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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.