Watt Poe

I've mentioned in the past that the fansub groups working on back catalog shows aren't all that distinct. They're more like an interlocking keiretsu than distinct teams. Orphan, Saizen, Soldado, Live-eviL, and others all share staff. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Saizen's recent release of the 1988 OVA Watt Poe to Bokura no Ohanashi (The Legend of Watt Poe). The project leader, Ayanami-, is part of Saizen, so it's a Saizen release, but the staff comes from across the keiretsu:

• Translation - Ayanami- (Saizen)
• Timing - ninjacloud (Orphan and Saizen)
• Editing - Collectr (Orphan)
• QC - Kuro Nemesis (Orphan), BeeBee (Orphan and Saizen), sangofe (Saizen)
• Encoding - tyroz (Anime Fanrips)
• Raw Acquisition and ripping - Intrepid raw hunter (Orphan)

Yawara! and Laughing Salesman also have staff from Saizen, Live-eviL, Soldado, and Orphan. I guess you could say we're group-fluid.

Watt Poe is a very old-school fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic world. Struggling villagers at the base of a mountain live in fear of the "Birdos", flying armored creatures that live at the top of the mountain. The Birdos have kidnapped a magical narwhal named Watt Poe, whom the villagers worship as a god, and now the villagers' sources of food are drying up. Intrepid youngster Jam decides to climb the mountain and release Watt Poe. He finds the Birdos are actually technologically advanced humans, but their society is dying out. He teams up with the only Birdos child born in the last twenty years, a girl named Selene, to free Watt Poe and prevent a war between the villagers and the Birdos. As Ayanami- wrote, "This is what happens when Free Willy and Lassie join forces in a Japanese anime." And as every old-school Hollywood actor knew, the dog steals the show.

The voice cast includes:

• Fujita Toshiko (Jam) played the title roles in the Dragon Quest: Dai no Daibouken properties, Fujiko Fujio no Kiteretsu Daihyakka, Ikkyuu-san, Tomcat's Big Adventure, and Ganbare Genki. She starred as Rui in Cat's Eye and Ryoko in Goku: Midnight Eye. She also played Lulu in Grimm Douwa: Kin no Tori, Takao in Oedo wa Nemurenai!, Cyborg 1019 in Oz, Gordon in Hitomi no Naka no Shounen: 15 Shounen Hyouryuuki, Sharaku in Akuma Tou no Prince: Mitsume ga Tooru, and Princess Iron Fan in Tezuka Osamu Monogatari: I Am Son Goku, all Orphan releases.
• Hara Eriko (Selene) played Patty in the Gall Force properties, Fana in Gldeen, Hiyami Hikaru in the Kimagure Orange Road properties, and Pyonkichi in the Soreike! Anpanman franchise. She starred as Ranze in Tokimeki Tonight and appeared in Fukuyama Gekijou - Natsu no Himitsu, both Orphan releases.
• Kawashima Chiyoko (Eva, a villager) played Okiyo in Haguregumo, Fujiko (Yawara's best friend in college) in Yawara!, and Ikou in Greed, an Orphan release.
• Yara Yuusaku (Regio, a villager) 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.
• Utsumi Kenji (Village chief) is best known for his roles as Roah in Fist of the North Star, Kaioh in Fist of the North Star 2, and Senbei Norimaki in the Dr. Slump and Arale-chan franchise. He appeared in Bavi Stock and 15 Shounen Hyouruuki, both Orphan releases.
• Miyauchi Kouhei (Birdos mayor) usually played elderly men or authority figures. He appeared in many Orphan releases, including the first two Sangokushi movies, Condition Green (Jack Goldman), Grimm Douwa: Kin no Tori (King Kaiser), Nozomi Witches (Eddie), Stop!! Hibari-kun (Kogorou Shirachi), Tsuki ga Noboru made ni (Grandfather), A Penguin's Memories (the judge), and Techno Police 21C (Brigadier Hamilton). He had a recurring role as Kame Sennin in the Dragon Ball franchise.

The director,  Kageyama Shigenori, also directed Bavi Stock I, Hi-Speed Jecy, and Yamato 2520, all Orphan releases, as well as the Himawari! series. Under the pseudonym Morino Yousei, he directed numerous h-anime shows, including Doukyuusei 2 (an Orphan release), the BL classic Boku no Sexual Harassment, and recent Queen's Blade releases.

It was fun, and not too demanding, to work on an "all ages" OVA, and I always like to build up chits I can call in later (heh heh). If you haven't watched Watt Poe yet, then you can find it on the usual torrent site or on IRC bot Saizen|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net

Akatsuki no Yona: A Retrospective

I haven’t done much fansubbing of current shows for the last few years. Most contemporary series have been junk, and the few standouts have been claimed by teams I don’t work with.  Akatsuki no Yona proved an exception, on both counts. Preparing the scripts for the batch release of the show has only strengthened my admiration for the series.

I’m not sure what drew me to Yona. The Fall Preview in Random Curiosity pigeon-holed it as a shoujo harem in the mold of Fushigi Yuugi, an otome series that I don’t particularly like. Guardian Enzo of Lost in Anime saw signs of promise but only enough for it to “sit near the top of my second tier.” Yet from the outset, I wanted to work on the show, even though I was sure no one else would be interested. I more-or-less cursed, cajoled, or convinced a few people in FFF to work on it with me, as repayment for the crap light novel adaptations I’ve edited for the group. My judgment about the show was confirmed within two episodes, as was my hunch that no other team would pick it up.  That allowed for a more leisurely pace, with releases two to six days after the show aired.

Yona is a shoujo series, because its protagonist is a teenage girl, but it is more a historical fantasy in the mold of Seiunkoku Monogatari than a romance like Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii. The core subject is not love but power politics. The show is set in a semi-disguised feudal Korea. Yona is the pampered daughter of the non-violent and perhaps indolent King Il. She starts out with nothing more serious on her mind than her red hair, which she doesn’t particularly like; her imminent sixteenth birthday celebration; and her romance, so far unfulfilled, with her first cousin, Su-won, the heir-apparent to the throne.

Her life is rudely shattered on the night of her birthday when Su-won assassinates her father, claims the kingship, and orders her executed. Su-won says he is doing this as revenge for King Il’s murder of Su-won’s father, Yu-hon, but that remains in doubt. At the last second, Yona’s monstrously strong bodyguard, Hak, known as the Thunder Beast, rescues her, and together they flee into the countryside with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

The opening episodes aren’t very promising. Yona is helpless and, worse yet, vapid. The show seems headed for a standard damsel-in-distress-rescued-by-her-hero trope. Yet at the end of the second episode, to set the stage for what’s to come, the show flashes forward to show Yona as the determined leader of a small band of warriors, fighting off an invasion of her homeland. The core of Akatsuki no Yona is showing how that transformation came about; how a helpless and cloistered girl became a leader and a fearsome fighter.

Yona and Hak first encounter an exiled priest, Ik-su, and his clever, handsome, but not physically strong attendant, Yun. Ik-su tells Yona about the myth of the four dragons, companions of Kouka’s founding red-haired king, Hiryuu. According to legend, their descendants are still waiting for a new red-headed king to summon them.  Accompanied by Yun and Hak, Yona sets out to find the dragons in the hope that red-headed Yona is the king the dragons have been waiting for.

Over the rest of the season, Yona encounters and eventually wins over the four dragons, but she also sees with her own eyes the true situation of Kouka and its inhabitants. Her father’s lackadaisical policies have allowed foreign powers and local lords to oppress the populace unmercifully, and the land is filled with bitter, poverty-stricken people who are barely surviving. Inspired by her desire to set things right, and her need to gain strength if she is to survive, Yona embarks systematically on training herself for combat and for leadership. While the dragons, Hak, and Yun all feel protective of her and see her as "frail" young girl, they grow to appreciate her drive, her insights, and her leadership. By the end of the show, she is the undisputed captain of her small company.

While the quest plot dominates, the theme of love is not lost completely. Yona’s feelings of love for Su-won have not disappeared, although they are now mixed with a desire for revenge. Her feelings toward Hak remain at the “childhood friend” level, but his feelings are increasingly colored by love and desire. All the dragons worship her in some way or another and struggle about whether this is because of their heritage or their true feelings. Even Yun, the self-described “handsome genius” and loner, is torn between his wish to remain aloof and his growing attraction to Yona.

Still, it’s power politics that dominate the show, and those politics are far from clear-cut. The initial setup seems to make Su-won an out-and-out villain, but later episodes show that he is a thoughtful, subtle, and skilled leader, determined to rectify the problems that arose under King Il. He puts on the mask of a buffoon in order to probe the state of his kingdom and convey needed but perhaps otherwise unwelcome advice to its powerful warlords. Further, he still has feelings for Yona, although he is determined to forget them lest they undermine his mission. At some point in the future, they will meet on the battlefield, but whether as allies or enemies can’t be determined yet.

Speaking of power politics, two things in the initial setup bother me. The first is King Il’s adamant opposition to Su-won marrying Yona. As the surviving male in the royal family, Su-won is not only an acceptable choice to be Yona’s husband but also the obvious one. The second is Su-won’s apparent decision to have Yona killed during his coup. In feudal times, a usurping lord didn’t kill the old king’s female relatives; he married one of them, to strengthen his claim to the throne. (Think of Henry VII marrying Elizabeth of York, Richard III’s surviving sister, following the Battle of Bosworth.) Yona would have no choice but to submit; in that era, women were chattel.

So there are all these unresolved questions. Why would King Il say that Yona marrying Su-won was “out of the question”? Marriage between first cousins was perfectly acceptable. Why would Su-won apparently agree by deciding to have Yona executed? And why did King Il have Su-won’s father, Yu-hon, murdered?

I have a theory, based on no evidence whatsoever, to reconcile these facts. Suppose Su-won was not Yona’s cousin but her half-brother? Marriage between cousins is one thing, but marriage between siblings is quite another. In more detail, suppose Yu-hon cuckolded King Il and fathered Yona. We know from the flashbacks that Yona’s mother died when Yona was young (six or less), and that shortly thereafter, Yu-hon died (or was executed). If Yona’s mother confessed or her deathbed, it would explain (a) why King Il murdered Yu-hon, (b) why King Il says that Yona can never marry Su-won, and (c) why Su-won would have agreed, albeit reluctantly.

Of course, this is likely to be complete balderdash, and Su-won’s decision to execute Yona rather than marry her may well be just a plot contrivance to set Yona on her journey. We’ll never know – or at least nothing’s been clarified in the 72 manga chapters that have been scanlated so far.

For the batch scripts, I’ve gone back through and tried to make all the naming consistent. Crunchyroll changed the spelling of every character’s name, except Hak and Yona, at some point in the series: Su-won was initially Soo-won, Mun-deok was initially Mondok, Ki-ja became Gija, etc. Male names are typically hyphenated, but female names (like Yona) are not. I’ve tried to listen to the phonetics of the names, but some decisions are just arbitrary. Is the Yellow Dragon Zeno or Jeno? I like Zeno better; so there.

Yona isn’t quite done. An OAD has been announced, and I have faint hopes for an eventual second season. There’s plenty of manga material for another 24 episodes, and with a lapse of six months or a year, there will be even more. But shoujo isn’t as popular as it used to be. Saiunkoku Monogatari got two seasons of 39 episodes each, but that was six years ago. Can an anime market dominated by crappy light novel adaptations pandering to otaku sustain a quality show like Yona? I certainly hope so!

2014 in Review

This is not a summary of my views on 2014's anime; why should you care? I didn't watch many shows. Instead, I was mostly working on editing projects, with a sideline of typesetting. Highlights included:

Orphan Fansubs

Without laalg, the team's prolific translator, the pace of work slowed. The group did more resubbing projects and fewer original translations. Still, Orphan completed twelve projects this year.

• Rain Boy, Lunn Flies into the Wind, Yamataro Comes Back, Adachigahara, Akuemon. Thanks to outstanding translation help from convexity and Moho Kareshi, we finished off Tezuka Osamu's Lion Book series. The shows range from sentimental fables (Rain Boy) to horror (Adachigahara) and illustrate the range of Tezuka Osamu's interests and talents. Along the way, I learned the basics of motion-capture typesetting, so the typesetting for the last four is better than for the first two, although it's still amateurish.
• Maze TV special. The notorious fanservice episode, subtitled in English for the first time as a public service to Maze devotees and anime connoisseurs alike.
• Yamato 2520. The notorious (for a different reason) incomplete sequel to the Yamato franchise, abandoned after three episodes. This was the first fully translated version in English.
• Sei Michaela Gakuen Hyouruuki. The token h-anime for the year (under the Orphan label, at least), distinguished by its mild content and wildly improbable and convoluted plot.
• The Adventures of Horus, Prince of the Sun. A resub project using neo1024's excellent subtitles and tipota's BluRay encode. A highly enjoyable family film, in the old-school tradition.
• Maroko. The baffling summary movie of the equally baffling OVA series, Gosenzosama Banbanzai! A resub project using Frostii/Ureshii subtitles and a sterling new encode by Skr.
• Amatsuki. A resub project using Ureshii subtitles and DVD encodes.
• Ranma 1/2 Live Action. Intended as a follow up to the very successful Usagi Drop live action project, it served to illustrate how variable the quality of Japanese live-action films can be - in this case, how bad the quality can be.

Orphan also established a formal h-anime sub-brand, Okizari, to allow for clearer labeling of h-anime releases; and at least one of the releases (Kunoichi Bakamatsu Kitan) was actually worth the effort.

The team has expanded a bit. It now includes three translators or translation checkers (convexity,  Moho Kareshi, and kokujin-kun), three timers (archdeco, ninjacloud, and Eternal_Blizzard), two typesetters (Juggen and me), four QCs (CP, Saji, konnakude, and Calyrica), and one editor (me). MrMew times the h-anime releases. macros74 pitches in on projects as well. Everyone has other commitments, but it's a fun group to work with.

Work for Other Groups

• Kiteseekers finished the first English translation of Limeiro Ryuukitan X, as well as the BluRay version of Hanaukyo Maid Tai, which turned out very well in my estimation.
• C1. My very first group has come back from beyond the grave, and I'm editing Kakyuusei 1999 for them. It's going slowly, as most back catalog projects do, but it got a pleasant boost when doll_licca was able to provide a DVD source for the series.
• FFF. I continue to work on TV resubs and BDs. TV shows included the utterly forgettable Golden Time and Seikoku no Dragonar and the far better Hoozuki no Reitetsu and Akatsuki no Yona. BDs included Hyakka Samurai Bride and Walkure Romanze, both guilty pleasures.
• WhyNot? I finished editing several incomplete series for the group, but they have not yet been released.
• FroZen-EviL finished Miyuki (and there was much rejoicing). Yawara! Blurays are next.
• Saizen roped me into Laughing Salesman and Psycho-Armor Govarian. On some of these shows, it's hard to tell the boundaries between Saizen, Live-EviL, Soldado, C1, and Orphan; the staffs overlap almost completely.
• m74. I edited a few shows for macros74 as he explored the back catalog through European releases and translations.
• ray=out. I finished editing Hiatari Ryoukou, but the show continues to roll out very slowly.
• Magai. I helped polish up Morellet's version of the charming The Rose and Joe.

I'm almost always willing to help out teams that need a hand... but I've become more particular about the kind of material I'll work on. Extremes of violence and moe are out of scope now, but sci-fi, slice of life, and cats never get old.

Looking Ahead

Next year's, Orphan will finish up D4 Princess and Tokimeki Tonight.  Beyond that, projects will be based on the team's interests and on the availability of raw materials. We'd all like to do more Tezuka Osamu, if raws are available. I'm working with LaserDisc encoders to see if we can get raws for series or OVAs that never made it to DVD or are only available as low-quality Internet raws. And I really want to do BluRay versions of Polar Bear Cafe and the Cosprayers trilogy; a different team is already working on Nodame Cantabile.

I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season and a joyous 2015. Thanks for reading, or watching, or both.

Adachi Mitsuru Overload

I've been working on Adachi Mitsuru series for a long time, seemingly forever. Hiatari Ryoukou started up more than two-and-a-half years ago; Miyuki, more than 18 months ago. Frankly, I didn't expect them to take all that long, based on Yawara, but for "reasons," the projects have stalled out repeatedly. Working on them in parallel has introduced a sense of perpetual deja vu, because one Adachi series looks very much like another, and nowhere is this more true than Hiatari Ryoukou and Miyuki.

Both shows are slice-of-life comedies, at the center of which is a love triangle. In Hiatari Ryoukou, the heroine, Kishimoto Kasumi, is torn between her long-term boyfriend, Muraki Katsuhiko, now a college student, and a boy who lives at her boarding house and attends her high school, Takasugi Yuusaku. In Miyuki, the hero, Wakamatsu Masoto, is torn between his high-school crush, Kashima Miyuki, and his newly returned step-sister, Wakamatsu Miyuki, to whom he is conveniently not related by blood. The character designs are interchangeable, with Yuusaku a dead ringer for Masoto, and Kasumi a dead ringer for Wakamatsu Miyuki. (That's a big spoiler for who will end up with whom, by the way.) Both shows feature some amount of high-school baseball, Hiatari Ryoukou fairly seriously, Miyuki just as incidental color. In both shows, the comic sidekick (Mikimoto Shin in Hiatari, Muraki Yoshio in Miyuki) is played by the same seiryuu, Shiozata Kaneto. Hiatari even makes a cameo appearance on a TV screen in episode 30 of Miyuki. See why I'm confused? By the way, so is the mangaka: in a recent interview, Adachi was unable to tell his own heroes apart.

One difference is that Hiatari Ryoukou is actually a complete version of the manga (when the movie is thrown in), but Miyuki stops about two-thirds of the way through. (The manga is completely scanlated, if you want to find out how it all ends.) Perhaps the 1983 audience wouldn't support five cours of Adachi Mitsuri, but after the smashing success of Touch in 1985, there was enough interest to see Hiatari Ryoukou through until the end. Besides, the characters in Hiatari are indistinguishable visually from the characters in Touch, so perhaps the audience thought they were watching the same show. Adachi would revisit the themes of baseball and a love triangle in Slow Step and H2, before moving on to other patterns.

I'd like to move on as well; I've had enough of Adachi for a while. (No, I'm not going to marathon Touch any time soon.) For one thing, Yawara! is out on BluRay, an event which cries out for a pristine new version. If I have to spend close to three years on a series, I'd rather spend it with Yawara-chan and Jigoro, Sayaka and Shinnosuke, Jody, Fujiko, Matsuda and the rest than a cast of characters neither I nor the author can tell apart. I'm sure both Hiatari and Miyuki are enjoyable in their own way, but long acquaintance has stamped out all the fun for me.

Maroko, or, Gosenzosama Banbanzai the Movie

Gosenzosama Banbanzai was a six episode OVA that started in Ureshii and finished in Frostii, after Froth-Bite and Ureshii merged. It's a deadpan send-up of the "family dramas" of the 1980s, highly stylized and very dry. The show consists of long set-piece scenes, filled with meandering dialogues, posturing soliloquies, asides to the audience, and pointless songs, punctuated (occasionally) by a great punchline. The intricate long lines, rarely broken by pauses, made editing this show one of the most challenging and difficult tasks of my early fansubbing days. I'm still very fond of it, although I can't watch it end to end. It's simply too bizarre.

As was often the case for OVAs and TV series, Gosenzosama was condensed and released as a movie, Maroko, now brought to you by Orphan Fansubs. Every line of dialog is from the original OVAs; only the additional signs required translation. I've tried to make as few changes as possible. The dialog font is larger, with better margins, and that required condensing or splitting a few lines. The original timing was off in a few places and has been corrected. The QC team turned up a number of mistakes that were missed in the original episodes. If you've seen Gosenzosama, there's not much point in watching Maroko, although the movie raw, encoded directly from a DVD reissue, looks much better than the DivX5 raws that were available to Ureshii and Frostii.

On the other hand, if you only watch Maroko, you're going to miss some of the very best bits in Gosenzosama. In particular, every episode of the OVAs begins with a long disquisition on a bird species and how its habits (sort of) relate to the human behavior in the episode. These standalone vignettes are hilarious and set the tone for the episode. There's no time for them in a 90 minute movie, but they're a serious loss.

This project has been gestating for a long time, primarily because of issues with available sources. The most common Internet source is from a LaserDisc and is corrupted in at least five places. An existing encode of the DVD proved to be bit-starved and improperly de-interlaced. Ultimately, a colleague bought a used DVD in Japan, which allowed a proper 10-bit H.264 encode to be made. I'd like to thank convexity, for supplying any missing signs and translation; Eternal_Blizzard for retiming and encoding; CP and Eternal_Blizzard for sitting through the whole thing and QCing; and Skr for obtaining the DVD source.

Gosenzosama Banbanzai and Maroko are lesser known works from the fertile mind of Oshii Mamoru, one of the lions of Japanese anime. The 1980s and 1990s were a period of great experimental creativity for him, starting with Dallos in 1983 and Angel's Egg in 1985 and culminating in the ground-breaking Ghost in the Shell in 1995. He remains an active force in Japanese popular culture, creating anime, live-action movies, and radio dramas; The Sky Crawlers (2008) is his most recent full-length anime work.

If anyone has ISOs of the recent Gosenzosama Banbanzai reissue on DVD, perhaps Orphan could redo the original OVAs. On the other hand, considering the content, maybe not. Meanwhile, enjoy Maroko.

Confession

Yes, I admit it. I put all the Happy Science videos up on BakaBT as a troll. Not of the films themselves, I hasten to add. The films have been left pretty much alone, except for minor fixes to the subtitles for timing, wording, and mistranslations. Rather, I offered these films to troll the BakaBT moderators.

It all started innocently enough. I found Medgirl’s rip of the first Happy Science film, Hermes: Winds of Love, on a different tracker, and I uploaded it to BakaBT because it wasn’t there. I hadn’t actually watched the movie, but I did carefully note the negative reviews and Happy Science connection in my offer. Next I put together a version of QTS’s The Rebirth of Buddha by lightly massaging the subtitles for timing, styling, and wording. Then the completionist in me led me to track down two more Happy Science videos and offer them, in whatever state they existed, with copious warnings.

 

If you’re not familiar with Happy Science, formally known as Kyoufuku no Kagaku (幸福の科学, or The Institute for Research in Human Happiness), it’s a Japanese religious cult. It is often compared to Scientology, because its cosmology is as much based on popular science fiction as it is on religion, but most authorities regard it as harmless enough. It doesn’t advocate violence or attack its detractors. Indeed, the head of the cult, Owaka Ryuho, was the target of a failed assassination attempt by the terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo in January 1995.

 

There have been six Happy Science films so far, one every three years:

                Hermes: Winds of Love (1997)

                The Laws of the Sun (2000)

                The Golden Laws (2003)

                The Laws of Eternity (2006)

                The Rebirth of Buddha (2009)

                The Mystical Laws (2012)

The films always do well at the box office. To each his own.

I began to have more sinister thoughts about these films when the BakaBT mods removed the Orphan Fansubs version of Space Neko Theater. The decision was, I thought, completely arbitrary: all "self-produced" anime was verboten, unless the creator was "well known." I’m particularly fond of Space Neko Theater, because it’s about cats, it’s really funny, and I went through a lot of trouble to get it right. As a result, I took this decision rather hard. If BakaBT wouldn’t take a wonderful comic short, then what truly terrible "legitimate" anime could I upload instead?

I’d been sitting on the QTS DVD rips of the second, third, and fourth Happy Science movies for some time when a request was made to offer QTS’s The Mystical Laws. Here was the perfect opportunity to hoist BakaBT on its own "we only offer the best version of legitimate anime" petard. I would create the "best" versions not only of The Mystical Laws but of The Laws of the Sun, The Golden Laws, and The Laws of Eternity. With full video resolution, dual Japanese and English audio, proper timing, and correctly edited subtitles, they’d be impossible to turn down. And so it proved. Mystical went up first, then Sun, the Golden, and finally Eternity. While some offers sit in limbo for months or even years, these were promptly accepted.

I tried to play fair with the BakaBT leechers. Each offer contained pointers to reviews (mostly negative), as well as copious remarks about the nature of the films as religious propaganda. Despite that, the member comments quickly filled up with howls of outrage about the films and how terrible they were. Even as my warnings became stronger, the outrage grew. I could only conclude that many BakaBT leechers don’t read (the offers). Caveat emptor.

So now I can rest from my labors, replete in the satisfaction of a job well done. BakaBT has what it claims to want: the "best" versions of six "legitimate" anime films. Are the Happy Science films a good tradeoff for expelling Space Neko Theater? I’ll let you be the judge. And was this project a good troll on BakaBT? Or was I the one trolled for putting in all those hours fixing up what’s basically religious propaganda? I’ll let you be the judge of that too.

Hanaukyo Maid Tai (In Praise of M.O.E.)

Over at Kiteseekers, I edited the BluRay version of Hanaukyo Maid Tai (2001). This short series of half-length episodes is one of several lightweight ecchi comedies from M.O.E., the tongue-in-cheek acronym for the Japanese anime company Masters of Entertainment. M.O.E. was also responsible for a trio of shows centering around a fictitious live-action superhero show: Cosprayers, Love Love, and Smash Hit.

Hanaukyo Maid Tai is an all-out harem comedy, in which 14-year-old Hanaukyo Taro suddenly and unexpectedly becomes the master of the vastly wealthy Hanaukyo family, the Hanaukyo mansion, and the mansion's horde of lovely and affectionate maids. Unfortunately, young Taro is allergic to girls and becomes rather ill at the slightest physical contact, except with the beautiful, calm, and nurturing head maid Mariel. (This situation was ripped off pretty much intact for the later Girls Bravo, with the mostly female planet Seiren substituting for the all female mansion staff.)

There's no pretense of significance or even a plot. The recurring characters - the head of security, Konoe, the oujo-sama from a rival family, Jihiyo Ryuka, the crackpot maid inventor, Ikuyo - are all tropes played strictly for laughs. Taro's trio of personal maids, known as Ringo (apple), Ichigo (strawberry), and Sango (coral), are mostly interested in taking the concept of "service" to an entirely different level. (They try to get him to "climb the stairs to adulthood," to use Kouko's phrase from Golden Time, for his fifteenth birthday.) Even Taro and Mariel remain pretty much stock characters, and their romance hardly progresses at all. The animation is simple and inexpensive, and the music is generic, except for the earworm opening song.

Nonetheless, I have a sneaking fondness for Hanaukyo Maid Tai, precisely because it is so unpretentious. It's mostly comedic, the comedy mostly works, and at 15 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's neither self-indulgent or self-aware; there's no fourth wall cracking or gimmicks. It's cotton candy for the mind - enjoyable in small doses.

The series was remade in 2004 as Hanaukyo Maid Tai: La Verite. The remake adhered more closely to the manga and thus was subject to that most dreadful of anime comedy contrivances, The Serious Plot Development. I won't spoil you with the details (they're all in the Wikipedia article anyway), but suffice it to say that there is a Nefarious Scheme at work which explains the peculiar circumstances of a mansion full of willing servants. Personally, I regard the Serious Developments that occur in the last few episodes of most anime comedies as a blot, and for that reason I prefer the original series to the remake. I also prefer the original character design for Mariel, although La Verite clearly has better production values.

Kiteseeker's version of Hanaukyo Maid Tai is a vast improvement over the previous versions. The BluRay video is not surprisingly much better than the TV or BD rips. Equally important, the subtitles have been checked and are a lot more accurate; they're properly edited too. The timing is better, and the typesetting is completely redone. All in all, this is really the first decent release of the series. Kudos to the KiteSeekers' staff for all their hard work and care on the show.

So if you need a diversion and have 15 minutes to spare, download and check out an episode of Hanaukyo Maid Tai. It won't change your life, but it won't leave your tearing your hair out either.

A BluRay box set of the Cosprayers trilogy is now available. I'd really like to do BluRay versions of all three series, but for now, that will have to wait.

V2's Galore

In a previous blog, I looked fairly skeptically at the rash of v2's that were occurring at the time. Now, like the maids in the ending song for episodes 13-15, I must confess my errors: two-thirds of the Hanaukyo Maid Tai episodes have v2's in the batch. The changes stemmed from relatively few root causes.

1. Inconsistent romanization. It wasn't until episode 12 that I noticed a discrepancy between the romanization of Hanaukyō Tarō and Jihiyō Ryūka. The former had been romanized by dropping the long markers, the latter by standard romanization, with ō becoming ou and ū becoming uu. We'd romanized Hanaukyō as Hanaukyo because the title , "Maid in Hanaukyo," showed it that way. Changing Jihiyou Ryuuka to Jihiyo Ryuka impacted half a dozen episodes.
2. Inconsistent preview conventions. It took a few episodes to get the tag line ("Next time, we'll again serve our master to the utmost! Heart") correct. At the end, an error crept in about translating Tai, and it was copy-pasted through four episodes.
   

I'll be a lot more forgiving about v2's in the future.

Bored

Things have been slack lately at Orphan Fansubs, ever since our full-time translator was pulled back into real-life. All of our projects are moving slowly, because the staff is both small and fully committed on other projects or in real-life. My work for other groups on two Adachi series, Hiatari Ryoukou and Miyuki, is also stalled for various reasons, so I don't have much to do.

As a result, I've worked on a bunch of recent shows, mostly to trade favors. For example, I "edited" Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai from Crunchyroll scripts, despite its moronic premise (singing idols become pro wrestlers? seriously?), because Orphan's timer is partial to anime eye candy. Little did he (or I) know that the TV broadcast would be heavily censored as well as witless. Perhaps someone will slap the scripts on BluRay encodes, thereby at least fulfilling the original intent of the project.

Another example is the current Seikoku no Dragonar. I'm "editing" that show to get the group lead to finish batching numerous BluRay encodes that are done and have been sitting on the shelf, some for as long as a year. For each BluRay batch released, I'll work on an episode. (He's two behind at the moment.) Otherwise, there's no excuse for this series, which shamelessly rips off both Dragon Crisis and Zero no Tsukaima without originality or added value.

[If I may digress for a moment... Groups that have inconsistent policies on batches really tick me off. I don't mind if a group never batches. I really like groups that batch promptly or provide updates on status, like Vivid. But groups that sometimes batch and sometimes don't, or batch after endless delays, irritate me no end. I want to get series off my hard drives and onto archival media when they're finished. That requires a definitive indication that  a series is in its final form.]

The only recent series I "edited" out of sincere interest was Golden Time, and what a disaster it turned out to be. I'd hoped that a show about college students rather than high school students might provide greater scope for characterization and real-life incidents. Instead, it was a textbook example of what might be called Light Novel Syndrome. Light Novels seem to substitute bizarre premises and arbitrary plot twists for organic development of characters and story. Sometimes, as with the current One Week Friends, the show can overcome these handicaps and provide a genuinely interesting experience. Golden Time did not. The male lead, Tada Banri, was totally generic, and his plight (memory loss and memory reloss) uninvolving and unconvincing. The female lead, Kaga Kouko, had no redeeming characteristics beyond her looks, yet she won out in the end, as foreshadowed in the OP and ED all along. The supporting characters were moved and paired in totally arbitrary ways. And it meandered for 24 episodes, prolonging the agony beyond all reasonable measure.

You will notice that I've put "editing" in quotes, because I don't consider the work I do on simulcast scripts to be real editing. It's more like QC. Partly this is because the shows are already edited, but it's also partly because frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Dark Sage pointed out that the first couple of scripts for Golden Time were only lightly altered. He was correct, because those initial scripts were quite well done and needed only a small amount of touching up. Others have commented that the later scripts contain careless errors. They're right too, because by then the Crunchyroll script quality had deteriorated, but I'd lost all interest in the show. I only continued with it out of a sense of obligation. The same applies to Sekai and Dragonar. It's really difficult to put in a sustained effort on uninteresting scripts. In short, these lousy shows are turning me into a lazy editor. That's not why I got into fansubbing.

So I need help. Orphan Fansubs has a backlog of interesting projects stalled for lack of staff. If you're a translator, a timer, or a QC and would like to work on shows that are different (although not necessarily better) than the current otaku and fujoshi fodder, please give me a shout. Your help will be sincerely appreciated, and you'll be saving an editor from the deadly Sin of Laziness.

Lime-iro Ryuukitan X Cross

So at long last, Lime-iro Ryuukitan X Cross is complete.

This sequel to Lime-iro Senkitan has had a checkered history, to say the least. Released in 2005, it was started, and dropped, by no less than three fansub groups. Despite the availability of decent DVD raws, it remained untranslated and unloved until KiteSeekers added it to the backlog about three years ago. I joined KiteSeekers specifically to finish this orphan series.

Even with my constant nagging, progress was slow. Although the episodes had been translated, the translations were a bit suspect. Fortunately, Zalis116, who in the guise of ReDone Subs created the excellent DVD version of Lime-Iro Senkitan, agreed to translation check the scripts. It still took a year to finish the series, as higher priority was usually given to the Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream and Tantei Opera Milky Holmes franchises. Lolis trump historical mecha, I guess.

As a sequel, a drop in quality would not be unexpected, but it’s the shift in tone that’s more bothersome, at least to me. Lime-iro Senkitan was a guilty pleasure, gleefully mixing action, comedy, harem, and mecha with a healthy dose of eye candy to utterly subvert the tropes of the genres. The hero, Shintaro, far from being the usual ineffective harem lead, scores with almost every female who’s both of legal age and human. He never really takes the lead in the fighting; his role is coaching, mentoring, and sexual healing. It’s good, dumb, ecchi fun.

Lime-iro Ryuukitan, on the other hand, plays by all the rules of the shounen and harem genres. The lead is clueless about women, tongue-tied and embarrassed about emotions, and generally only good at charging head-first at the enemy. The girls are all in love with him, but none of them makes an impression on his heart of iron. Instead, he teaches them life lessons about believing in themselves as well as about wrestling wild animals and patching up scrapes and bruises. In the end, he is the HERO who defeats the enemy, and the girls are supporters. As a result, the show plays as a series of cliches, with only occasional flashes of humor to lighten the endless tropes. The villains, named Chiffon, Linen, and Cashmere (what are they, an 80s girl group?), have no personality to start with and don’t develop any along the way. It’s a big come down from the original.

I’m glad it’s finally subbed, and the Lime-iro series can be viewed in its entirety. Nonetheless, Lime-iro Ryuukitan serves to point up an important lesson about orphan series: when a show’s been dropped by lots of groups, it’s probably for a good reason.

Ranma 1/2 Live Action

If the Usagi Drop live action movie embodies everything that can go right in a Japanese live action remake of an anime, then Ranma 1/2 shows almost everything that can go wrong. I have a soft spot for the original Ranma anime franchise because of its unremitting silliness, even though it wore out its welcome long before the 161 episodes, 12 OVAs, and 2 movies were over and done with. The live action TV special has all  the stupidity of the original and none of the charm. It's sexist, homophobic, and, worst of all, not very funny.

The core problem, I think, is that cardboard characters and repeated tropes are tolerable (barely) in a cartoon but are off-putting in a film with real actors. Thus, the best live action shows are adaptations of slice-of-life or romantic comedy series, such as Usagi Drop, Nodame Cantabile, and Honey and Clover. The anime characters in those series are semi-believable, and that gives real actors room to work. In contrast, a slapstick comedy like Ranma requires actors to behave like cartoons, complete with cartoon-like special effects. In my view, that's only been successful once, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It's not successful here.

So you might ask, quite reasonably, why I worked on this. As has happened before, I got dragged in by the simple awfulness of the original subtitles. I couldn't bear to archive that mess.(For example, the first ten lines include, "I'll be more gental next time!" and "He's finially coming!") So I started editing, and then found I had to retime, and then found I need translation checking on a bunch of lines... it went on and on. It's been more than a year from when I downloaded the original version to the release of this one. I've had to watch the movie through three times, and I never want to watch it again. I will be more forbearing in the future. The world is filled with awful subtitles, and I don't have time to deal with them.

The raw is by Rabite-Asses. The original subtitles are by LuffyNoTomo, with additional work by zdzdz. I re-timed, re-edited, and did some additional typesetting. CP did QC, and convexity translated the lines that were missing or so clearly wrong that even I could hear it. If you have the raw, you can patch to this version. A link to the patch is in the torrent.

Anyway, I can't recommend this live action special. But if you do want to watch it, I think this version is an improvement over what was currently before. That may sound like faint praise, but it's all it deserves.