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.
Being a child of the late Cold War means that occassionally you spent your sunday morning watching old nuclear holocaust documentaries. (Some disturbing images of Hiroshima victims as well as footage from a civil defence exercise; be careful.)
It was just a casual tweet mentioning this particular documentary that sent me down the rabbit hole of early eighties British nuclear war programmes. This was the stuff of literal nightmares for me as a child growing up in eighties Holland, seeing nuclear war casually referenced on the news and even on children’s television. It’s hard to imagine forty years later just how dangerous that period of 1979 to 1986 felt like, that idea that at any moment the bombs could drop. That nuclear war was inevitable not because either side wanted it but simply because there were too many weapons, too many complexities that made certain the war would happen by mistake sooner or later. Though it didn’t help that we got an American president talking about winning a nuclear war and who deliberately upped tensions to the point the Soviet leadership became convinced he was planning to strike first.
What fascinates me about this documentary, a 1980 Panoram special, is its tone. When we think about 1980s nuclear holocaust angst we tend to remember movies like Threads or The Day After or Raymond Briggs’ when the Wind Blows or the various pop songs about nuclear war that were a staple of the hit parades. All very emotional outbursts of rage and horror of what we might do to ourselves, all of which contributed to that anxiety me and so many other children felt growing with them. But here there’s none of this emotion, just calm, rational men talking in posh accents about the end of the world and how it might come about. There’s no sensationalism, but the horror of the subject is conveyed anyway; as Paxman’s heard saying at the end of it: that’ll send them to bed happy”. That remark may be as much about how unprepared the UK government was for the prospect of nuclear war as the actual horrors of the war itself, because the focus of the documentary is firmly on the former.
How to survive a nuclear attack, a 1981 Thames Television TV Eye documentary on Operation Hot Seat, a monthly exercise rwargaming the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Britain. Held for local and regional government officials including the emergency services, police and army, the intention was to prepare them for their roles after the bombs dropped. Again a very understated sort of documentary, following civil servants as they go about arranging food for the population of their fictional county and brainstorm how to deal with looters. Everybody involved takes the exercise very seriously, but you do wonder if all these people would show up if the real thing had happened and if so, how much control they would’ve really had. Even in the exercise the participants come to the conclusion that just expecting people to obey their instructins is futile when people are cold, hungry and slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The absurdity of it all is best shown in the quote taking from it I’ve used as the title for this post.
On the 8th Day, a documentary from 1984 shows that all the preparation and planning for the “post-attack era” are just so much nonsense, as it explains the concept of nuclear winter and how long the climate would be destabilised after a nuclear war. What the bombs and the radiation hadn’t killed owuld be finished off by the immense dust clouds kicked up by the war blocking out the sunlight, plunging Europe and America inot a new ice age. Featuring the always calm voice of Carl Sagan as he explains the horrors of it all.
Nuclear Nightmares is a 1979 Peter Ustinov narrated documentary about how nuclear war could start. Written by Nigel Calder, it was his book of the same name that was a primary driver of my own nuclear nightmares back then. A very pre-Reagan view of nuclear deterrence, when you could still assume that rational men where in control of the nuclear arsenal. One of the more cheery parts in this documenary is John Erickson stating that the 1980s would be the most dangerous decade for nuclear war as technological advances favoured the side that attacked first.
A British Guide to the End of the World is a much more recent BBC Arena documentary, using much of the footage created for the previous documentaries, focusing both on the idea of what was planned to happen after the nuclear attack and the realities of what the preparations for waging nuclear war meant in reality. Which this documentary does by looking at the treatment of British service men present on Christmas Island during the first tests of British nuclear weapons and how the radiation they ingested there impacted their health and that of their children. It’s not just that they got deliberately exposed to radiation, but that the UK government completely abandoned them to their fate even after its affects became clear. That disdain may be the real horror of the nuclear age.
Last Monday Henny Vrienten, frontman of the Dutch pop group Doe Maar, passed away and with him a little bit of my youth.
If you’re not Dutch, you’ll likely have never heard of him or Doe Maar, so it may be hard to understand how insanely popular the band was from 1981 to 1984. Every single was a hit, every album went paltinum and every concert had thousands of teenage girls screaming their heads of. Comparing it to Beatlemania would be an understatement. When the band announced they would stop it was the first item on the main television news broadcast that day. I was not even ten when they split up, but I had the buttons, the pink/green scarf and everything. Everybody in my primary school was a fan, not just the girls, the boys too. If you were a child in the early eighties, Doe Maar was the sound track to your youth.
In hindsight the popularity of Doe Maar is utterly bizarre. This wasn’t a manufactured hype, but something that sponteneously erupted at a time the band had almost decided to quit already. Doe Maar was founded in 1978 by a group of musicians in their late twenties, each with a history of playing in other bands; when Vrienten joined in 1980 he was already thirty. Their first hit with him as singer, sinds een Dag of Twee, was about him how strange it was to be falling in love again when you’re thirtytwo. Hardly the stuff that makes teenyboppers swoon. Furthermore their record company at the time had so little faith in them it had shelved their second album. It was only by accident that Dutch radio diskjockeys started playing the single and promoting the album, but it was enough to start the Doe Maar hype. From that point onwards they would become the most popular Dutch band of all times.
What made Doe Maar’s success even more improbable was that at the time, serious Dutch pop music was just not done. Sure, there were people singing in Dutch, but these tended to be either serious folk singer types, or people from the light entertainment world. But if you wanted to be taken seriously as a pop or rock musician, you had to sing in English. Doe Maar never did this. In fact, they’d made their debut on the legendary compilation album Uitholling Overdwars (1979), put out by the Stichting Popmuziek Nederland to promote Dutch language pop music, which also included several other groups that would make it big in the early eighties alongside Doe Maar. That may be Doe Maar’s biggest legacy, making Dutch language pop music respectable and relevant. What made Vrienten’s singing also important was the distinctive Brabant accent in his voice, rather than using the somewhat artificial standard Dutch of your usual light entertainment singer. ‘Provincial’ voices were rarely heard until then, unless in purely regional bands with little national appeal.
What made this small revolution possible was of course punk. The D.I.Y. aesthetic and attitude of punk rock meant there was space to break with the established traditions of ‘serious’ rock and all over Europe you saw bands move away from English towards their own language; most well known being the Neue Deutsche Welle movement of the same time. Nevertheless Doe Maar was never a punk rock group, even if some of the songs on their first eponymous were at least punk in style, like Wees Niet Bang Voor Mijn Lul. No, the secret sauce of Doe Maar’s success was something else entirely: ska and reggea. While on that first album it was all a bit Kinks’ Apeman style parody including dubious accents, from when Vrienten joined Doe Maar it was taken seriously. As a bass player Vrienten himself contributed a lot to the new Doe Maar sound. He even produced an actual dub version of their third album, Doe de Dub in 1982.
I can still remember the frustration and sadness of Doe Maar just deciding to stop at the height of their fame. It was the only thing we talked about on the playground next day: why did they have to stop, why now, why. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it was the best decision they could’ve made at the time. That popularity must’ve been incredibly scary, night after night seeing 13 and 14 year old girls screaming themselves hoarse at you to the point of fainting. Vrienten himself had said that he feared that one day it would all go horribly wrong and somebody would be killed in the crushes that happened during their concerts. The pressure of so much popularity didn’t help relationships within the band itself either and when Doe Maar realised they could just …stop, it must’ve come as a relief.
At the time Doe Maar quit, Vrienten had already brought out his first solo record. Post-Doe Maar he would not only record, but start a new career as a writer of movie music, having been one of the two composers within Doe Maar as well. Movies and musicals would be the main focus of his music, but he also featured in various side projects with other famous Dutch musicians over the years. Doe Maar itself would re-unite in 2000, just as the generation of teenyboppers that were their fans in the early eighties were now in their thirties themselves. It was never quite the same as before, but they did release a new studio album and held regular new tours ever since. In fact, Vrienten’s illness led to the cancellation of their last tour, which would’ve been held last year.
