Forum - View topic(The) Great Passage (TV).
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Stark700
 Posts: 11762 Location: Earth |
|
||
|
Episode 11 (finale):
Not going to lie, the finale got me crying a little. The way that Matsumoto passed on was just touching and with the journey coming to a close with the completion of the Great Passage, it made the show worth watching. It retained a level of realism that I was impressed by throughout this entire show. The only part that I did hope was Kaguya and Majime's relationship being focused on more before forwarding with the timeskip. Still, pretty satisfying show in the end. I might consider giving the film version a try in the future. |
|||
|
|||
|
Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11340 |
|
||
|
I missed this so much I had to dig up the live action movie. It was nice, and covered pretty much the same ground as the anime, but I liked the anime a lot better. I could never quite warm up to live Majime the way I immediately did with anime Majime. However, they did include a pun on his name (though never delved into its actual etymology as the anime did).
In the scene where they find him in the sales division, they hear someone call him over and think they've nicknamed him Serious Kid (Majime-kun) and are later surprised to learn it's his real name. 
There's also a later scene I liked where Kishibe points out the circular definitions of "right" and "West," (they used North in the anime) something that had always bothered me in the back of my head when everyone was excited over Majime's definition. It also pointed out the added difficulty of defining common words when you can't plagiarize existing dictionaries. But I thought their solution was still a bit sloppy spoiler[("when you write the number 10, 0 is on the right." Without designating Arabic numerals or horizontal script, that doesn't work either - well, printing 10 instead of 十 takes care of the first, and if they can print 10 horizontally within the verticle text of the dictionary, I guess that works)]. But what I did not like was the portrayal of the relationship between Kaguya and Majime. If you thought they were a little distant with each other in the anime, in the live action it's like Majime is the Earth and Kaguya is the Moon way out there vaguely orbiting him. They're formal with each other to the point where it seems they barely like each other. The only clear emotions present between them were around The Letter and her showing some concern when he was absorbed in his marathon race to publishing. Mainly their relationship is she feeds him, he likes her food. It seemed like she mainly liked him for that and for listening when she talked and talked about knives to her heart's content. On the flip side, Matsumoto's wife was a veritable hearthfire of warmth and sunshine compared to her anime version. 
Btw, the missing word 血潮 was here translated as "blood spray." And yes, they missed it 3 times in the proofs. Anyway, if you liked the series, the movie is worth the watch.
|
|||
|
|||
dash56
 Posts: 151 |
|
||
|
Will this get a wider release? I would like to see it get a review and not just disappear into obscurity.
|
|||
|
|||
|
vonPeterhof
Posts: 729 |
|
||
|
^I believe the show is already up on Amazon. Gabriella Ekens was supposed to review it, and she has mentioned on her Twitter that she has started watching it, so I guess a review should come out soon.
|
|||
|
|||
Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23760 |
|
||
|
I guess the question is whether or not this gets a physical release. noitaminA titles have an excellent track record of getting NA releases. Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress is getting a home release through CR and it was an Amazon Prime show, so there is no particular reason to assume The Great Passage won't get one (although not necessarily through CR).
Let's hope this doesn't end up being a Tatami Galaxy situation. |
|||
|
|||
|
dash56
Posts: 151 |
|
||
Thanks for the update, this little gem deserves a bit more exposure and hopefully will gain a larger audience. |
|||
|
|||
yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
|
||
Only if you subscribe to the $5/month Amazon Strike service on top of a Prime Subscription ($99/year). As for a physical release, I think Kabaneri is a very different type of show from Fune wo Amu, and one which has more appeal to the traditional anime audience. I'm not sure we can infer anything from Kabaneri's being released on disc. |
|||
|
|||
|
Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23760 |
|
||
|
The only thing I inferred from the upcoming Kabaneri release was that obviously noitaminA titles are still potentially in home release play despite Amazon Prime being their first window. I wasn't sure that would be the case once AP got exclusive streaming rights to noitaminA titles.
|
|||
|
|||
|
yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
|
||
Amazon Prime probably has an even smaller share of anime viewers than Netflix or Hulu among people unfamiliar with Crunchyroll or Funimation. I doubt FujiTV would sign a contract forswearing physical distribution just because their series stream on Amazon. Adding another obstacle via Strike can only make the Amazon audience even smaller. Fuji seems to treat the streaming and physical rights as separate entities. Even when noitaminA shows were streaming exclusively on Funimation, NISA released the home video version of House of Five Leaves. NISA also released Usagi Drop when Crunchyroll had the exclusive streaming rights to noitaminA productions. |
|||
|
|||
|
Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23760 |
|
||
|
Well, the whole point, yuna49, is that I didn't know what the significance might be. Amazon is a whole different ball game from CR and Funimation. They have really deep pockets. FujiTV could conceivably have signed a deal with them that precluded any kind of home release for the duration of its run on AP if Amazon's license fee was generous enough. Or, Amazon might have been contemplating getting into physical releases themselves at some point and who knows how long that might have delayed things. Therefore I take the Kanaberi example as a good sign. There is nothing strange about wondering what the implications for a home release are when a new, rich player like Amazon gets involved.
|
|||
|
|||
|
MaxSouth
Posts: 1363 |
|
||
|
The project is deeply flawed as the setting is not realistic, what significantly destroys viewers ability to submerge into the story. A number of points on that and other thoughts about the project:
1) The depicted process does not look authentic at all for the 1996-2010 time frame the events span for. Publishing companies were digitizing business processes since the 1970s (!), and especially since 1980s, and yet we see only one computer in the series. The departments that work on dictionaries went digital long before the events of this novel/anime started. By 1990s you could already buy all-digital vocabularies on CDs. Staff in dictionary department has long worked in office cubicles with paso-kuns (a cute way to say "PC" that Japanese invented) around, not shelves of books and boxes of tagged papers and files. 2) back in 1995 the internet was very scarce, it was in infancy. However, say, by 2006 things like Facebook, YouTube and even Twitter already existed. Of course, by this project's timeline, the vocabulary was mostly finished by then, with later years left for polishing and "readings". But even those later stages, in reality, would be enriched by the very advanced software that does the online data mining automatically with the use special programming languages that help process words and sentences as constructs and with the use of additional artificial intelligence processing. But, of course, nothing like that shown in this project even in the part that correlates to 2009-2010 years towards the very end of anime. 3) the starter story in this anime about a guy who randomly voiced the banality of fact that the word "air" can have various readings/definitions depending on intention and context, is not impressive as an example of acuity. Also, most people find such unsolicited manifestations of superficial knowledge by eggheads and wiseacres to be annoying. 4) Japanese linguists would hardly use slang borrowings like "advice" all while the Japanese language has its own words for this concept (even though it came from the Chinese language). This also subtracts from the believability of the setting. 5) dictionary editors normally know their job so well that they intuitively feel if some major words' definitions are missing in-between articles. It is not believable that such case was only found by a newbie. And this all is done digitally and automatically via software on computers for many decades. You do not need to hire loads of temporary workers/interns to manually check if editors forgot some words as comparative analysis is done on computers since as early as the 1970s (1980s as latest in some Luddite publishing houses). 6) the last episode creates a false narrative that says that the government control is the sole source of bias that may tamper with the work of media professionals, including in the field of making dictionaries. This is a deeply misleading notion because in reality corporations that own publishing houses are just as entrenched in their oligarchic crony predatory capitalist agenda that is behind the most of global problems, including the ever-worsening income inequality, endless regime change coups and wars, migration crises, the rise of the fringe right as a consequence. The notion that this project pushes helps to create the Orwellian mindset in people where they genuinely believe that they live in a free society, that they are served by "independent and free" publishing media houses, while in reality, the installation of this corrupt delusion in people's mind helps to control them most effectively. 7) this point is not really about the project, but about the vocabulary creation process in general. The whole concept of compiling a vocabulary that was in the past an art in itself just as this anime shows, is no longer valid in our times. The internet has made it possible to gather just all words there are, so the only job to do now is to describe those words with ever-changing meanings and contexts, provided with examples. It still is an uneasy and interesting task, but it is much simpler than the skill to select a quarter of one million words to fit it in eight centimeters thick printed vocabulary. Besides, the aforementioned specialized software makes the search for new words and the tracking of changes in use of old words, establishing their meanings (semantic graphs), as well as providing it all with examples almost automatic. This means that contemporary vocabularist is more like a logic/statistic/AI programmer, a vastly different thing than what it was in pre-Internet, pre-digitised, pre-giant databases era. 8) this is maybe the most obvious thought, but the interludes with cute vocabulary characters are pointless since the whole project is an anime for adults that do not need such cutesy things, and there is almost no chance that children who would love it enough to survive watching episodes to a point where those parts appear. After all, this is not about magical beings with superpowers or an idol show. 9) it is always interesting to see how those rare anime about obscure and non-flashy things are trying to hype up their showcase. This anime shows flying and curly words as well as the depiction of uneasy oceans for that. It does not abuse this too much, though. Overall, due to the drawbacks, this anime deserves "Very good" rating, not something higher. Yet it is a high rating as the project is focused on a unique field of human activity that was never addressed before (and will be probably never addressed again); a rare gem in this field. If the anime's events would be pushed back a couple of decades back in the history, then most of the believability issues would not exist; too bad the timeline was not chosen carefully enough. |
|||
|
|||
|
Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23760 |
|
||
I saw MaxSouth's bolded "deeply flawed" comment and a list of supposed flaws and I figure, "guess he'll give it a not great rating" only to see he rates it Very Good. Just shows to go ya, I guess. |
|||
|
|||
nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5120 |
|
||
|
I have not finished my own write up but I would like to make a note about something that I recently discovered that I have overlooked. A package of novellas arrived from TRSI; and, as I was looking over how my bookshelves had been rearranged, I noticed a book that I had overlooked.
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester (1998, Viking: U.K.) It details how a paranoid schizophrenic inmate of he Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum literally ended up writing a plurality of the entries in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
|
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group