Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! [2009-05-08]
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BrianaTheBard
 Posts: 34 Location: Milwaukee, WI |
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The answer to this week is way too easy: Neon Genesis Evangelion.
I had watched the odd episode here and there when I was a teenager, but it never interested me then and just seemed like a load of crap that the creators threw in to look cool for the sake of cool. Then the anime fandom comes in with their "common sense" stick and demanded that I watch it in order to become a true, elite anime fan. At the time, I had just finished and really enjoyed RahXephon and the first season of Code Geass, so I thought that maybe I just needed a little introduction to the mecha genre before I could really like NGE. So instead of being cynical and dismissing it as a waste of my time, I decided to give it a fair chance. And man, was I surprised. It IS the pretentious load of BS I thought it was as a teenager. I could rant on and on about the botched religious symbolism and almost indiscernable storyline, but what really turned me off was the characters. What hooks me into any story, be it movie, book, or anime, is interesting characters that are unique but you can still connect to them, and the relationships between these characters. NGE has NONE of that. I think I could get a lot of people to agree with me that Shinji is a LOSER that needs to stop whining about his daddy issues and mother complexes and grow a pair instead of moaning about how it's oh so unfair that he has to do this and that and nobody understands what he's going through. . Also, maybe the point of Asuka, Rei, and Misato is lost on me because I'm not a 13-year-old boy who just found out what his wee-wee can do. Holy wow. I didn't expect to write that much. Oh well. There it is. |
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v1cious
 Posts: 6202 Location: Houston, TX |
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damn more people need to know about Yuasa. the man is brilliant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1qvAE_epc&feature=related(possibly nsfw) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y9xzHtnUNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFQ-iizBm8w Last edited by v1cious on Fri May 08, 2009 1:57 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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One has to keep in mind that it's alright to have a hobby in your young age, but one must not let that hobby become the be all and end all of one's life without then making it pay your way on the other side of the adult threshold, by making it your career. Until that happens a hobby is just another form of entertainment which must take the back seat when it comes to making something of one's self. That means dedicating your efforts toward your future life completely. Once one has finally secured their chosen career and are making enough money to pay off bills, debts, etc, and still have some left over to spend on non-essentials can one then resume that hobby once again. However, once a hobby becomes a job it stops being a hobby, but pain is eased by knowing you love it.
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8461 Location: Penguinopolis |
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Duhr huhr, yeah, Shinji is such a wuss, why can't he shut up about the mind-crippling life he lives every day that any lesser person would kill themselves doing? He should really be more like shallow, obnoxious super robot characters like Kouji Kabuto or Kamina. |
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Ai no Kareshi
 Posts: 561 Location: South Africa |
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First, let me tell you that I enjoy Answerman a lot – it's one of my ANN highlights of the week. The questions you publish are interesting, and your responses are always enlightening one way or another. Keep it up!
That said...
Nice strawman, Brian. If dubs ruin anime, the cause would be bad acting. But let's not get into that here. |
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Zirdante
Posts: 49 |
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Answerman had a flaw in his logic. Even if the dialog is recorded after the animation is done, its still animated for the japanese mouth, and turning it into english, the character will have awkward lip-syncing that will look terrible. And since its in english, and the focus is more on the characters, it comes even more clear that the lip-syncing is a mess. So, my biggest vomit inducing things about dubbing to english is the low quality of voice acting (every woman sounds like a squeaky teenager), and what I said before, the lip-sync. Do english voice actors even watch the original version? Seems like they have only watched tom and jerry or pinky and the brain; and mimic the voices of those characters into everything they do. That gives anime the childish vibe with the american audience, and pulls them away. This is why I would recommend watching it as it is mean to be watched, in the original language. If you dont like it, dont watch at all. (What pisses me off the most, is the fact that dubbing a quality show, and slapping it on cartoon network and having dumbed down all the good plot.) |
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Murasakisuishou
 Posts: 1469 Location: NE Ohio |
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Two words for you: ZRO Limit. In all seriousness, maybe you're just watching the wrong dubs. I've seen more than my share of awful dubbing (Yes, that means you, Appleseed: Ex Machina, and you, Matantei Loki Ragnarok - I am not an ADV dub fan at ALL) and usually stick with subs, but I've also seen some very good dubs, most of them produced by ZRO Limit and/or Animaze. It all depends on the pool of actors being drawn from, and they seem to have some of the best talents regularly on hand, like Kirk Thornton, Jamieson Price, Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, and the near-godly Richard Epcar. |
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Ai no Kareshi
Posts: 561 Location: South Africa |
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I'm not sure if I would call those arbitrary mouth flaps "animated for the Japanese mouth". I think most people who watch subs just don't detect that the sync is more often than not pretty bad on the Japanese side as well (exceptions exist, of course). I rather think the acting is the deciding factor. At any rate, I just wanted to point out that the Japanese voice track being recorded post-production constitutes no defence for bad English dubs. |
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Fat Herman
Posts: 1 |
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Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Someone recommended it to me, and I decided to give it a shot. Let's see.. mecha show. Dumb, useless fanservice character (Yoko). I hate mecha with a passion, and loathe anything more than just a little fanservice (move the plot along already!).
Hot springs episode. More female characters with their boobs hanging out. It was just getting worse and worse and then episode 8 happened. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone, but know that the show makes a major turnaround at episode 8. The raw, manly passion, the enormous energy and the perfect awesomeness instantly redeemed the show, and after that I must have finished watching it within a week, seeing it get more and more epic until the final battle, and the fitting conclusion. Looking back, I can say I'm glad I gave TTGL a chance: it's an awesome show anyone should watch, even if they're not into mecha. Interestingly, the opposite of this question applies to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. What at first seemed fun and exciting (time travelers, robots, espers!) turned out to be a boring show with too much fanservice, "high school comedy" and other cliches, all of which seemed more important to the producers than the sci-fi plot, which only got a few minutes of attention every episode, if anything. The ending disappointed, too. Bryan |
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momogoldfish
Posts: 135 Location: New Zealand |
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I'd like to nominate the Hitman Reborn! anime for this week's answer man. It was insanely popular on Crunchyroll (this was back in the days when it was still an illegal org) and that got me curious since you don't usually see fangirls fawning over a crazy guy in underwear who wasn't even cute.
...so I watched the first episode which was weird and mediocre... ...then I gave it another chance and luckily the episodes were finally funny. None of the episodes were particularily stellar but some strange gravity just kept on pulling me back... ...and then I reached the Kokuyou arc and ended up marathoning the whole thing, and the Varia arc after that (it was particularily bad since this was during the period I was supposed to be swotting for exams.) So now I am amongst the people who scream out the 'it gets better!' encouragement you see so often in the Reborn! fandom, and trust me...it does. |
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The King of Harts
 Posts: 6712 Location: Mount Crawford, Virginia |
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I think the entire American anime industry is under appreciated by fans older than 16 (in America that is). Think about it, when we got home Pioneer/Geneon ruled our lives with Sailor Moon, Cardcaptos, and Tenchi Muyo. Funimation took up several years of our youth with Dragonball. Bandai showed us more Gundam series and model figures than I can count and not to mention Cowboy Bebop. 98% of American anime fans wouldn't even know what anime was if not for them and yet they always sit at their computers and bitch and moan about the industry. You owe the industry your fandom, not your hatred.
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2231 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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Getting visual novels on PSN won't happen for a number of reasons.
There's the prejudice mentioned in the article itself against Visual Novels selling in the west, which has a lot of truth to it. But then there's the pricing issue: These games, and their ports to PS2 and other systems sell at full price in Japan. Heck, more than full price: They tend to be more expensive than the big major market games. $40 or so for PS2 games, $50 when new. So you're going to go to the developers and say "hey, we want to license your game and sell it for... $5 on the PSN"? You might be able to get games from the playstation era for that price, but anything recent or nearly recent they won't let be devalued like that. And any PSN game more expensive than $10 is doomed. Also, if I might be a bit crude here: What possible reason do you have for only importing the "clean" versions of games? Do you realize why that market exists in Japan in the first place? It's not because of the engaging stories, let me tell you. Sure, there are a number of great, non-ero games or games where the ero-content is secondary, but that's not what created the market in the first place. So if you are talking about creating a similar market in the west for visual-novels, censoring out any ero-content or limiting yourself to "clean" ones is going to do nothing but doom you to failure. Porn will sell. And if you are lucky, you can slip in a good story here and there. That's the winning strategy; not some sanitized white-washing of what the ero-game industry is. |
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LordRedhand
 Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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I second the Paranoia Agent and would add Le Chevalier D'eon, Gunslinger Girl and ERgo Proxy to that list of "good" anime series.
Agreed on both points there anime is a hobby not a necessity and should be getting things we need first over things we want to have. We also owe the people who make anime possible our respect and fandom not any sense of hatred or entitlement. |
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vashfanatic
 Posts: 3489 Location: Back stateside |
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It really varies from series to series; if they've got a bigger budget and are better made, the lips match up very well. If they were thrown together at the last minute, well... Movies tend to be better done. And it's easy to rip on American voice actors, but there's a much smaller pool to draw on, so it can be harder to match the actor to the role that would be best for them. I mean, I think Crispin Freeman is a great actor and love his work in most series, but I found him horribly miscast as Alucard in Hellsing and much prefer Nakata Jouji. And casting the 40-year old Vic Mignona as the 15-year old not-quite-through-puberty Edward Elric was just a bad idea all-around. (And I know I'm going to get people angrily disagreeing with me on that. I don't care. ;-P)
So am I the only person who thought the first episode of Cross Game was embodiment of "shallow storytelling"? Throw in a bunch of characters, don't bother really developing them, spoiler[kill one them off], then expect us to tune in next week? Maybe some of his other stuff was better, but I was completely unimpressed with how utterly bland it was. Maybe if it had been hyped less... I'm so glad someone brought up Yuasa Masaaki, though. I thought of writing in myself on his work and how excellent and under-appreciated it is. People who called Wall-E (an outstanding movie, don't get me wrong!) innovative and cutting-edge, I wanted to just smack over the head with a copy of Kaiba or Mind Game.
Ah yes, let's bash people who clearly have psychological issues that go untreated in a society where seeking therapy and help are considered black eyes that can haunt you for the rest of your life. As someone who briefly went into therapy for similar issues of self-isolation (the result of depression and anxiety), I get sick of people not having a level of sympathy for hikkikomori and telling them to just "get over it." |
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Iritscen
 Posts: 793 |
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I agree with vashfanatic on the hikkikomori comments, it's uncool to insult people who in most cases are suffering from a social disorder. Most of us have an innate desire to prove ourselves in the world as we get older, to be our own man (or woman) and not lean on our parents, and that's despite the fact that we all can be quite lazy at times and enjoy taking it easy on ourselves. So, if someone is a shut-in, that should tell you that either there's something not working right in their brain, for which they need treatment, or there's something wrong with the society they live in that leads to this kind of stunted development or withdrawal. Okay, /rant.
I dare you to make good on that threat, Brian. In my continuing quest for weird stuff, Cleopatra has been particularly difficult to find. Finally, I just wanted to mention that I've always had a strange fascination with Michael Scott Ryan, who played Kagato in Tenchi Muyo (credited as Weston Peese, apparently). It wasn't worth writing in to Answerman about, but I thought he did a marvelous and underrated job as the villain -- campy and yet with rich, controlled inflection. And apparently he's had no other notable roles as a VA besides Parmenion in one of my favorite anime, Reign the Conqueror (yeah, you heard me, I said "favorite", you wanna start something?). I assume that Ryan is the kind of guy who normally acts on stage and just did some VA on the side for a quick buck, but it's too bad, the guy's got talent. |
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