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REVIEW: Knights of Sidonia

fan service is limited to a couple of locker room scenes and a handful of other scenes where female characters are shown photosynthesizing while naked. While these show no actual frontal nudity, they combine with the graphic content to give the series a TV-MA rating.

Casting choices are good and for the most part the actors provide a smooth and natural-sounding dub, though in a few places they conspicuously pause as if waiting for the subtitles to catch up. Given that this happens with even the most experienced voice actors, it suggests timing flaws at the directorial level and/or a hurried dub production in general.

As luck would have it, I worked on the simul-dub of Kurokami: The Animation. Boy, was that a break-neck insane schedule. I'm a little surprised we all survived.

There have been a few attempts at making a simultaneous dub of anime in the past, and it's really really hard. What happens is, early in the show, Japan will deliver the final animation really early, the dubbing studio will have plenty of time to rewrite for lip-flap, record the dub, and do the final mix. But as the show goes on, things almost always start falling more and more behind. Anime studios have a terrible track record of not finishing until the LAST POSSIBLE SECOND, often not finishing the final touches until hours before the show airs.

So what happens to the time in which the dubbing studio gets to do their work? It's not like the broadcast can be delayed, otherwise it won't be a simulcast anymore! So, the dub gets more and more rushed. Sometimes they have to dub to unfinished animation. (Does it match lip-flap? Who knows!) Sometimes sound effects and other things will get tweaked in Japan, but nobody will tell the US dub studio, resulting in audio being out of sync with the video! (see: Kite: Liberator) Japanese studios are simply not used to having their product handed off to someone else to finish, so they will habitually go right up to the line, and the dub studio is left scrambling trying to make insane deadlines.

...certain characters being hundreds of years old (perhaps the reason why the female captain always wears a mask is to conceal that fact?)

Did anyone else get the vibe that this pulled a lot from attack on Titan and might have been made or distributed based off of its sucess.? A lot of similarities in stories and elements used (last group of humans forced to fight in military society, a monstrous race of bad guys that reappear out of nowhere, some strange genetic link/play between humans and monsters, young cadets forced to bece new pilots,etc)

As for the show, I kinda saw it as Attack on Titan with giant robots. Huge inhumanoid abominations that only have one weakness against a seemingly outgunned human armed force saved by the arrival of a newcomer.

Also, two things on Lala
1. You're questioning a talking bear in a show with Giant Mechs, space travel, immortality, cloning, a third biological gender, and shapeshifting hell beast from space?
and 2. It's a Nihei thing, if it's anything special it's a homage to Biomega.

The fact that it takes place in space makes Lala stand out even more since there are no other mammals on Sidonia! They can barely afford to feed humans, how can they afford a bear?

I do think AoT handles character death better, though. If a story follows a soldier, the audience should really feel it when the soldier's comrades die. Obvious death flags and killing nameless characters don't work well towards that goal. Although at this point I think the core casts of both shows/manga feel "safe", for the most part.

This sounds like they were trying to do the dub without the final TV material in front of them. It reminds me of serious sync issues in the SF4 OVA dub, and the Kurokami dub. That's the first thing I noticed and was extremely distracting/annoying (though SF4 was worse than Kurokami)

It's always an issue with simul-dubs. Even if the Japanese process adds voices during or after animation, the timing and lip flaps (most importantly line/phrase start and end times) are always animated and timed for the original language, and the lines and timing can be tweaked. Getting off-sync from tweaked pauses, or shifting the timing of phrases, half a second here or half a second there between phrases, etc are VERY obvious and makes a dub look like a dubbed live action movie. Justin had discussed this (and verified my experience with Kurokami):

When it comes to MY THOUGHT PROCESS, in the Neon Genesis Evangelion area / Knights of Sidonia area...The gauna being killed by a specific spear like weapon(think it was a three letter word that started with E) = Lucifer(the one with the seven eye 'face') that was impelled by the lance of longinus(may have mis spelled this word). So yeah... while watching KoS, and seeing the gauna get killed by a specific only spear/material, made me think of lucifer being impelled by the lance of longinus in NGE.

I have to disagree with you on the visuals. I think the semi-3D thing that they have going on looks awkward as all hell. I don't know how people can say the Sailor Moon transformation thing looks bad while saying this looks good. I don't think it looks flat out terrible, or maybe even bad, but I do feel it's at least a bit off-putting.

I'm not sure if it's the review or the show/manga, but that makes no sense (unless there's one unit with much higher trust power than the others). But if all the unit are the same, grouping up would not increase there trust since they all weight the same. If you apply a force on an object you'll get the same acceleration than applying twice the force on an object being twice as heavy, F=M*A and all (2*F=2*M*A, the 2 cancel and you're back to F=MA). They could get a range increase if there truster can only go at 0 or max speed, and by grouping up they only have one unit use it's booster at a time, but they'd accelerate way slower. I'm probably just reading it wrong thought.