Shin Takarajima (DVD)

Orphan presents a revised version of Tezuka Osamu's 1965 TV special Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island). The first version, done four years ago, was based on a web raw. This one uses an R2J DVD encode. The DVD encode is crisper and has better contrast, and the script has undergone minor cleanup, but otherwise, nothing much has changed. 

Here's a comparison of the DVD release

to the original release

I wrote about Shin Takarajima at length for the first release, so I don't see a need to rehash the plot or the voice credits. Shin Takarajima doesn't really follow the story line of Tezuka Osamu's 1947 manga of the same name. Instead, it hews more closely to the plot of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure novel, Treasure Island, but with animal characters. The good guys are mostly herbivores: Jim Hawkins is a rabbit, Dr. Livesey a deer, Squire Trelawney a pig, Captain Smollet a bear. The pirates are all carnivores: John Silver is a wolf, Bill Bones a mountain dog, Pew a wildcat, Ben Gunn a lion, and so on. It's a lot of fun, with a rollicking blend of action, suspense, and humor, in Tezuka Osamu's trademark style. The sight gags when the ship sets sail are non-stop, including a misspelled sign that is far funnier today than when the show was made sixty years ago. 

Because of the improvement in video quality, I would recommend this version unconditionally, except for a couple of things: the encode is anamorphic and five times bigger. (No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to break encoders of this habit.) As I documented here, angled signs may play incorrectly. Further, some players will shrink the 720x480 video to 640x480 instead of stretching it to 720x540. If your video player renders the angled signs wrong, or shrinks the video, you'll want the first version, or a new video player.

For the first release, Iri translated and kokujin-kun kindly filled in a few lines that were difficult to hear. ninjacloud timed. I edited and typeset. Nemesis and Uchuu QCed. Nemesis pointed out that a black-and-white anime should not have subtitles with colored outlines, so Orphan's usual color scheme for overlapping and song lines was changed to gray-scale. Uchuu supplied some interesting notes, particularly on verbatim quotations from the novel. For this release, WOWmd supplied a new encode from the R2J DVD. Perevodildo did a translation check, and Paul Geromini a release check. They pointed out that lyrics for "Fifteen Men" were incorrect; they should have been "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest," not "a dead man's chest."

I loved Shin Takarajima when Orphan first worked on it. I still do, and so does everyone who worked on either release. The original release stands the test of time and will continue to be available; the new one improves on both the video and the subtitles, at the cost of a five-fold increase in file size and the usual anamorphic caveats. If you want the new release, you can get it from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.