Discuss. ㋼
Archive for the 'Anime' Category
Recently, some copypasta sauce spread over an Internet or two proposed that there are two types of anime fans. The first type enjoys story, substance and animation quality et cetera, and the other kind enjoys lighter, character-driven series and doesn’t care so much about where the story is headed.
Like most generalizations, this is complete rubbish.1 Different people like or dislike different things for different reasons. There are several qualities that may make a series seem good or bad, each entirely subjective. At least, that’s an idea. By my reckoning, likes and dislikes (in my case, at least) occur more-or-less at random. But I digress.
About a year ago, the sequel to Kiddy Grade, which had previously existed only as a pilot episode and some sketches, was greenlit for a full-fledged series. Now, I believe that Uta∽Kata is the best non-Giant Robo anime ever made, so although I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Kiddy Grade I was really looking forward to this new series from gímik, the production triforce behind all aforementioned (non-Giant Robo) titles. I even made a blog post anticipating it!
It didn’t live up to my hype. Of course it didn’t. Things tend to not. But I continued watching. I sat through episodes filled with in-jokes and references that remain impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t spend most of their life on Nico Nico Douga. Sure, there was plot, centimetring away under the everyday antics of the maids-who-are-actually-secret-agents, but it lacked the interconnectedness of Kiddy Grade, the subtle foreshadowing of Uta∽Kata.
One (half-)episode was nothing but a string of Lucky☆Star-esque voice actor-related gags. I’ve said that the presence of Norio Wakamoto is never a bad thing, and, well, it wasn’t. But I maintain that it was a thoroughly pointless episode; it introduced no new running characters, had no effect on the overall storyline and was never mentioned again.
But I persisted.
I’d watched the original Kiddy Grade. I’d watched Uta∽Kata. I knew that we were being lulled into a false sense of security, building to a massive plot turnabout.
And then it happened. Two major characters died, leaving our heroines without idols/mentors. Sad. Moving.
Meh, I thought.
It seemed that after eight or so episodes of nothing really happening, attempts to shake up the formula didn’t faze me. Maybe I thought that it should’ve been this way from the start. Maybe I was just in a bad mood that day. Either way, the series did become generally less painful to watch after this point, even though the overlying plot still didn’t make much of an effort. You could say that I had the mindset of a “Type A” anime fan at this point.
After an episode of mourning, episode 11 gave us a look into the lifestyles of the antagonists. (There are a bunch of characters in this show.) I thought it was a great episode; it may’ve been low on plot, but it was low on unfunny gags, too. Plus, we got to know the bad guys a lot better. They have feelings and stuff! Who’d've thought it?
Episode 12 added some much needed plot, featuring some well-appreciated continuity in the form of acknowledging the original series, revealing what happened to the principal members of the original cast and definitively linking both storylines. This is it, I thought. The halfway point in the series where everything changes. From now on, everything’ll be deadly serious.
The next episode was a beach episode.2
As beach episodes go, it was okay. It turns out that some computer broke down which trapped them there and they had to fix it or blow it up or something in order to save everybody. But the story isn’t why I find it notable. (No, neither was the mandatory dress code.)
As this episode played out, I found myself emotionally connecting with the main characters. I smiled along with them, cheered them on; they looked so cool in the denouement when they defeated the whatever-it-was terrorising the other characters that they were keeping their ES-Member-status a secret from until now.
And it was then that I realised that, for perhaps the first time ever, I wasn’t watching a show for the story. Sure, I enjoyed the plot and I continue to look forward to seeing where it goes, but that’s not why I care.
Over twelve hit-and-miss episodes, I had shared the adventures of these two girls. Together, we dealt with the strange situations that we were placed in, and, with time, it almost felt like we had become friends. It didn’t matter that they just happened to be a pair of young, good looking female-types; it was their personalities, not their bodies, that won me over. Going back over the older episodes looking for screenshots for this post, I found myself appreciating the show a lot more now that I knew.
I cared for these characters more than I cared for the series that brought us together.
And I still managed to write this whole post without mentioning their names. ㋼
- “Every generalization is false, including this one.” – Mark Twain [↩]
- Technically a holiday resort episode. [↩]
That title up there should probably say “Kanon Turned 10”. I started writing this post in May.
But it’s still 2009, and this year marks the 10th anniversary of the release of one of Japan’s most beloved visual novels.
Kanon takes place in Winter. There is a main character and some other characters as well. Some of the other characters are more important story-wise than others, and the main character has to talk to them for the story to happen. (That’s what one does in a visual novel, after all.) Hopefully, I’ve managed to describe it to you without spoiling anything. Please don’t stop reading here.
Kanon is notable for being the first work produced by Key, who would later go on do create Air and Clannad (which you may have heard of), as well as Tomoyo After, Planetarian and Little Busters!.1 (Which you may not’ve heard of. Don’t read too far into any of those Wikipedia articles if you don’t like spoilers.)
Nayuki is my favourite character. This is a picture of her.
Evidently, some people (i.e. Toei Animation) thought that Kanon was worth adapting into an animated series. So they did. It wasn’t very good.2 A few years later, after the exceedingly poorly paced Air TV series somehow became liked by folk, anime megahouse Kyoto Animation made another one. And it was good. So good that they eventually brought it over to North America, translated it into English American3 and released it on DVD, which, due to issues, quickly went out of print. Until it was re-released in a horrible boxset that tries to cram the whole series on four discs and typesets the subtitles in a highly annoying font.
At the time, one could've expected to pay this much for one of these. That's four episodes, y'hear? Well, I suppose that it's better to get 24 episodes for £30 than 4 of those episodes for £200. Even if the subtitles are harder to read.
To further appease the English-speaking fans, an unofficial fan translation of the original visual novel had been in the works for many years; before the story was animated, in fact. After much work by many hands, it was finally released earlier this year for anyone who owns a copy of Kanon Standard Edition, the slightly enhanced re-release.
Haeleth (who I believe started the project) mentioned on his website that HimeyaShop was a good place to get visual novels and the like. So I did. What I didn’t know is that since Haeleth’s now out-of-date page on Kanon was posted, all of the 18+ rated visual novels that they sell have been moved to a separate website, so I ended up with the “all ages” version.4
Now, Japanese programmers do things slightly differently to the way us Englishmen are used to. I’m no hacker (heck, I barely know any HTML), but one can tell from looking at the way that the game installs itself that the Japanese are used to a much different computing experience than us. (Do they not have the Program Files folder in Japan?) Perhaps the biggest cultural difference is that Mac users are generally left in the cold when it comes to visual novels, with most pretty much all of the major releases being Windows-only. This is a problem for me, as I have been a Mac user for nearly three years now.5 With barely any hard drive space remaining on the ol’ MacBook and Brother choosing to use his computer most of the time, there was only one way I’d be able to play Kanon.
I bought a MacBook Pro.
I wanted to take a photo that showed off the anti-glare display because I couldn't find any photos of the anti-glare display when I looked for them when I was thinking of getting a MacBook Pro with an anti-glare display.
I suppose that you could tell from my brief description up at the top that I haven’t yet finished Kanon in any of its forms. But just you wait. The moment Windows 7 is released (and my beautifully cheaper-than-half-price pre-order copy shows up), I’ll shove a Boot Camp installation onto that glorious solid-state drive and have Kanon running better than anyone could’ve imagined. (No, I did not write this post just to show off the new computer. I haven’t even turned it on yet.)
But soft. If you’re running Windows 2000 or XP or so (and have a working DVD drive), you too can experience the story of Kanon — regardless of your knowledge of Japanese.6 As mentioned before, Kanon Standard Edition For All Ages (to give it its full title) can be purchased at HimeyaShop.com. They post internationally! (But they don’t bother to fill out the Customs declaration, so be prepared for extra charges once it reaches your nation’s borders.) If you want the full version with the added nature sequences (which you might as well get, seeing as it’s the same price and the fan translation allows one to disable the sex sections if one wishes), you’ll have to go through ErogeShop.com (direct link provided so that you don’t have to look at the more trashy selections). The English update can be found up here (the link is buried at the end of the second sentence from the top of their section on Kanon). Use 7-Zip or something to extract everything in the “Patch files” folder to wherever you installed Kanon, and that should be it.
Finally, I will mention that at the time of starting this post, there was an ongoing online thing called the Key 10th Anniversary Letter Project, which attempted to collect fan submissions of thanks and congratulations to Key on reaching their decennial year. That date has now been and gone, and I’m not sure what the status of the project is, but it looks like they need help more than ever. If you can lend a hand with managing the project (or want to contribute a letter of your own), please give them a moment of your time. Who knows where it’ll end up?
When I first experienced Planetarian, I was moved to the point of giving a care — not something that comes easily for me. When I finished the Clannad anime series, I felt a similar way. Let’s hope that Kanon does the same.
Additionally, Japanator tells me that today is Moé Day. So this post isn’t so irrelevant after all! Hooray! ㋼
- No relation. [↩]
- Or so I have heard. [↩]
- Nayuki sounds like a man. Still, they got the drowsiness down; in the Japanese version, she just sounds like a duck. [↩]
- Many Japanese visual novels, particularly the kind where there’s one guy and more than one girl, contain sex scenes. (Hence the nickname “erotic game”, or “erogé”.) Having sex isn’t necessarily the goal of the story; these scenes range from being tightly integrated into the storyline to just thrown in there to tick the box. (“Game’s not selling well? Add the obligatory sex scene and watch the copies fly off the shelves!” --The Thought Process of the Common Erogé Producer) Kanon falls into the latter category, and versions with the naughty bits removed completely were released without any major changes to the storyline. Incidentally, neither of the animated adaptations feature such scenes. [↩]
- My excuse: They don’t make Logic for Windows anymore. [↩]
- Not that it’s a brilliant translation; the names are written backwards, with the first name last and vice-versa (for what I can only assume are unavoidable technical issues), honourifics are bizarrely ignored & transcribed without any explanation and certain words and phrases are left untranslated and highlighted in purple. If you click on them, it tells you what they mean and why they decided that it was a good idea to not translate them. They might’ve fixed all of this in the latest patch, though. [↩]
“If music be the food of love, K-On.”
Last Thursday’s film class involved watching some stock footage compilation called something like Poyahniskwazzi. It was depressingly boring. If this is pure cinema, I’d rather wallow in the mud of the latest Hollywood action flick.
Thankfully, this bout of anti-tainment was followed by a visit to my local anime society, whose antics are usually enough to keep me amused for the rest of the week. Our weekly showings go something like this: Attendees are allowed to bring in anime episodes. The congregation then votes on what they would like to watch, and the four or five shows with the most votes get shown – barring any (annoyingly common) technical difficulties. Hardware aside, one particular flaw in this system was demonstrated to me during the most recent showing: There’s no quality control. People are free to bring any anime in any format, regardless of whether it’s a 5-year-old fansub1 or a poorly-mastered DVD Video (although DVDs are generally discouraged at the society due to the aforementioned technical issues). Last week, when the first episode of the frighteningly popular anime series K-ON! was voted in, us anime society denizens were treated to this:
That's "Just not to join any club will turn into a home dweller?" for those of you with images switched off.
Yep. Awkwardly phrased English, low video quality, annoying subtitle typesetting – they didn’t even include the title theme or ending credits!2
Comic Sans MS is the much-loathed font used in this fansub. Much media attention has surrounded the Ban Comic Sans movement in recent weeks; the abundance of the typeface and its usage in unsuitable situations are the points of contention that they seek to put a stop to. What would you think if you went to an up-class restaurant and discovered that the menu was written in the very same cartoon font used on banner ads and office circulars? Thought so.
Comic Sans may be a discredited font, but that’s not the worst of this particular fansub’s problems. See for yourself in these undoctored screencaps:
"Stop the nonsense!" "Once we've become professional, the ticket profit share will 3/7 split, OK?"
"We have to keep her stay by all means!"
o(`ω'*)o
There will always be bad translations. And, if a series is popular enough and some other bright young translators make the effort, there’ll be good translations out there as well. It’s up to you, the consumer, now: DO THE RESEARCH. Don’t just grab the first file you see on Tokyo Toshokan. Download only from accredited fansub sites like AnimeSuki. Make use of fansub comparison websites. Download and compare several different versions yourself if you have to. Just, please, don’t subject us to any more of these failsubs. Yes, that’s right. I said failsubs. ㋼
- A fansub is a film or TV show subtitled into a different language by fans of the series. The quality tends to be a lot more hit-or-miss than professional translations, and there are different translation and presentation styles that can cause one series to be fansubbed by different parties. [↩]
- The opening theme (OP) and ending theme (ED) are more prominent in anime than their equivalents in foreign TV shows. They usually run for at least a minute and feature a catchy, mass-marketable song that may or may not be directly related to the show itself. In the case of K-ON!, the OP and ED music CD singles went straight to the top of the Japanese charts – quite a rarity for an animated TV series. [↩]
Precisely three years after the animated adaptation first graced televisions and monitors the world over, the original The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya light novel1 is being released in English. But this isn’t the first time that English speakers have been able to read a copy in their native tongue.
As I’m sure many of you will know, the now-legendary animated adaptation of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya received a really rather spiffing English-language fan translation by a group known simply as “a.f.k.” way back when it was originally broadcast in Spring 2006. What many of you may not know is that the text of the first Haruhi book (and the first couple of chapters of the second one) was also given a full fan translation by the very same people.
At the end of the final fansubbed episode, the members of a.f.k. were credited. It seems that the mastermind behind this adaptation is a fellow who goes by the handle “Strato”, who we can assume was also responsible for the similar novel translation, which could be viewed on a website linked to in the credits. Ever since North American publishing house Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (a division of the Hachette Book Group) announced that they had the license to publish an English edition, the a.f.k. translation has been removed from the website and replaced with a message promoting the upcoming release. And this is all well and good: once an English-language license has been announced, the unofficial translation is often voluntarily removed from circulation.
From the end of Haruhi Episode 14. Note the credits on the bottom-left and the URL on the bottom-right.
Now, with the finished product just hours away (at time of writing) from official release, some lucky folk have received their copies early. As I’m still waiting for mine to be posted, I have to make do with a free promotional excerpt being offered on the official website. Giving it a read, I notice that it’s quite similar to the a.f.k. version I read a while back. Very similar, in fact. Hey, I recognise that line! I think to myself. Those idioms, that writing style… They didn’t, did they?
They did. Barring some cosmetic changes and an amount of copy-editing, the official English-language release of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya uses a.f.k.’s fan-produced translation.
Here's the opening text from the sample on the Hachette Book Group website…
…and here's a.f.k.'s translation of the same. Bear in mind that this edition was released in June 2006, nearly three years before the English print version.
It’s not quite word-for-word, but the similarities are undeniable. Although translations of the same work, by their nature, are inevitably going to be similar, this one’s just too uncanny to be pure coincidence. They even use the same backronym for “SOS Brigade” that a.f.k. used (the “Save the World by Overloading it with Fun Haruhi Suzumiya’s Brigade”) as opposed to the (in my opinion, superior) translation from the anime adaptation’s English DVD release (the “Spreading Excitement All Over the World with Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade”). As I said, I don’t have the full, finished product to hand, but the people that I’ve discussed this with on Twitter who do have the novel agree that they’ve got to be the same translation.
So, does this mean that Hachette are making a dirty profit from the sweat of a fan’s brow? I don’t think so. In this day and age of Internet Vigilantism, a publisher would never try and pull something like this off; they’d be found out immediately. This very post is proof of that. No, it’s much more likely that Strato himself (or at least his translation) was brought into the project with his full consent, and was edited for accuracy and readability as such. This appears to be the current consensus, anyway. It’s all speculation at this point, but it makes sense: The link from the Haruhi episode mentioned earlier now leads to a short “press release” which notes that someone named Joe Monti (who may or may not be a member of a.f.k.) will be overseeing the program. I reckon that if the time was taken to credit that person on that particular website, then he ought to be involved with the group somehow. I’ll update if any new details come to light.
For the sake of comparison, the original a.f.k. novel translations can still be found on the Internet Archive (and the Hachette sample to compare it to can, at time of writing, be found in PDF form on their website). If you’re still not convinced, try comparing both editions to the (in my opinion, inferior) fan translation at Baka-Tsuki; by looking at this edition, you can see just how divergent different translations can be.
This being that sort of blog, however, I am obliged to stress that you really ought to go out and buy a copy of the book (or at least rent it, if your local library’s “hip” enough) if you want to read it. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is released on the 1st of April in the USA in both paperback and hardback editions. I expect that your local import comics retailer should have it in stock shortly; elsewise, try RightStuf (noting the US$10 international postage) or Amazon.
Many thanks to my Twitter followers—particularly @animealmanac and @animevice—for helping me with my research. I’d've liked to’ve included the original conversation here, but WordPress got confused with all of those <span>s I got from copying and pasting the individual tweets. There’s probably a better way. One day I’ll learn what it is and then update the post accordingly.
- Light novels are, in general, quick-and-easy reads aimed at the sort of person who does not read a lot of books but who is into anime, manga and the general fandom—not unlike myself, in fact. As such, these books are often (if not usually) based on—or adapted into—manga, video games and animated series. Although printed to a cheaper standard than mainstream books, light novels are not necessarily synonymous with Western pulp literature, but there is a great degree of similarity: Like pulp magazines, light novels are commonly serialised in periodicals such as The Sneaker. [↩]
Wondering why this blog hasn’t been getting as many page views as I’d like, I postulated to myself that perhaps the problem was that I wasn’t updating the blog. In order to remedy this, I started typing the words that you are currently reading.
So I’m going to be taking a look at that FLCL DVD set released in the UK a few weeks ago. I pre-ordered this one from Amazon back in January using a gift card. I hate gift certificates, but Amazon’s gift voucher implementation is (grudgingly) one of the best: When the FLCL collection was released and Amazon hadn’t received any copies (and still haven’t to this day), I cancelled my order and placed another with Play.com. Amazon automatically gave me back the credit for the gift certificate which I was able to apply to another pre-order I’d made without having to place the order again. (The contents of said order can wait for another post.)
We watched the series over a period of about a week. We do most of our viewing on a Yamada DVX-6700 (which, to date, is the best DVD Video player that I have used), but we had to watch the last disc on Brother’s iMac due to the general television area being occupied. It was Brother’s first time watching the series, but I’d seen it several times (in both Japanese and English variants). As such, I’m not going to bother talking about the show itself. Maybe I’ll get Brother to do a write-up.
Continue reading ‘A Technically Minded look at MVM’s FLCL Collection’
This is big, guys. gímik {sic}, the three-kin anime powerhouse behind such series as Kiddy Grade and Uta∽Kata, are working on a new show. For real, it seems. It’s a spinoff of the aforementioned Kiddy Grade franchise, and it is to be entitled “Kiddy Girl-and”. I kid thee not (pun not intended). Much thanks to my Twitter followers who alerted me of this, and to the Anime News Network for discovering it in the first place. Man, this gives me a great idea for a blog post: a gímik retrospective. Just as soon as I’ve finished watching Gigantic Formula. And, come to think of it, Kiddy Grade itself. I’d better make preparations for a marathon showing…
EDIT: Shiroi Hane, to whom I give credit for promoting gímik awareness across the English-speaking world, has mentioned us on his blog. Wow… *sniff* I’m so moved. Has this blog hit the big time already?
