Adding to the stuff I said yesterday about anime openings, Pixy Misa has this, and then suggests that this song is catchy. I played it through and I’m not inclined to argue. I think it’s catchy like ebola. I won’t say I liked it, but much like Gollum and the One Ring, I may never be rid of my need of it.
One of the odd things about this series is the way Kaoru and Aoi act in the English dub. Both of them talk in a very formal manner. Their speaking is slow and even, and they never use contractions. (Their speach is a bit like that of the character Data in Star Trek.) At first I thought this was due to the difficulty of matching the dub to the original mouth movements. However, their delivery seems stiff even when the character speaking isn’t onscreen.
Now I have a new theory: I think they speak this way in an attempt to re-create the very formal speaking style of the characters. I’m betting that due to their traditionalist upbringing, Kaoru and Aoi have strong accents that I could hear if I had Japanese ears.
Another interesting note is that unlike most dubs, they preserved a great many of the honorifics. Even in English Kaoru and Aoi call each other Kaoru-sama and Aoi-chan. However, they call Miyabi “Miss Miyabi”, a translation of Miyabi-san. In turn, Miyabi calls them “Sir Kaoru” and “Lady Aoi” instead of Kaoru-dono and Aoi-sama. I can’t tell why some honorifics were translated and some were preserved. Sempai (sp?) is translated for certain combinations of characters and not for others. At least it’s consistant throughout, though.
For Tina’s character, they simulated the effect of her American accent by having her speak in a southern (Dixie) accent for the dub. The accent is a bit heavy-handed, and the way it’s played it makes her sound a bit unsophisticated, which might be how an American accent would sound to people in upper-class Japan.
Tina also leaves off honorifics entirely. I checked the subtitles and listened as well as I could to the Japanese voices, and I’m pretty sure she does indeed leave off honorifics, at least sometimes. This is odd. I didn’t know you could do that. I thought one of the challenges facing foreigners was that you couldn’t refer to someone without knowing what honorific you needed. Perhaps this is only a problem if you don’t know their name.
There is an old SNL sketch that has Chris Farley playing an American tourist who somehow ends up on a Japanese game show. (If you’ve never seen it, you can get it here.) He doesn’t speak the language, know the rules, or even understand what’s going on, and the skit gets pretty crazy as he’s introduced to the strange and painful world of game shows in Japan. It’s quite funny.
The skit has everyone else speaking faux-Japanese. It sounds enough like the real thing to make the skit work for me, but even to my untrained ear I can easily tell they are talking gibberish.
This got me to thinking, though. Do Japanese entertainers ever do this with English? If so, what would it sound like? That would be facinating to hear. They might not have to though, since English speakers in Tokyo are easier to find than Japanese speakers in Hollywood or New York. In the Anime I’ve seen up until now, English has always been real English and not gibberish. Still, a low-budget show (comedy show in particular) might go this route, and it would be facinating to hear how English sounds to non-English speakers.
Steven Den Beste had a post at one point (which I’m sure is still there, but I can’t find it now) which showed the scoreboard in Angelic Layer. (Update: Right here! Thanks Steven.) The display was in properly spelled English, but none if it meant anything. It was just just some general English words arranged to look like a meaningful display at first glance. It worked: I never noticed it was nonsense until he pointed it out.
I notice that most of my favorite Anime series also have fantastic opening credits. The ones I disliked also had opening sequences that I disliked. Was it that the (lack of) quality in the show also applied to the opening? Or, did my feelings for a show simply extend to the opening musc? Or vice versa? I don’t know, exacty. I know there are very few shows that I liked which had openings I didn’t and I’ve never seen a show I hated which had music I loved. Hmmmm.
Let’s take a look at my highly subjective list:
The BestHaibane Renmei was perfect. Music: Perfect. Visuals: Just right. It set the mood of the series, and even captured the spirit of each of the main characters with just a few seconds of screen time apiece. Masterfully done.
Serial Expierments Lain facinates me because the opening is in plain English. The visuals and the music combine to impart a sense of mystery. The images of the birds are quite striking. In some ways I think the intro exceeded the show itself.
Kino’s Jouney does an excellent job of setting the mood of this series with a sense of discovery and wanderlust.
Sugar, A Little Snow Fairy will MAKE you love it with the fun visuals and irresistible tune. They characters have miles of charm, and it comes through in the little glimpses we get of them here.
Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex has an interesting intro. It’s techo, with a potentJapaneseRussian aria. Just my sort of music. The other interesting thing is that for the most part they don’t (re)use visuals from the show. The show itself is mostly standard animation, but the intro is done in cgi.The good and the mediocreChobits has a very, very catchy song. The visuals are a bit plain though. Still, gotta love that song.
Cowboy Bebop is a bit overrated in my book, but it’s still a fine opening and it does a fine job of setting the mood. I got a bit tired of it, and by the end of the series I was skipping the intro.
Ai Yori Aoshi didn’t quite work for me. I like the series, but the intro never seemed to fit. The series could be at times tense, touching, wild, or silly. None of those were really captured in the overly sappy intro.
Mahoromatic‘s intro struck me the same way Ai Yori Aoshi’s did: I just didn’t fit the feel of the show for me. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t right.The worstBlue Gender was forgettable, much like the show. Meh.
Outlaw Star has an intro song that sounds like a late 80’s leather-pants-and-big-hair rock band. Sort of a Japanese Motley Crue. I don’t care for that sort of music, and this song made me cringe.
Big O. Sigh. Where to start? The lyrics are the name of the show repeated over and over. The visuals are no picnic either, with black shapes spinning on a red / orange background. The whole thing looks like a parody. Good grief.
If I were to organize the above based on how much I liked the show overall, it the list would be almost exactly the same. I think I’d move Ai Yori Aoshi into the first group (I really liked it) and move Lain down into merely “good”. Still, the correlation between openings I like and shows I like is quite strong. Interesting.
You’re annoyed. I can feel it. I’ve slagged something you love. Or perhaps I’ve praised something that you deeply hate. This is unavoidable. The comments link is below if you feel the need to let me know just how wrong I am.
The other day I was out and we saw an amazing sight: To the west was a brilliant sunset, and to the east that sunset shone into a storm and created a huge, vibrant double rainbow that reached across the entire sky. In all my 34 years, I’ve never seen one like it before. I didn’t have my digital camera with me, but I did have my phone, which has a built-in camera. We pulled over and I started shooting. Amazing.
Today I uploaded the pictures to find out how they turned out. I then found out something interesting: My phone can take pictures at the “high” resolution of 640×480, the “medium” of 320×240, or the “low” of 160×120. Laying aside the fact that the “high” resoultion is lower than the “low” resoultion of most self-respecting cameras these days: Guess which of the three is the default?
If you’re going to have a camera with three settings, “small”, “miniscule”, and “useless”, can you at least have it set to “small” by default? For crying out loud. What possible use could anyone have for 160 x 120 pictures?
What a bloody shame.
One of the first Anime series I watched was Ai Yori Aoshi. It is not a deep or mysterious series, but to someone like me who was unfamiliar with the genre it was continuously unexpected. I’d never seen anything quite like this story (there is certainly nothing like it in American entertinment) and so I never knew what was going to happen next. This series introduced Aoi Sakuraba, who is still one of my favorite anime characters.
From here on are some mild spoilers. What I’m giving away isn’t exactly anything the average otaku couldn’t probably see coming a mile away, but if you want to set-up episodes to be a secret, it’s best to skip this.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ai Yori Aoshi”
They Might Be Giants are on tour. They have this thing at their site called “Venue Songs”. The site is making a big deal of the fact that they are writing a whole new song for each location they play. That would be impressive for any other band, but we already knew these guys could write songs pretty much at will. What’s amazing to me is that they have a new music video for each of those songs, and that these seem to come at the rate of about once a week.
I can believe that they can write songs this fast. Heck, I’ll bet they could churn out song ideas at the rate of one every couple of minutes if they needed to. But how do you get a new music video done in a week? These music videos are not just them on stage, playing the song in question. Most of them look like very well-done flash animations. Those things take time to produce. As much as I like TMBG, I think the real hero in this venture is whoever is churning out these videos.
And as is usual with TMBG, you can see all the videos and hear all the songs on their site for free. They don’t even make an effort to recoup the expense of playing it for you. There isn’t an ad anywhere on the site.
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
T w e n t y S i d e d
