken leaves (closely followed by our kid companion identification figures Bat and Lin) and runs into two new figures representing South Star martial arts, Shu and Souther. Shu is blind and it turns out he blinded himself to save Ken's life when Ken was being tested as a child. Since that point Shu has devoted himself to caring for children (kind of the companion figure to Toki on the North Star side of things) and has been locked in battle with Souther, who is a despotic maniac getting his minions to kidnap children to use as slaves to build a monumental pyramid. Ken is incensed by this and after initially being defeated by Souther (who uses his time on top to torture and kill Shu by forcing him to carry the capstone to the top of the pyramid to complete the structure under threat of killing all of the women and children if he drops it, and then ensures that Shu will die crushed underneath the stone because as he says: "Blood makes the best mortar") works out Souther's big secret to being undefeatable (not that he is a divine ruler but that his internal organs are backward, which ties in well with all of this North Star-South Star situation being about characters who are reflective of each other's issues) and kills him with kindness and love that Souther had tried to banish from his mindset.

Although for all of his cruelty and callousness, we find that Souther was building this mausoleum pyramid in a grand tribute to his master who was the last person to show him affection (and who Souther killed whilst blindfolded in his master's final test of worthiness. Because, rather like Ken and the North Star in some ways, there could only be one representative alive of the particular martial arts that Souther was being taught and in this situation the student has to kill the master to rule), the pain of the loss being the thing that hardened his heart to cruelty so he would never have to feel strong emotions again. Ironically feeling too much in that one situation was the moment that pushed Souther to the opposite extreme of despotic cruelty. A lot of this series feels about students getting irreversibly marked by the tests their masters force them to undertake when young naive and wide-eyed, and the Souther situation feels most emblematic of this (a kind of monarchical 'divine right to rule' tale), but it echoes into the wider story too with both Ken's journey and conflict against his North Star brothers; Bat and Lin as the child figures watching and learning from the situations they follow Ken into; and even the set up of the entire show, which entirely takes place in the wake of a nuclear conflict that has destroyed society and left only pockets of civilisation in the form of ragged villagers and biker gangs in its wake, just begging for despots to step in and corral them.

So I'm currently at episode 67 of the show at this point in time, with Roah still on the loose (though I loved the coming together of the three brothers of the North Star with their conflicts briefly put aside to watch Shu's sacrifice and Ken's battle against Souther) and one more figure of the South Star martial arts yet to be met, and presumably defeated, destroying the South Star martial arts entirely.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Sep 23, 2020 3:38 am, edited 4 times in total.

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#287 Post by Boosmahn » Sat Jun 22, 2019 11:21 pm

Netflix's release of Neon Genesis Evangelion has been met with some annoyance by fans, chiefly due to the absence of the ending theme (Fly Me to the Moon), script changes, and untranslated signs. Also, their dub uses a different cast than FUNimation's Rebuild one.

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Re: Anime

#288 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jun 23, 2019 5:32 am

It sounds like it is going to feel a lot different with those changes. The "All's right with the world" quote sounds the most problematic one, since it misses the allusion. And yes, translating all of the on screen text is incredibly important for this series. I'm glad that Neon Genesis Evangelion is getting out there again, but I'm not going to give up the ADV Films DVDs without a fight!

Another important aspect to compare this new dub with the original Japanese track and the ADV English dub from the 90s is on how they handle Shinji's scream, especially the piercing scream when the eyeball opens up at the end of the first episode (where even the English dub of that from the 1990s is amazing, with Spike Spencer apparently blowing his voice out on it) and the moment later on. By comparing between this clip of the Netflix version and the original from the later scene, it seems a bit muted.

And if you want thirty minutes of Japanese cover versions of "Fly Me To The Moon", (just as important to keep intact because it is being sung by different characters and nuanced differently depending upon the events of the episode) have I got the video for you!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Jun 23, 2019 8:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Anime

#289 Post by Cde. » Sun Jun 23, 2019 8:09 am

It's incredibly cheap of Netflix to not just license the damn song. By cutting all instances of Fly Me to the Moon, they significantly changed the tone of two major scenes (in episode 15 and 21) that featured an instrumental version.
Netflix made a big deal about licensing Evangelion. They know how important a show it is, but they've treated it with a lack of care.

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Re: Anime

#290 Post by RIP Film » Sun Jun 23, 2019 5:31 pm

Don’t usually watch anime but I’m watching this one based on its notoriety. Have been enjoying it and the dub seems pretty good, although it’s kind of odd how the subtitles and dub use two different translations. It seems like the subtitles are more direct in their meaning; sometimes I’ll rewind a scene and watch it with the subs on because the dialogue and reactions don’t match up.

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Re: Anime

#291 Post by Boosmahn » Sun Jun 23, 2019 6:49 pm

RIP Film wrote:
Sun Jun 23, 2019 5:31 pm
...It seems like the subtitles are more direct in their meaning...
There's a very interesting explanation for that...
Babysitter Super Sleuth wrote:So there's actually a reason the translation is so hyper literal and stilted! I was actually there in Baltimore to witness the instigating moment for this, so, story time.

A bit of background for those unaware: there is an ostensible remake film series of Evangelion called Rebuild of Evangelion, that starts out fairly beat for beat but diverged more and more, so far culminating in the third film, which bears zero resemblance to the original work in any way and is more or less an original work with the same characters.

The third film, 3.0, also features Kaworu, the gray haired anime boy in those tweets, far more prominently than he ever was in Evangelion, where he's essentially a deuteragonist of the story with Shinji. 3.0 also extremely amps up the romantic overtones of their relationship to almost blatant heights, with one of the motifs in the film being Kaworu literally teaching Shinji how to play a duet on piano as part of a way to get to know each other.

So fast forward to Baltimore, 2013. 3.0 has been out in Japan for a couple months. Funimation has been working on the dub, and they're going to screen it in America at Otakon, one of the biggest anime conventions in America, in their biggest exhibit hall, which fits several hundred people. This was, as far as I know, the American Premiere, a full six months before it hit actual theaters. There is a massive amount of hype for this, because as I said, 3.0 was completely divorced from the original series and the rumors about it had completely reinvigorated the fandom to a fever [fucking] pitch, so the room is packed to the [fucking] gills, at full capacity. Some people come out, they intro the film, and the lights drop and it plays.

And what follows is a [fucking] disaster.

So, I like 3.0. It's a movie that's willing to go completely [fucking] batshit, and it more or less threw out every scrap of existing canon it possibly could in one of the most active attempts at audience antagonization it possibly could. But that's the problem, it actively antagonizes the audience. It starts with a twenty year time skip and all the characters berating Shinji, and refuses to explain anything for almost an hour of its run time. And the crowd [fucking] loses it. There's cheering, there's laughter, there's groans, people shout "what the [hell]?" to massive applause. Most of the people in that room were watching it for the first time, and they were getting the both barrels treatment, so there was an extremely high level of energy for a movie screening.

So we get to the end of the first act, and Kaworu comes into the film for the first time, and this is where the wheels really come off the bus. Because funimation, at its core, still has a bit of the "by fans for fans" ethos going on, it's staff were all anime nerds, and shipping Kaworu and Shinji is one of the old classic ships of anime fandom. They'd been handed an official work from the original creator of Evangelion where the subtext of their relationship had been amped almost to text, so what did they do? They took the localization and pushed it even father. Every implication and hint is amplified, every joking line is uppsd to a full double entendre, and every double entendre is upgraded to full on flirting dialogue.

The crowd, being almost a thousand-strong people who were not only big enough nerds to go to a con but big enough to go to a movie screening AT a con, see this and essentially lose their [fucking] mind.

From this point on, you could barely hear the actual movie, because people were cracking up at every single line, cheering every action, and just going completely nuts. Just a [fucking] madhouse of hooting anime nerds. It continues like that mostly through to the end, people cheer, people leave, we all put the movie out of our minds and go get drunk as you do at anime cons, everything's right with the world, etc. Etc.

Except it isn't.

As the months go by, 3.0 has a slow rollout, leaves theaters, and news slows down. The first home release date in america blows by, no release. Second one blows by, no release. People start asking questions and answers are really cryptic. People are wondering, why the [hell] isn't it out on blu ray yet, Japan has had it for almost a year now.

After a few leaks and a public announcement comes out, a picture starts to form. Funimation is delaying the release because they're working directly with Khara to ensure "a better translation," and as such, are retranslating and redubbing the entire movie, from scratch.. Because it turns out, there was somebody actually from Khara itself at the screening at Otakon, and witnessing the crowd reaction had mortified them. The film was supposed to be taken seriously, you see; and witnessing an entire room losing their [fucking] mind with laughter at what was supposed to be a serious film had set off every alarm bell in this person's head. I don't know if anyone tried to explain to them that Americans generally react more animatedly at the movies, or that the crowd at that particular showing was a unique experience, but if they did it didn't work; Khara latched on to the liberties taken with the localization as the reason, decided that people didn't take the movie seriously because the translation wasn't precise enough, that enough care wasn't taken with their project and changes had to be made.

Khara brought in their own translators and took a direct hand in the new dub of 3.0, and had to approve every single line, every single delivery, every single change. Funimation tried to push back but could get zero ground, and almost all the localization was stripped out in favor of a dry, clinical direct translation. The home release of 3.0 in the west eventually didn't land until 2016, a full three years after the movie came out, because of this.

Ever since, khara has been extremely hands on with any and all translation of their work, which includes the Netflix dub. This has the same translation team Khara brought on for the 3.0 dub, and it's full of absolutely bizarre choices that make no sense in English, like referring to the (singular) character of Shinji Ikari as "the first children" and cutting out all of the memorable adlibs from the first dub.

What's actually happening here with Kaworu is that in the original Japanese episodes, all of his lines have a large amount of ambiguity that you can't really translate directly into English. This is where localization is extremely important - you need to look at the context of his character and decide which choice makes more sense. But since khara doesn't trust localizers anymore, they mandated a translation that maximizes ambiguity at the cost of not sounding like anything an English speaker would ever say.
Note that the premiere was subtitled, not dubbed. Everything else seems credible. (Also, the forum this was originally posted on had a profanity filter, so I took the liberty of replacing "gently caress" and "loving" with what they meant to say.)

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Re: Anime

#292 Post by Cde. » Sun Jun 23, 2019 10:35 pm

RIP Film wrote:
Sun Jun 23, 2019 5:31 pm
Don’t usually watch anime but I’m watching this one based on its notoriety. Have been enjoying it and the dub seems pretty good, although it’s kind of odd how the subtitles and dub use two different translations. It seems like the subtitles are more direct in their meaning; sometimes I’ll rewind a scene and watch it with the subs on because the dialogue and reactions don’t match up.
This is normal for anime - the subtitles are usually more accurate than the dub, because the dub has to alter lines to fit mouth movement timing. Dubs usually take more liberties too, because the subtitle watching audience is naturally more purist.

I strongly recommend you watch this in Japanese instead. The original voice cast do incredible work.

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colinr0380
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Re: Anime

#293 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jun 24, 2019 1:27 am

This is also where you will occasionally hear people talk about the difference between the terms 'subtitles' for the Japanese language track and 'dubtitles' for Hard of Hearing subtitles translating the English language track. A lot of anime companies will go to the trouble of producing both because the differences between the content of both tracks can be quite pronounced (though if there can only be one subtitle track then it is always best to go for the one focused on translating the original language than the new vocal track), and this is where Disney with the initial release of the Studio Ghibli films occasionally ran into trouble because they (understandably) focused more on translating the dialogue of their newly produced English language vocal dubs into subtitles for the purposes of general family audiences rather than preserving the original nuances of the language in a 'purist' way.

This issue of a dubbed track potentially changing tone or adding originally unintended meanings to a scene actually happens with live action films as well, though perhaps not quite as much because its more difficult to time new dialogue compared to animation. The main example I always go to for this is remembering a key scene which takes place in the back of an ambulance near the end of the German film Run Lola Run which in the original language plays more as a scene of benediction between two strangers whose paths have briefly crossed again, whilst in the English language dubbed version it actually makes it appear that the man in the back of the ambulance (the lowly security guard in the main character's unsympathetic father's bank) might actually be her real father! All that just from changing a couple of enigmatic lines of dialogue played over meaningful interedited gazes into a couple of other enigmatic lines of dialogue and the whole tone and even implication of the entire point of the film can have changed! (And I love that it raised an idea that would never have occurred to me from that scene! But it possibly might not have been the original intention of Tom Tykwer for that scene! Or maybe it was and the English language dub made it more obvious! Or maybe the English langauage dub track did not realise that the tiniest change in nuance raised all of those ideas!)

It is really interesting to hear Boosmahn's quote that the reaction to a screening of Evangelion 3.0 at a US anime convention caused the company to become extremely wary of translations though. It seems that early on a lot of the anime that came to the West were left in the hands of various specialist localisation companies and the original companies in Japan did not really take much interest in it (which is presumably why Angel's Egg got turned into In The Aftermath, or how three separate sci-fi series got mashed together to make the Robotech series, or how you get some of those astoundingly bad early dubs such as Dark Cat or the upsettingly atrocious (but fun if in the mood) English track on the comedy version of Tron, Savior of the Earth! The dialogue is almost as bad as in that Adam Sandler Pixels film, and only slightly less stilted!), and maybe we are seeing the flipside of anime getting a higher profile now by these more conservative translations.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Oct 14, 2019 3:23 am, edited 8 times in total.

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Boosmahn
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Re: Anime

#294 Post by Boosmahn » Mon Jun 24, 2019 4:01 am

Given language barriers, I don't think we can ever achieve a perfect balance of localization and accuracy.

As much as faithfulness matters when translating, localizing certain phrases can be the better choice in some cases. (On the extreme end, take Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, whose crass dub matches so well with the onscreen action it's hard not to imagine the two leads hurling profanity at each other every 30 seconds. Coincidentally, this was animated by Gainax, the same studio behind NGE!)

Fans are still heavily divided on the issue, and that's not even taking into account the decisions that can go into just one phrase. (For instance, the Monogatari series: one character refers to another as "oni no onii-chan." How could you translate that? "Devil boy?" "Ogre brother?" "Devil brother?" "Big brogre?" There's no correct answer.)

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Re: Anime

#295 Post by Zot! » Mon Jun 24, 2019 9:04 am

I’m hardly an expert, but I usually try the dubs first, and if they rub me the wrong way, I switch to Japanese with subs. I thin NGE was one of those I couldn’t stand. Also hated the original Totoro dub. But I like the Panda Go Panda one a lot. Miyazaki is probably right that when you are dealing with animation, you’re better off focusing on the visuals over dialogue anyway.

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Re: Anime

#296 Post by Zot! » Mon Jun 24, 2019 9:05 am

No excuse for not licensing the song though.

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Re: Anime

#297 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jun 24, 2019 11:53 am

They'd better have Pen Pen's theme in there, or there will be no end of complaints!

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Re: Anime

#298 Post by Cde. » Mon Jun 24, 2019 12:42 pm

Honestly surprised people on a Criterion forum prefer to watch anything dubbed. Animation takes away the blatant visual absurdity of foreign dubbing, but I don't think that's the only reason we watch foreign language film subtitled.
As for the argument that one should focus on the visual, is this any different than for, say, a Tarkovsky film?

I prefer subtitles because I think it's the best compromise. Yes, you're imposing text onto the image, but I think that's something we learn to compartmentalize, and it's less of a deviation from the original vision than replacing the performances selected by the director.

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domino harvey
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Re: Anime

#299 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jun 24, 2019 1:03 pm

Aversion to dubbing is a particularly English-speaking affliction. Tag Gallagher talks about this all the time in his work on Rossellini. I can't speak to this particular anime example, but I think you're assuming a dub is somehow by nature inferior or working with different elements, which is not necessarily so-- especially for an animated film, where these differences are presumably planned for in advance anyways. Wasn't Miyazaki pretty vocal on the value of his films appearing in the native language of the viewer?

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Re: Anime

#300 Post by knives » Mon Jun 24, 2019 1:16 pm

I can't speak for Miyazaki, but there have definitely been cases with authors strongly for and against dubbing. The FLCL dub for example was largely controlled by the original Japanese team and can be seen as as authoritative. Likewise Canadian animation is often made with English and French tracks simultaneously. To be honest even with live action I have a preference for dubbing, but especially nowadays that's not what directors tend to like so I roll with the punches.

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