With 4.4 billion views literally more than half the planet has seen this:
Over five million comments. I’m sure there were people in the rest of the world who knew about Korean pop music even in 2012 but Gangnam Style was still very much a novelty hit wasn’t it, driven by the video and dance more than the song itself. Hard to not see the phenomonal success of it, the first video to break a billion views on Youtube as opening the way for Korean pop music and pop culture in general to be accepted in the west. Every so often I find myself watchhing the video again and every time it’s still as good as the first time I watched it.
Lycoris Recoil touches on an uniquely Japanese sort of right wing paranoia. The idea that modern Japan may look peaceful on the surface, but in reality is a criminal cesspitt where monsters and terrorists are only kept at bay through extralegal government directed death squads, usually consisting of cute high school girls. The sequence above, in the opening two minutes of the first episode is particularly blatant in expressing this paranoia. To me, this feels different from similar law and order concerns in e.g. US media. The crime in movies like Deathwish is not hidden, but out in the open. Everybody knows that the city is riddled with crime, but nobody can do anything about it. The police are helpless, tied down by bureaucracy and political correctness and you need a vigilante like the Punisher to step up and take a stand. Which is the second difference, in that the heroes of western fantasies about restoring law and order tend to be outsiders rather than government employees. With the Japanese version you have the fear that there are monsters lurking behind the surface of polite society, but also the fantasy that the government will protect ordinary citizens from discovering this truth and is competent enough to keep the monsters at bay. Not an idea that plays well in America.
Thank you Cyan can for putting the two big climatic Nevermore battle scenes from the new RWBY anime and the original RWBY Flash animation back to back in one Youtube video:
You can see that the battle is roughly the same in both, with a lot of the differences due to translating a 3D scene into 2D animation; much harder to swing the camera around as impressively for example. But there are also differences in the choreography of the battle itself, as well as in what the anime chooses to showcase as opposed to the original. the biggest difference is at the start of the battle. In the anime, the battle is quickly divided into one team fighting the giant scorpion while the other tackles the giant raven. In the original, this all happens much more organically, with various characters switching which monster they fight as their comrades need help until finally you get the two teams established that will remain together for the rest of the battle. (And which will remain teams for the rest of the series.)
Character wise, the anime version keeps a much tighter focus on Ruby, Weiss and Jaune. In both versions it’s Ruby and Jaune who come up with ways to defeat their respective monsters, but in the anime version the other characters have little more to do than just fight whereas in the original they got their individual moments to shine as well. Especially the scorpion’s defeat was much more of a cooperative affair, with Nora playing a much larger role. She just hammers the scorpion’s spike into its head in the anime version, while in the original she was flipped into the air by Pyrrhia, riding her own hammer and giggling. The team work to defeat the other monster also suffers a bit in the anime version, with the original being much more clear about all four members setting up Ruby to launch the final blow.
I can well understand that if you’re not particularly interested in what some anituber said about Akira a decade ago you don’t want to watch a nearly hour long video about why he’s wrong, but it points out two consistent flaws in Bennett The Sage’s reviews that drive me up the wall. With Akira he insists on using a particular not very good old dub to review and I get that reviewing crappy dubs is his schtick, but it’s fundamentally unfair when better versions are available. Worse, he has the habit of blaming the movie for the sins of the dub. Don’t complain about the voice acting as if that’s the movie’s fault when you yourself sought out this dub. Dubbing is fundamentally inferior to subbed anime anyway, but especially if you insist on using the worst possible dub in existence. Every review of his is this way, where he takes some hastily shit out dub done by bored amateurs instead of using the original Japanese version. Again, it wouldn’t bother me so much if he didn’t then judge the entire anime by the crappy dubbing. With something like Akira it’s even worse when the dub makes things that were perfectly clear in the original and muddles them up.
Which brings me to my second gripe: he wants everything explained but doesn’t bother paying attention. As the video makes clear, he complains about things that were spelled out for him literally minutes before. He also doesn’t have the patience to wait if something isn’t when plot points or situations aren’t immediately explained to him. He fundamentally refuses to do the work to understand a story on anything but a surface level and gets frustrated when things are implied or left to subtext. This is made worse by him wanting every aspect of a story, characters and setting to contribute to the plot, preferably all tied up in a neat package. He cannot handle messy settings, a world that exists outside of the plot’s constraint. When you combine that with his tendency to get fixated on irrelevant details, he’s the worst possible person to review something like Akira.
Studio Chōjin in his critique of Bennett’s review chose to focus on how he misunderstands things even though the movie explains them, but I feel that a deeper problem is that tendency to want everything explained in the first place. The idea that you have to explain why Neo Tokyo is wracked by riots and political unrest, that it all has to tie into the plot rather than just be the background against which the story happens, even though it is explained and does tie in with the plot, is just alien to me. I first saw Akira in 1989 or 1990 and political clashes like that were familiar to me from the evening news, from seeing the marches for freedom in East Germany or Poland, from the squatter fights with the cops in Amsterdam or even the fight for democracy in South Korea and Taiwan that took place at roughly the same time Akira was made. Corrupt repressive government involved in dangerous secret schemes, idealistic, naive militants used by equally corrupt opposing politician, righteous rightwing military leaders disgusted by them all, those are not new ideas. You don’t need the movie to spoonfeed you the background, you just need to accept it and move on.
Ultimately my point is that Bennett is lazy. He’s comfortable just slagging off decades old dubs of already obscure titles with not enough dept in them to trip him up with his overly literal way of looking at stories. To be honest, I do enjoy watching his videos from time to time even if the only he does is just retelling the plot and complain about crappy voice acting. But when he tries to tackle something with a little bit more worth, he’s out of his depth fast. He is getting better, but ultimately you don’t want to rely on him for judging whether any anime more complicated than Queen’s Blade is any good.
Who’d want to be an anime translator? No matter what you do, some monolingual schlub on Reddit or Twitter will accuse you of DoInG iT wRoNg, or worse injected politics in your subtitles, insisting that Japanese should be translated literally and that machine translation is good enough. You’re expected to work quickly enough that a new episode is translated and subtitled on the day it is released in Japan and most streaming services will not only not credit you, they’ll pay you not enough to live on:
Yes, you heard it right: Crunchyroll pays translators eighty bucks per episode, according to the Canipa Effect’s video above. That’s from two years ago and I’ve heard scuttlebutt that conditions for translators are slowly improving, but the reality of the business is still that it’s hard work for little pay and even less respect. Especially under the sort of time pressure same day streaming services put translators. You may have the script the week before the episode is released but even if there are no differences between it and the episode, you still need to do the actual subtitling. And often there are differences, or things that only become clear once they’re heard in the context of the episode. Do keep in mind that the subtitling itself isn’t that easy either; it needs to be timed properly with the audio and fit properly on the screen too, not to mention that it needs to be clear who’s speaking. All of which also can impact the translation as frex the chosen text doesn’t fit or cannot be timed correctly and needs to be adjusted.
It’s frustrating all this hard work is not rewarded properly and almost as frustrating must be that it’s usually uncredited as well. I don’t know which genius came up with this particular pun in episode 8 of Sono Bisque Doll Wa Koi Wo Suru because Funimation refuses to credit any of its staff working on their releases. So does Funimation and even Netflix. The only streaming service consistently giving credit is Hidive/Sentai Filmworks, who have a separate credit section listing both the Japanese and their own staff tacked on to each episode. It’s thanks to that I know that Jake Jung was responsible for the excellent translation on this seasons Paripi Koumei for example. Really this should be the standard at all streaming services, a little bit of credit for the people doing the work.
These then are the first two of Martin’s increasingly petty rules for translating anime: 1) pay your translators (all staff really) a living wage and 2) give them proper credit. Not too controversial yet I think, but this is only the first in a series of posts I want to do on what I think is good translation. The focus here will be mostly on subtitled animation as I don’t care about dubs, but I’ll also talk about manga and even *gasp* other forms of translation than from Japanese to English.
