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I would generally agree on preferring to go subtitled if at all possible (at least you are getting the original vocal nuances coming through, even if the subtitles can still interpret the actual content of the dialogue in their own way), and do not really see animation as any different to live action in that respect. An extra layer of translation is getting a little further from the original production. However there are always exceptions to that rule, and dubs done excellently that make them worthwhile in their own right. The example from anime that I always want to mention (and which is apparently getting a Blu-ray release at some point this year) in terms of preferring the English language dub version to the original Japanese version is of Cyber City OEDO 808, mostly because the UK version specifically added a score by Rory McFarlane that enhanced the action amazingly.

domino harvey wrote: Mon Jun 24, 2019 5:03 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?

I would think that foreign audiences being less averse to dubbing is a result of growing up on (largely) American exports dubbed into their native language. To make a broad generalisation, English speakers tend to stick to entertainments in their own language unless they are more interested than the average viewer in film as art.

I acknowledge that dubbing can be subjectively superior, and I've seen excellent English subs of anime - FLCL and Cowboy Bebop being two famous examples. For me though this is mostly beside the point. If I really care about a piece of media, especially an auteur driven one, I like to get as close as possible to the original vision. A dub has a new cast, chosen by a different director. Subtitles are no obstacle for watching live action films, so why should animated films be any different?

Beyond that though, anime dubs are almost always dramatically inferior because some of the creme of Japan's voice acting talent are working in anime, whereas anime dubbing is low budget, from a less competitive niche of the American voice acting industry. Performances are almost never comparable to what you'd hear in an American cartoon.

And yes, Miyazaki has stated that he is fine with dubbing, as the experience may be just as distorted with subtitles. Satoshi Kon said he accepted dubbing but prefered if people watched his films with the performances he directed. There are a range of perspectives on this, I just think that a preference for subtitles makes the most sense if we're coming at this from an auteur or film-as-art perspective.

One more point of interest for Anime specifically is that this style of animation doesnt animate speech like western animation. So it’s just open and closed mouths as far as I’m aware. So it really lends itself to localization well.

Cde. wrote: Mon Jun 24, 2019 6:42 pm I acknowledge that dubbing can be subjectively superior, and I've seen excellent English subs of anime - FLCL and Cowboy Bebop being two famous examples. For me though this is mostly beside the point. If I really care about a piece of media, especially an auteur driven one, I like to get as close as possible to the original vision. A dub has a new cast, chosen by a different director. Subtitles are no obstacle for watching live action films, so why should animated films be any different?

What the Italian examples mentioned earlier show though is that often there is no original mouth. Most classic Italian films were dubbed over in sessions that did not involve the original director at all. Rossellini is a particularly notorious example often just giving the raw footage to the studio to edit, score, and dub. Additionally the original vision of something might not be the 'natural' soundtrack. Tarr's Man From London is a prominent recent example of this. As far as I know it has only been dubbed into Hungarian, but there is a lot of evidence that it should be in English. There's also examples like Chris Marker and occasionally Werner Herzog where they may have filmed their movies in one language, but prefer various dubs that aren't by any measure the original version. The issue is not as simple as people make it out to be.

By the way, if anyone wants more Fly Me To The Moon a series of videos of a 1997 concert performance of the Eva score which includes it is up on YouTube!

And for Otomo manga fans, Kodansha is also releasing an "Otomo: The Complete Works" reprint project of all his early out of print comics. I have no idea how much Otomo's work has been uncollected, but can speak to the quality of Domu and his shorts collected in Memories. Kodansha did a bang-up job on his Akira box set two years ago, so I'm fairly excited about this venture.

And, I only post this here because there's a lot of crossover between the anime and manga worlds, but any devotees of Kazuo Umezu, or just batshit-insane storytelling that is must be read to be believed, should take notice of THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM perfect editions coming from Viz this Fall.

It's a boy's own adventure, bred into a William Golding novel, within the genre trappings of post-apocalyptic nightmare, but as relayed to an outsider artist by an alien race. The levels of unfiltered creativity on display by Umezu in this work are simply astonishing, every ten pages featuring an even more extreme WTF moment than the last.

And it was all serialized in a Japanese kid's anthology in the mid-seventies!

Originally reprinted over a decade ago as 11 paperbacks, there will be three of those volumes to each single volume of the perfect edition hardcover. It's going to be glorious. And this really is the type of thing to support if anyone wants more Umezu (which I most certainly do) or esoteric/off-the-beaten path manga licensed to North America.

Boosmahn wrote: Sun Jun 23, 2019 3:21 am 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.

I never finished the original dub of Eva but I will say odd translation choices like referring to each of the individual child pilots as "[number] children" never stops being awkward. Also, the weird pronunciation of NERV as "nairv" really bugs me. I don't entirely mind the dub otherwise, I'm more peeved that since Netflix has licensed the series it means there likely won't be any physical release.

jazzo wrote: Fri Jul 05, 2019 2:48 pm And, I only post this here because there's a lot of crossover between the anime and manga worlds, but any devotees of Kazuo Umezu, or just batshit-insane storytelling that is must be read to be believed, should take notice of THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM perfect editions coming from Viz this Fall.

It's a boy's own adventure, bred into a William Golding novel, within the genre trappings of post-apocalyptic nightmare, but as relayed to an outsider artist by an alien race. The levels of unfiltered creativity on display by Umezu in this work are simply astonishing, every ten pages featuring an even more extreme WTF moment than the last.

And it was all serialized in a Japanese kid's anthology in the mid-seventies!

Originally reprinted over a decade ago as 11 paperbacks, there will be three of those volumes to each single volume of the perfect edition hardcover. It's going to be glorious. And this really is the type of thing to support if anyone wants more Umezu (which I most certainly do) or esoteric/off-the-beaten path manga licensed to North America.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to these as well. I still have my original paperbacks, but maybe I should stick them on ebay while I can get something for them. It is a crazy series. Always hoped there would be an animated adaptation, but maybe it was just too crazy.

Junji Ito's horror manga Uzumaki is getting a 4-part anime adaptation by Production I.G and Adult Swim. It is set to be directed by Hiroshi Nagahama (Flowers of Evil!) and Colin Stetson.

Boosmahn wrote: Mon Sep 02, 2019 12:41 amJunji Ito's horror manga Uzumaki is getting a 4-part anime adaptation by Production I.G and Adult Swim. It is set to be directed by Hiroshi Nagahama (Flowers of Evil!) and Colin Stetson.

Here's the teaser with Stetson's music. I'm afraid Hereditary (which he also scored) is still in my to watch pile, but I also note he is also involved in scoring the upcoming H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, The Color Out Of Space, so he's very busy in the horror field! What is Flowers of Evil like Boosmahn?

This will join the anime adaptations of Gyo and the recent mixed received series the Junji Ito Collection which apparently stiffly animated a number of his short tales. Hopefully it will be a bit more successful than those.

colinr0380 wrote: Mon Sep 02, 2019 8:07 amWhat is Flowers of Evil like Boosmahn?

Flowers of Evil is a disturbing, poignant series, and maybe the most un-anime-like anime there is. If there's one person who can nail quiet and unsettling tones, it's Nagahama.

Flowers of Evil is finally nearing the top of my kevyip; I'll say something about it when it gets there but that's not quite yet.
In the meantime, hear's the write up that got me interested in the series in the first place.

Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress will be released by Shout/GKIDS on November 19, leaving, I believe, only Paranoia Agent, as his only work unavailable in a region-1 (or free) friendly Blu-ray release. I can only assume that they'll get to that eventually. Tokyo Godfathers is available in a lovely region free release from Umbrella.

My understanding is that the existing Blu-ray editions of Paranoia Agent (Japan, France, Germany) are upscaled from SD. A true HD version may not actually be possible given its age and TV origins, but seeing how the R1 DVD set is long OOP and goes for ludicrous prices on the secondary market, an upscaled BD release would still be far preferable to the status quo.

I have just been reading through the latest edition of NEO magazine and there are a few really interesting anime titles getting released in the UK on Blu-ray in the next month. The anthropomophised take on the functions of the human body series Cells At Work! is being released by MVM (here's a clip of how red blood cells circulate through the heart!). Apparently there is a manga follow up to this called Cells At Work: Code Black, which after showing how things should work in a healthy body, instead moves to someone with an unhealthy lifestyle, presumably for more action scenes fighting against fatty deposits, cancerous cells and suchlike (though really we have already seen the 'body horror' version of that with getting that inside view of Bill Murray in Osmosis Jones!)

The boxing-but-with-power-armour series Megalo Box is coming from Anime Limited at the end of November. This is based on the manga from Ikki Kajiwara, the creator of Champion Joe and Tomorrow's Joe, which were more traditional boxing titles from the 1970s and 1980s. Some of his work was made into Sonny Chiba vehicles in the 1970s, and since then his work has been adapted by Takashi Miike into live action a few times from two straight to video Bodyguard Kiba films to For Love's Sake, and he wrote the novel on which Big Bang Love: Juvenile A was based.

I am a bit curious about Record of Grancrest War which is coming out from MVM in two volumes, one in a couple of days and the second in November. This is apparently from the creator of Records of Lodoss War, so that is interesting, though it does also get savaged in the Neo review which ends by saying "the only Game of Thrones comparison that feels appropriate here is to its divisive final season. Neither are very good". Ouch! So I'm back and forth on whether I might check that one out or not.

But the most exciting release has to be Anime Limited bringing Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade to Blu-ray. This is a 1999 feature that was written by Mamoru Oshii (though not directed by him) and is a sort of alternate universe set tale about a kind of government mandated death squad set up to track down an execute terrorists carrying out waves of suicide bombings. We follow one of the members of this squad and the tragedy-tinged relationship that starts up between him and a girl that is part of the underground resistance movement. As you might guess from the "Wolf Brigade" title this leans heavily on the Red Riding Hood story, all building up to a rendition of the "what big eyes you have!..." part of the story for the tragic climax. It is probably the most 'arthouse' recent anime release (revisiting Oshii's 1985 film Angel's Egg recently was really educational coming back to this one, as the central relationship contains basically entirely the same arc of wariness turned to trust and eventual betrayal between the central couple), with a wonderful 1950s or 1960s seeming atmosphere, a fascinatingly ambiguous relationship between agents of the state and suicide bombers (I cannot argue with the Neo review of this new release stating that it is "operatically romantic" and making reference to both the doubling female characters, one lost in the past, the other a potentially saveable 'recreation' in the present, of Vertigo, along with the chase through the sewers raising the spectre of The Third Man. Though in this case you get ultraviolence of being torn apart by heavy weaponry rather than a nod and a wink goodbye from Orson Welles!), and one of the best scores to ever grace an anime feature.

Plus there is that amazing shot in the opening scene of the police facing the rioters which follows in one fluid shot the creation and lighting of a molotov cocktail, the person carrying it running through the thinning out crowd towards the front line like an Olympic runner and then following the molotov arcing out and exploding in the middle of the police line, is still a spectacular moment of animation. Though it is important to be prepared for quite a shift in pace after that bit of action early on to something much slower about guilt and, again Vertigo inflected projecting onto another person, before tragically finding out the dark truth about the situation.

If there is one slight drawback with this release it is that whilst it has everything else from that long out of print Region 1 US DVD set and adds the jump to Blu-ray, I'll still be keeping the old set for the CD soundtrack that came with it. But it finally gets the film out there again, if just to have the original to contrast against the apparently rather changed in certain aspects South Korean live action remake from last year by Kim Je-woon.

I’ll second the recommendation for Jin-Roh, ultimately a sustained meditation on the ways fascism eats the soul—and I can’t praise enough its astounding score which so perfectly accentuates the film’s humanistic sense of tragedy.

Giant Robo finally made it to r1 blu ray. It looks and sounds great.

This was a fun surprise: the Christmas edition of University Challenge featured Jonathan Clements as one of the contestants, representing Leeds University. Clements co-wrote The Erotic Anime Movie Guide with Helen McCarthy and does an essential monthly "Manga Snapshot" article in Neo Magazine, in which he translates and reviews the content of various publications out on the newsstands!

I enjoyed Yuasa's 2010 mini-series Tatami Galaxy -- which actually makes reference to the manga "Night Is Short, Walk On Girl" -- which he made into a film more recently. The protagonist is (deliberately) a dolt most of the time -- as he progressively explores all sorts of alternate time lines/choice paths during his first 2 years in college (at a college modeled on one of Kyoto's top schools, Doshisa University). The heroine is appealing, however. A bit weird at times, but that seems to be expected from Yuasa (who worked as one of the animators for Takahata's "Our Neighbors the Yamadas").

Apparently, Funimation will be releasing a blu-ray of Satoshi Kon's television series, Paranoia Agent, sometime in 2020.

Teasing-Master Takagi-san (Akagi 2018) (on Crunchyroll)
Teasing-Master Takagi-san 2 (Akagi 2019) (on Netflix)

Possibly the most charming and delightful animated series in many years. It focuses on two middle-school students (in their first and second years). The heroine, Takagi-san, delights in (successfully) teasing her classmate, Nishikata -- while he dreams up countless schemes to best her (always in vain). Over tme, it becomes clear to classmates (and to Takagi-san) that they (in fact) like each other, Nishikata (needless to say) remains relatively clueless -- despite clearly being obsessed by her. As the series progresses, we also see more of the "couple's" classmates.

This is set on Shodoshima (an island in the Inland Sea) -- where the author of the manga lives -- and is meticulously localized to the actual settings (sort of like Takahata's Anne of Green Gables).

Rare to find a show so simultaneously sweet-natured and intelligent. One wishes for a third season -- but the manga author hasn't yet written the third (and final) year's adventures of these characters.

Addendum -- Season 2 is watchable even if you haven't seen Season 1 -- though I'm glad I saw Season 1 first (as Season 2 is even better made),