Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Kageki Shoujo!!
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
SHD
Posts: 1752 |
|
|||||
|
Oops, I expanded the spoiler tag so that it would be more obfuscated, but it was too late...
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
meiam
Posts: 3442 |
|
|||||
It makes for good dramatic moment "you'll never be a star!", but being really good at mimicry is perfectly fine way to become a star. Vast majority of the audience would never be able to notice (and even if they did wouldn't be bothered by it). Apparently they always perform the same plays, so it's not like Sarasa will ever have to make a new performance. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
SHD
Posts: 1752 |
|
|||||
None of this is true whatsoever. 1. Most actors (well, most good actors) bring their own interpretation to a character, and they have their individual mannerisms, style of speech, etc. And this is especially true with musicals, where the actors have their own singing styles, their own interpretation of a song, etc. even within the confines of the melody. Plus, Takarazuka style performances are fairly stylized, so it's not like there's "refuge in subtlety" - actors have their own unique flourishes, etc. 2. Not everyone is a "star". Even Broadway or other popular theaters have only a few "select" top stars in any given era; and with theaters like Takarazuka (that Kouka is based on) there's only a handful of stars at any given time, per group: the otokoyaku top star, the musumeyaku top star, and their "seconds" - and the otokoyaku top star is THE star. She's the one headlining most shows, she's the one who has the raging fangirls memorizing everything she says, does, every moment of her every performance, etc. So these actors are very memorable. Sarasa mimicking a previous star's performance is something that a Kouka fan would absolutely notice, and they wouldn't like it at all - fans see this sort of thing as her trying to make it big by piggybacking on a more accomplished and famous actress. Besides, if a fan wants Otokoyaku Star X they'll just watch performances by her, if Sarasa wants to be a top star she should give a reason for fans to think she has something unique to her. 3. Takarazuka et al don't do the same plays all the time, quite the opposite. There are staples of course, but they have new material all the time. Last edited by SHD on Wed Aug 11, 2021 10:31 am; edited 1 time in total |
||||||
|
||||||
Yttrbio
 Posts: 3653 |
|
|||||
|
And yet every single student (who are presumably big Kouka fans) seemed super-impressed with her. The show did a terrible job of showing point 2.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
SHD
Posts: 1752 |
|
|||||
Or maybe it's because the students are 1. very young and haven't seen as many Kouka shows as most established fans, 2. being enthralled by something/someone with tons of charisma without noticing details is absolutely a thing. But buy a recording of a show and rewatch it with a clearer head (or hell, just watch the same show in the theater for the nth time), and those details will jump out. But hey, you don't have to believe me. Go ahead and think whatever you want. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
meiam
Posts: 3442 |
|
|||||
1. So? 2. You're way overestimating the average fan, maybe the most diehard fan that go to every performance would notice (like maybe 5-10 people), but most people only see a few play a year, if even that (I imagine most of the audience are just tourist seeing a play once or twice in their entire life). Even then most people would recognize that similar performance but they'd still see it as different (if only because Sarasa looks physically different). Most of the students in the show know more about acting than the average fan and they certainly didn't mind, and since they're already mega fan they've probably seen more play than most people. 3. That may be a problem, but even then most play use the same character archetype, she could just copy a similar character. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
SHD
Posts: 1752 |
|
|||||
So exacly what I wrote. What's so difficult to understand about it? I was explaining how being able to mimic another actor's performance alone, in this particular context, doesn't make Sarasa star material.
Let me ask - how familiar are you with Takarazuka/et al? (Or hell, theater fandom.) You don't sound like you know how these revues work. They don't have "casual fans". Sure, there are tourists who have heard of Takarazuka from anime or whatever and want to check it out what it's like, people who enjoy the spectacle once in a few years or so, and sometimes the odd person randomly stumbling into a performance without being very familiar with the genre. But the ones who keep the show going are the fans, who start at "diehard" and peak around "restraining orders have been placed". These revues are very expensive, have a very specific style, and cater to a very specific taste - to be a fan, even an "average" one, you have to be thoroughly invested. (There's also so much gatekeeping.) Kageki shoujo is not exaggerating when it says there are generations of actresses, or fans who were "indoctrinated" by their mom as their mom had been by their grandma, etc. I don't understand why you're placing so much emphasis on a simple storytelling element where the laymen go "wow" and the expert goes "not so fast"...
You're truly not familiar with this at all, are you. But hey, if this is the hill you're willing to die on, go ahead. |
||||||
|
||||||
1dbad
 Posts: 710 Location: Texas |
|
|||||
|
Weren't the other girls impressed with Sarasa's memorization abilities? If memory serves, they were freaking out more about how quickly she memorized the script of a show she had never seen before than they were with the performance itself.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
Mami-kouga
Posts: 181 |
|
|||||
Yeah it was a combination of it being so different from the usual Sarasa and her abruptly going from barely reading the script to moving like a professional. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
meiam
Posts: 3442 |
|
|||||
My disappointment doesn't come from expert going "not so fast", my disappointment is from the expert not realizing that it doesn't matter because he may realize but almost nobody else would and at the end all that matters is that the performance is great. People love to think that they're super fan of specific art and would totally be able to tell plagiarism, but fact of the matter is that they absolutely cannot and even expert have an extremely hard time. Lookup Joyce Hatto, she was a pianist who began releasing a prodigious amount of CD with her performance, she started gathering a lot of praise by both expert and layman. Some people started saying that it was kinda weird that she would produce so many track when she was dying from cancer and had until then never release that many tracks, but expert went out of their to defend her. Turn out, only one expert was finally able to prove that she was in fact a fraud and the tracks she was release were just blatant copy of other performance. That expert was iTune, when someone tried to import one of her CD iTune identified one of the song as belonging to another artist, because it was 100% the same. Here we're talking about 100% identical song. In a theatre play, even if someone was able to perfectly replicate movement down to the atom they'd still look differently, have a different voice and be surrounded by different actor and sets. Unless you're about to claim that only filthy casual listen to pianist CD and that theatre fan are true fan, I think it's pretty clear that theatre/Kouka would be much much harder to spot a copy. No one would notice. Now that could make for a really interesting storyline, if Sarasa went back to the teacher and said "Well I though about it and decided that you're full of shit and I'll be just fine! <3", but I'm guessing instead we're just going to get the generic "you have to find your own path", which is fine but is both generic and not true to life. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Mami-kouga
Posts: 181 |
|
|||||
|
Anyway. It's interesting to see the contrasting values between Kabuki and Takarazuka besides just the difference in which gender is generally meant to perform it. Though I guess the one thing both have in common is the internal messiness of it all, geez.
Also Sarasa and Akira's relationship is a bit strange. I didn't really expect Sarasa to be lovey dovey but a handshake is rather formal even for just childhood friends |
||||||
|
||||||
Folcwine P. Pywackett
 Posts: 99 |
|
|||||
|
With EP 7, "The Hanamichi and the Silver Bridge", Kageki Shōjo!! has delivered a brilliant piece of theater which comes down to a compare and contrast between two theories of Art.
You can see these theories played out in the ongoing forum argument between lowercase meiam and UPPERCASE SHD who are as opposed as their casement! In EP 6, "A Glimpse of Stardom", we were presented with the Star theory by Andou-sensei which has caused great concern to Sarasa because what she did was either plagiarism or parody. She channeled another artist's interpretation of the character, Tybalt. In EP 7, we are introduced to Sarasa's world of Kabuki and the theory that one should copy exactly the style of a great master. Take a more recent art form such as Hollywood. If someone were to copy the acting style of John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, or Jimmy Stewart, people would not say, "Great Performance", instead they would say "Great Parody". And that is essentially what Sarasa has done. Why not copy the style of actor Stephen Tobolowsky, and immediately there are blank stares all around, or you are looking up the name on IMDB! Mr. Tobolowsky is a greater actor than all three of the stars named above. You have certainly seen him perform many times and yet you do not know him, because he is not a star, he is a great actor with a very large body of work. HINT: Think Ned, the insurance salesman in Groundhog Day Great art does not equate to great fame. Most artists create in obscurity and stay there, known only to other artists. Think production crew on an anime. A Star or (Idol as in Asia) is a creation of Fandom, that is the Star will do a shtick that sticks in the hearts and minds of the vast majority of fans, and so everyone knows who they are, they are famous. Certain artists have a special something others do not. They might not even be on top with regard to technical skills, but they are Stars. This something other grabs hold of a large fan base, and its the fans who create the Star. Some use the word, Charisma which is just another way of saying, I don't know. Sarasa is facing a great problem, "Do I really want to be a Star? How do I create my own style? Will that style be popular in selling tickets to the fans?" The fans will come not to see Lady Oscar, but to see Sarasa Watanabe playing Lady Oscar! I do not see how this can be solved in the limited story time left (6 more EPs in a 13 episode season), and how is that for a downer? But Ai has the best line in the episode, perhaps in the entire run, when Sarasa and her boyfriend shake hands, Ai turns to the audience and says, "They're shaking hands? Aren't they dating?" Now that's art! |
||||||
|
||||||
KitKat1721
 Posts: 955 |
|
|||||
|
Happy to see some praise for the translator in this review. I swear not enough translators/localizations get any credit in weekly reviews, and some shows are absolutely elevated by them (Moriarty the Patriot, Odd Taxi, & Case Study of Vanitas were just a couple off the top of my head from the past year that really impressed me)
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
xolulu
Posts: 16 |
|
|||||
I'm not convinced. These look like pretty basic mistakes, and honestly that puts the quality of the rest of the script into question. Many translators definitely do a lot of great work, and certainly a lot of them get a lot of unwarranted flak for their choice of words (e.g. "don't fall in", "sus", or "big brudder", to give some recent examples), but legitimate mistranslations do happen and should be recognized. CR, Funi, Sentai are co. are providing a commercial product here. Let's not sweep it under the rug just because we're friends with the translator. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Folcwine P. Pywackett
Posts: 99 |
|
|||||
Completely agree with the reviewer, Ms Clewis, the Kouka Seniors are some of the hottest women I have ever seen animated, and they don't at all fit the stereotype of the perfect Shoujo woman. There is nothing kawaii about them, no frilly dresses, no makeup, bobbed hair, and the way they carry themselves with such grace and elegance while even off stage is remarkable. In some ways they are more like the Kabuki actors. (It would seem that the real Female fan base for the real Takarazuka Review fall heads over heels for these actors!) If you were ever to see some heavily coded subtext, it certainly was displayed here in EP 9 with the winning Bridge hand being called out only it was Chika Sawada being called out! The backstories of the minor characters surrounding Sarasa and Ai, are so rich and fulfilling (Angel Beats comes to mind). Such a shame that we only have 4 more episodes to run here, in such a wonderful production! Appearing as it does that the artists behind Kageki are not going for a fake ending while spending so much time filling out their background characters, seems to mean that Kageki Shoujo!! will just stop at 13 and that is mean! |
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group