I want to take a moment now to ask you, raelianautopsy, how on Earth human beings can stand watching any Gundam series while simultaneously taking it even remotely seriously - Mobile Suit Gundam is the most ridiculous of the bunch. It's so nonsensical that it borders on complete and never-ending metaphor in place of actual events.
The statement that film-length animations are inferior narratives to series' is absurd. Can you give examples of what makes you say this?
I can see some of your point about the short memory of many animation fans, but most of Miyazaki's films came out in the 80's - It's only Mononoke and Spirited Away that have come out since. A large part of why this is, though, is that the translations have largely been given poor consideration before the 1990's - After that point, the voice direction became more of a factor, translations became more acute and interesting, and more attention is paid to getting quality copies of the originals to Western shores - studios certainly began plunking more money down to get them over here to the US.
It isn't necessarily the age of the cartoon, but the quality of the western translation team(s)(except for shows that simply haven't made it over here, obviously). A good example of this is Lupin III - a really great series from the 70's that only very recently received a stellar translation and voice cast for English-speaking audiences.
This has the double effect of raising the bar and homogenizing the process a bit. The Cowboy Bebop westernization was so wildly successful that it's become the one to copy now and again, particularly by hiring the same voice actors - but some otherwise interesting shows are crippled by that approach. There are probably no more than 30 actors in total that get regular medium-profile work in cartoon voice-overs. They're there because they're good, but it can lead to a really stale feel when every show is attempting to use them. Steven Blum/David Lucas is in practically every show that comes down the pipe now.
An example is Witch Hunter Robin. The voice cast features most of the major actors from Big O, most of whom had worked (at least once) on Cowboy Bebop prior to that. The feel worked magnificently in Cowboy Bebop, but the style horribly misrepresents Witch Hunter Robin - which I'm sure is a fine show in Japanese but with the monochramatic melodrama and a shoddy handling of the Japanese script, it comes off painfully adolescent and super-expository with the baroque pace of its translation.
Big O is another series that people seem to love that I think is just fucking terrible. Nonsensical and hyper-bloated, dramatically. Oh, and on my Ninja Scroll recommendation? The movie's fun, but DON'T watch the series, it's terrible. |
