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Geekout. Non-anime fans probably want to skip this one.
So the official announcement's been made and my new anime love, Fullmetal Alchemist, has been licensed and is going to air on the Cartoon Network this fall. (Damn, now I have to get cable again...)
I'm about 90% "YES!" and 10% "hmmm..." because the company that bought the rights is Funimation, and their track record with dubs is, from my POV, rather mixed. Their dub of Fruits Basket is *wonderful* -- it's one of the handful (along with Excel Saga and Cowboy Bebop) where I like the English voices so much that I prefer to listen to it in English rather than Japanese. On the other hand, some of their other projects have had terrible mismatches between voice actors and characters, or rewrite the dialogue in a way that makes the characters sound like idiots ... I have trouble even listening to their Yu Yu Hakusho, and don't get me started on Dragonball Z ... and since FMA is more of an action series than a shoujo series like Fruits Basket, I'm worried that they might try to handle it more similarly to their other action ones and in the process lose the quirky moodiness that makes it unique.
I'm also wary of what might be done to a series as dark and adult as FMA if it's cut for a daytime audience. Some series have been aired in the afternoon and still kept their adult sensibilities. The CN version of Rurouni Kenshin was *nice*. But FMA is way darker than RK, way darker than some of the Adult Swim stuff like Inu-Yasha -- I'll be really surprised if it isn't Adult Swim, but none of the buzz (that I've seen so far) mentions that it's going to be.
But I saw the trailers online this morning and I'm now thinking, "Wow, it looks like they're gonna do a good job with this." They don't seem to be trying to downplay the darker aspects of the storyline, and Al's voice sounds really good and not at all forced. (My one big problem with a lot of American voice acting is that the actors so often force their voices to sound unnatural, like in Saturday morning cartoons. For all I know, Japanese voice actors do it too, but I don't know enough about the inflections of spoken Japanese to recognize when they're doing it.) One of the trailers is basically just the theme song and corresponding voice-over; the other one is more theatrical. But both of them seem to be genuinely respectful of the source material and not trying to force it to appeal to ten-year-olds.
In any case, I hope I NEVER become one of those purist anime fans who sits on the sidelines and pooh-poohs any attempt to bring anime to a mass audience and nitpicks the translations when I don't speak a word of Japanese. (Spend enough time hanging around anime message boards and you start wanting to *strangle* people who bash on the official translations of anime just because they don't agree with the fansubs. Ye gods.) I'm excited and happy that FMA is going to be on TV, even though this is one that I'm definitely buying. (At least that way I can stand to wait for Christmas and see if I can get a beloved relative to buy it for me ...) And even if the dub turns out mediocre, Funimation has always done supurb subtitles. But I really, really want a good dub for this one, because FMA has a strong enough plot that it might be another of those series that makes a really good crossover for people who don't normally watch anime.
*fingers crossed*
I want more trailers, dammit.
I'm about 90% "YES!" and 10% "hmmm..." because the company that bought the rights is Funimation, and their track record with dubs is, from my POV, rather mixed. Their dub of Fruits Basket is *wonderful* -- it's one of the handful (along with Excel Saga and Cowboy Bebop) where I like the English voices so much that I prefer to listen to it in English rather than Japanese. On the other hand, some of their other projects have had terrible mismatches between voice actors and characters, or rewrite the dialogue in a way that makes the characters sound like idiots ... I have trouble even listening to their Yu Yu Hakusho, and don't get me started on Dragonball Z ... and since FMA is more of an action series than a shoujo series like Fruits Basket, I'm worried that they might try to handle it more similarly to their other action ones and in the process lose the quirky moodiness that makes it unique.
I'm also wary of what might be done to a series as dark and adult as FMA if it's cut for a daytime audience. Some series have been aired in the afternoon and still kept their adult sensibilities. The CN version of Rurouni Kenshin was *nice*. But FMA is way darker than RK, way darker than some of the Adult Swim stuff like Inu-Yasha -- I'll be really surprised if it isn't Adult Swim, but none of the buzz (that I've seen so far) mentions that it's going to be.
But I saw the trailers online this morning and I'm now thinking, "Wow, it looks like they're gonna do a good job with this." They don't seem to be trying to downplay the darker aspects of the storyline, and Al's voice sounds really good and not at all forced. (My one big problem with a lot of American voice acting is that the actors so often force their voices to sound unnatural, like in Saturday morning cartoons. For all I know, Japanese voice actors do it too, but I don't know enough about the inflections of spoken Japanese to recognize when they're doing it.) One of the trailers is basically just the theme song and corresponding voice-over; the other one is more theatrical. But both of them seem to be genuinely respectful of the source material and not trying to force it to appeal to ten-year-olds.
In any case, I hope I NEVER become one of those purist anime fans who sits on the sidelines and pooh-poohs any attempt to bring anime to a mass audience and nitpicks the translations when I don't speak a word of Japanese. (Spend enough time hanging around anime message boards and you start wanting to *strangle* people who bash on the official translations of anime just because they don't agree with the fansubs. Ye gods.) I'm excited and happy that FMA is going to be on TV, even though this is one that I'm definitely buying. (At least that way I can stand to wait for Christmas and see if I can get a beloved relative to buy it for me ...) And even if the dub turns out mediocre, Funimation has always done supurb subtitles. But I really, really want a good dub for this one, because FMA has a strong enough plot that it might be another of those series that makes a really good crossover for people who don't normally watch anime.
*fingers crossed*
I want more trailers, dammit.
no subject
I know too much about how the anime industry works to know that sometimes, what we think are stupid decisions are those made by the direct intervention from the licensor, like the whole Arucard/Alucard thing. They do try their best but the other thing to remember is that (unless they're certain companies who I won't mention) they're in the business to make money as well as import anime well. Note the order I put that sentence in.
no subject
I don't know most of what goes on behind-the-scenes, but I do know, intellectually at least, that a company won't import an anime unless it expects to turn a profit on it, and I expect most of their decisions to be made towards that end. It hardly helps soften the sting when they make decisions that (I feel) are out of keeping with the original series, but I understand it, at least.
I do appreciate it when the companies give the viewers credit for having some brains. I still don't know what company is doing Rurouni Kenshin, but I love them to death for keeping so much of the foreign flavor of that series, even in the Cartoon Network afternoon time slot. Or Funi for keeping a lot of the Japanese honorifics in their subtitles. I like to be treated as someone who won't just flip the channel rather than learn a new word. But then I look at message boards full of "fans" reaming Viz to the rafters for translating an attack name in Shonen Jump. You get the feeling that some people won't be satisfied until the characters are speaking stilted word-for-word Japanenglish.
When I first started watching anime in the mid-80s on TV (I feel SO OLD!) the idea that someday we'd have anime on TV that was mostly faithful to the original would never have occurred to anybody. People give Harmony Gold grief now for all the editing they did to their imported shows back then, but all I remember is how mind-blowing "Robotech" and "Captain Harlock" and "Galaxy Express 999" were to me as a 10-year-old ... here were cartoons in which heroes died and bad guys weren't always evil and people fell in love and got married on-screen. They really changed my idea of what you could do with animation. So what if they made the purists writhe in agony? They were good, entertaining TV.
Ironically, all the bitching from anime fans probably has helped a lot towards getting more faithful translations. But there's gotta be a line somewhere. While I'm all for unflopped manga (and remember when all the nay-sayers said unflopped manga was never going to sell? BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!) I think Viz goes a bit far with leaving the sound effects completely untranslated in some of their recent projects like the Excel manga. That actually makes it harder to figure out what's going on in the story. You can't keep flipping to the back to look up the sound effect.
Some scanslators have a neat solution to this: "subtitling" the f/x, either between panels or in an unobtrusive little box somewhere in the panel. If Viz must keep the f/x untranslated, I wouldn't mind seeing them do that with some of the important ones like gunshot sounds.
You can't please all of the people all of the time, I guess. And actually with importing manga/anime, it kinda looks like you can't please ANY of the people ANY of the time ...
no subject
Media Blasters (http://www.media-blasters.com), same fine folks who will be bringing the world the Invader Zim DVDs.
You get the feeling that some people won't be satisfied until the characters are speaking stilted word-for-word Japanenglish.
That's the same impression I get a lot, too.
They really changed my idea of what you could do with animation. So what if they made the purists writhe in agony? They were good, entertaining TV.
Amen to that.