Ultra Nyan (Theatrical Version)

When Orphan released Ultra Nyan: Hoshizora kara Maiorita Fushigi Neko, I thought that the encode looked a bit washed out. I asked the team to look for the laserdisc, in order to make a new encode. Eventually, it was found, purchased, shipped to the United States, and encoded. We've created a new release based on the new encode, only... it's letterboxed. And therein lies a tale.

When home video, in the form of VHS tape, first emerged in the 1970s, content providers found themselves with a dilemma. Television content worked fine on the 4:3 (640 x 480) TVs of the day, but widescreen movies could not be displayed in their theatrical aspect ratios. The industry came up with two solutions, neither satisfactory - letterboxing, in which the movie was displayed with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen; and pan-and-scan, in which the focus was moved around to put the "essential" part of a scene on the full TV screen. Letterboxing reduced the size of the image, sometimes unbearably; pan-and-scan created extraneous camera motion and deleted parts of the original scenes.

An alternate solution was Open Matte. Films were shot on 4:3 (standard 35mm) film stock, but the shots were framed for 1:85:1 projection. In theaters, the top and bottom were cropped out by mattes in the film projector, but for VHS (and later, laserdisc) release, the full frame could be used. This process introduced complexity into the film-making process, because the director and cinematographer had to ensure that nothing extraneous, like mics or cables, showed up in the full frame, but it facilitated home video releases without letterboxing and without loss of shot detail. Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and James Cameron's Terminator 2 were made with Open Matte. Eventually, technology solved the problem. DVDs could display widescreen films (up to 1.85:1) without letterboxing. Large widescreen TVs became standard. Open Matte was no longer needed. The full-frame versions of Open Matte films were filed away, and only the widescreen,theatrical versions are available on digital home video or digital streaming.

While Open Matte was used in movies, I had never heard of it being used in anime... until now. Ultra Nyan, and its successor, Ultra Nyan 2, were shown in theaters on twin bills with widescreen, live action Ultraman movies. The Ultra Nyan cartoons were drawn for Open Matte. In their theatrical release, they were shown matted, in widescreen. For home video, though, Ultra Nyan was released in full-frame on VHS tape but widescreen on laserdisc.

The streaming version was full-frame too (that's the source for the original release). Ultra Nyan 2 was released in full-frame on all home video media. Why the inconsistency? I haven't the slightest idea.

All of this begs the question: which version is "right"? The answer is, they both are. The widescreen version is what theatergoers saw; the full-frame version is what was drawn. Obviously, there's more information in the full-frame release:

but the theatrical audience didn't know that. Personally, I like the full-frame version better, because it's consistent with Ultra Nyan 2, but the new, widescreen version has more vibrant colors and better cropping. Pick your poison.

For this release, I transposed the original script to the new raw, tweaked the timing, and redid the typesetting. I've eliminated some line breaks and split a few lines so that more lines fit in the letterbox area and don't overlap the video. Overlap lines have been moved to the letterbox area at the top. BeeBee did a quick release check, and of course, Erik of Piyo Piyo Productions encoded from a Japanese laserdisc. For voice credits and the other staff credits, see the original release post.

Interestingly, the re-release of classic Japanese anime on Blu-ray has created a new version of the letterboxing debate. When 4:3 shows are remastered, the media creators have two choices. They can maintain the original aspect ratio, using vertical letterboxing or "pillarboxing" (black bars to the left and right of the frame); or they can crop the video to match the aspect ratio of a widescreen TV. The latter could be viewed as a modern form of Open Matte, except that the shows were not made with matting in mind. Cropping chops off parts of the screen that were intended to be seen. Most anime fans object very strongly to cropping, but some Japanese content companies continue to do it, so strong is their aversion to letterboxing.

So if you'd like to see anime Open Matte in action, you can get the widescreen (and the fullscreen) version of Ultra Nyan: Hoshizora kara Maiorita Fushigi Neko from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.
 

Eguchi Hisashi no Nantoka Narudesho!

As I've said before, 80s and 90s OVAs are like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to find. Some are good, some are great, and a few are outright stinkers. (Yes, I mean you, Bavi Stock II and Twinkle Nora Rock Me.) But never has a project pissed me off as much as Eguchi Hisashi no Nantoka Narudesho! (Eguchi Hisachi's It'll All Work Out!), the second anthology from Eguchi Hisashi, creator of Stop!! Hibari-kun!

Most people know that Japanese anime has its dark corners of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. For example, The Anime Encyclopedia characterizes The Chocolate Panic Picture Show as a "jaw-droppingly racist musical in which grossly caricatured Africans Manbo, Chinbo, and Chonbo causes chaos in civilization despite the efforts of their pretty tour guide/bedmate to tame their zany, grass-skirted cannibal ways." The anti-semitism in Angel Cop was so bad that the last episodes were more or less completely rewritten for its U.S. release. And offensive stereotypes of LGBTQ characters are rife, not least in Eguchi Hisashi's own works (see, for example, episode 22 of Stop!! Hibari-kun or all of Otako no Seiza). But neither I nor the staff were prepared for this. The translation checker summed it up best: "I thought I was being trolled."

Like Kotobuki Gorou Show, Nantoka Narudesho! is based on a manga and is a series of unrelated sketches, supposedly humorous. Some of them involve live actors:

• A Manga with Chapters (live action). A bashful young actress, told to perform, does a striptease.
• Uncle Jamilla's Nightmare. A young woman's dreams are tormented by an old man who tells truly awful jokes, making her fear she will die of laughter. A parody of Nightmare on Elm Street crossed with Ai to Makoto.

• The Thomas Brothers Appear. Gay-bashing at its worst.
• Attack of Love (live action). A girl keeps falling for men she literally runs into.
• The Thomas Brothers Again Appear. The gay-bashing continues, taken to new lows.
• Extreme Journey's Ends. Various characters' lives are described, with an emphasis on their unexpected demises.
• She Always Took the Tozai Line in the Morning. A (mostly) silent and (mostly) serious segment about a young man transfixed by a girl on the subway.
• Let There Be Light for Every Youth! A blind teenager's vision is restored, with unfortunate consequences.
• Ushimitsu-kun. "Hell Boy" Ushimitsu versus a sea otter at the aquarium.
• Compression (live action). Kaiju Umera the Glutton gets a lesson from its auntie about the proper way to roast and eat subway cars full of humans.
• Switch off. The end, mercifully, including the end of the world.

In addition to being tasteless and offensive, Nantoka Narudesho has another strike against it: it's not very funny. Uncle Jamilla's nightmare has some truly awful Japanese puns, but they don't render well in English. Compression's take on kaiju movies from the monster's point of view is okay. The rest of the sketches are obvious, stupid, or worse. Even the striptease is spoiled by a bad punchline.

The voice credits only included the actors' names, not which roles they played.

• Kamiya Akira is best known for the title roles in the City Hunter properties and the Kinnikuman franchise, as well as the Sayaka's ambivalent boyfriend, Kazamatsuri, in Yawara! He played Sergeant Zim in Starship Troopers and Kentarou in Nine: Original-ban, and he stole the show as the lecherous robot Chiraku in Hoshi Neko Full House, all Orphan releases.
• Mitsuya Yuuji played the leads in Hi-Speed Jecy and Yousei Ou, both Orphan releases. He's also appeared in many other shows, including Oz, Ranma 1/2, and the Stitch! franchise.
• Yara Yuusaku played the destroyer captain in Zipang. He had many featured roles, appearing in Eguchi Hisashi no Kotobuki Gorou Show, Next Senki Ehrgeiz, Eien no Filena, Hidamari no Ki, Nozomi Witches, both Sangokushi OVAs, Prime Rose, and both What's Michael? OVAs, all Orphan releases.
• Nishimura Tomomichi played the rot-loving Professor Itsuki in Moyashimon and Richard Mardukis in the Full Metal Panic franchise. He has had hundreds of featured roles, including Eguchi Hisashi no Kotobuki Gorou Show, Aoki Honoo, Bremen 4, Dokushin Apartment Dokudami-sou, Fumoon, Starship Troopers, Wild 7, and Wolf Guy, all Orphan releases. He is still active, appearing in this year's Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai.
• Mukaidono Asami appeared in the Project A-ko properties, Starship Troopers, and Yousei Ou. The last two are Orphan releases.
• Touma Yumi played the title roles in Emma: A Victorian Romance and Baby Felix. She has appeared in numerous shows, including Boyfriend and Condition Green, both Orphan releases.
• Suzuki Reiko played Megabaa, the "fairy godmother" character in Dennou Coil. She appeared in the first Sangokushi OVA, an Orphan release, Yawara!, and many other shows, usually playing a grandmotherly character.

Very little is known of the actors in the "live action" segments; Eguchi himself made a brief appearance in the Compression segment. There were multiple directors, all of whom should have known better.

Maho Kareshi translated. The translation checker refuses to be identified. ninjacloud timed. I edited and typeset, for my sins, and BeeBee and VigorousJammer somehow managed to QC. You can blame ics- for the laserdisc rip, which M74 encoded, probably without looking at it.

So why did we do this show? A simple mistake, really - I didn't bother to look at the raw before starting the project. After all, it was Eguchi Hisashi, author of Stop!! Hibari-kun! How bad could it be? The translator said nothing either. By the time the translation checker raised the alarm, the project was mostly done, and I wasn't (quite) willing to smother it before birth. In the future, I'll vet raws more carefully.

Fortunately, this is the last of Eguchi Hisashi's untranslated anime works. If this blog post hasn't put you off, you can get Nantoka Narudesho! from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net. However, don't say you haven't been warned.

Postscript: There's a stupid typo in the first live action segment. A patch to create a v2 can be found here, if you care.

Majo demo Steady

Orphan's first release for 2019!

Although Erik at Piyo Piyo Productions is the most prolific ripper and encoder of Japanese anime laserdiscs that have been stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, he was not the only collector aiming to preserve the anime past. Another was Macross2012, who worked in the BakaBT community and then abruptly vanished. (One could say of the Internet what Dorothy says about Oz: "People come and go so quickly around here.") He encoded a number of interesting and unique raws, and Orphan has now used one to provide the first English version of the 1986 ecchi sci-fi comedy, Majo demo Steady (My Steady Is a Witch).

Majo demo Steady begins with a classic anime plot hook: Hisashi Seki, ordinary working guy, wakes up one morning to find a naked, and very amorous, girl in his bed. (This is carrying the Sudden Girlfriend Appearance trope to a whole 'nother level.) Because he's a grownup, and not an anime harem lead, he's happy to take advantage of the situation, to their mutual satisfaction. However, the girl's appearance leads to all sorts of increasingly strange phenomenon. 

The cause lies, sort of, in Jungian psychology. The girl, whom he has named Asami, is from a parallel dimension where people's ideal partners - the anima to their animus, or vice versa - reside. Asami's longing has allowed her to cross dimensions to be with Seki, but her presence in his world upsets the natural order. She goes back, and Seki must venture to her world to save her. The lovers are reunited. However, matters don't turn out quite as they hoped.

I need to mention a couple of points. There is a lot of nudity. Asami spends most of her time without clothes, and Seki joins her in that state whenever he can. There is a lot of under-the-covers sex, never shown; this is ecchi, not hentai. And there's a subplot about Seki's boss, Sugiyama, who is gay and lusts after his subordinate. This part starts to look a lot like typical anime gay-bashing, but it takes an unexpected turn. Sugiyama too has an ideal partner in the parallel world, and he is allowed an unexpectedly upbeat ending to his quest for love.

The voice cast includes:

• Mitsuya Yuji (Seki) played the leads in Yousei-Ou and Hi-Speed Jecy, both Orphan releases, and in two Adachi Mitsuri properties, Touch and Hiatari Ryouko. He has  appeared in many other shows, including Oz, Ranma 1/2, and the Stitch! franchise.
• Takahashi Miki (Asami) is best known as a singer (she sang all the songs in the show). She had featured roles in MAPS (1994) and Tenamonyo Voyagers. She appeared in Doukyuusei: Climax, an Orphan release.
• Kokontei Shinsuke (Sugiyama) has only one other anime credit.

Kobayashi Osamu, the director, is not well known. There are a lot of songs in the show, all of them sung by Takahashi Miki. The OP, ED, and one of the insert songs appear on the image album. Most of the rest are on Takahashi Miki's album Dress Up. We've only subtitled the insert songs that are more or less complete.

Moho Kareshi translated, and laalg checked the dialog, added more signs, and translated the songs. ninjacloud timed. I edited and typeset. BeeBee and Nemesis QCed. The raw is from Macross2012. He included two Japanese audio tracks, one AAC, the other AC3. Neither includes a right channel, so the sound is in effect monaural.

Majo demo Steady is not a world-shaker, but its heart is in the right place. If you'd like a light ecchi comedy with sci-fi overtones, it will do quite well. You can get the show from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

Update: in response to complaints, I've muxed the AC3 track down to mono and removed the AAC track. As a result, v2 is about 100MB smaller. A patch to create the new version can be found here. We've been outbid twice trying to buy the LD of this show, so v2 will have to stand for now.

2019 Plans

(This is just a rewrite of my usual status-plus-recruiting post, so don't get your expectations too high.)

I surveyed the team about what projects we should do in 2019, and as usual, there are more ideas than bandwidth. Still, a few of them are already underway and can be treated as "commitments," in the usual loose fansub sense.

• Sangokushi movies. These three movies are enormously long - three hours longer than John Woo's epic Red Cliffs movie, or the equivalent of a 20- to 22-episode anime series. There are also hundreds of signs. Movie 1: encoded, translated, timed, typeset, edited; in QC. Movie 2: encoded, translated, timed, typeset; in QC. Movie 3: encoded, translated, timed, typeset; in editing.
• Manxmouse. Encoded, translated, translation checked; in editing. 
• Tales from the Old Testament. Episodes 1-3: released. Episodes 4-6: in encoding and translation.

In addition, we're planning a number of reissues, based on recent media acquisitions and improved transcription capabilities.

• Al Caral no Isan. New laserdisc rip, without the washouts of the current raw. In RC.
• Boyfriend parts 1 and 2. New laserdisc rip of the complete OVA.

I'm really happy about Boyfriend. As I mentioned in my release post, Boyfriend was originally a two-part OVA, released on VHS tape and laserdisc. It was condensed into a shorter TV special, released only on VHS tape; that was the basis for the Orphan release. The new version will not only look and sound better, it will be more complete.

Beyond that, the list of possibilities is too long for rational contemplation: the remaining episodes of Chameleon; a translation-checked version of Gosenzosama Banbanzai; BD versions of Cleopatra and Senya Ichiya Monogatari; three different Tezuka Osamu OVAs or series; Nayuta, Genji Pt 1 and other Piyo Piyo Productions laserdisc rips; and on and on! There's little chance of getting through the backlog of available scripts this year, let alone taking on new projects, unless Orphan gets more capable and experienced help...

• Editor. I can't deal with the backlog all by myself. (I'd like to have a life away from the computer.) However, an editor for Orphan needs to be bimodal. Some of our translators are very proficient in English and rather picky about gratuitous changes to their wording. With their scripts, an editor must exercise great restraint and avoid gratuitous changes. Some of our translators are not native English speakers. With their scripts, an editor must change the wording to flow better but preserve accuracy.
• Typesetter. Same issue; I'm it for now. A typesetter must know motion tracking and must be prepared to work with jittery, hand-drawn signs, blended frames, etc.
• QC. QCs must have a thorough command of American English grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage. They must know how to use Aegisub and to look for errors not just in the dialog but in the timing and signs.
• Encoder. Orphan needs an encoder who can work with difficult sources and apply corrections, manually if required, to the numerous flaws, including interlacing, frame blending, chroma bleeds, color drift, film burn, etc. Orphan doesn't get progressive DVDs or Blu-rays very often, and when it does, there are enough encoders for them.

In closing, two caveats. First, don't use the comments section to plead for translation of your favorite show. As I've explained several times, Orphan doesn't take requests. Second, don't apply to the team if you have no experience or if you want to use different tools, like Discord instead of IRC or Twitter instead of blog posts. Orphan's an old-fashioned fansub group, I'm an old-fashioned (or just old) fansubber, and I'm not going to change the workflow now.

[Updated 07-Mar-2019]