What are you Watching?

[llj]

I don't mind grain or even the occasional piece of dirt on film. I don't have a huge desire for "spotless" film prints. I do think in animation, line clarity is the most important thing, and DNR tends to wash it out. Unless, of course, the image is intentionally fuzzy.

By the way, I snagged a copy of Discotek's Locke the Superman today after seeing this:



Now this is nice. A US dvd that's better than the Japanese dvd. It's also anamorphic, and the Japanese version isn't. I guess there isn't a huge demand for a Locke re-release in Japan right now.

Maybe Discotek can pick up Arion and get a new anamorphic print, too. There was only one Arion DVD release in Japan, and it's old as well. I love me some 80s anime films. You can argue this and that about TV anime today vs yesteryear, but it's difficult to argue that anime films today could even compare to the variety, ambition and selection of the ones released in the 1980s. You only have Ghibli, the late Satoshi Kon, and the occasional Oshii today. Occasionally you might get something somewhat interesting like Redline. And I really enjoyed the Haruhi Suzumiya film (better than the TV series in fact), which was sort of a throwback to 80s anime films anyway.

Edit: Watched Locke last night. Really liked it! For years I thought this film was a lighthearted superhero one shot, but actually it's a space opera in the Matsumoto mold. It really captures that fever-dream feel that you get while watching early 80s anime, that sort of "beautiful nightmare" kind of mood because of the expressionistic visual techniques and the moodier color palettes of anime from this era. I think from 1986 and on, the majority of anime--films included--started using brighter, more pastel-like color palettes in general and were more conservative with uses of visual expressionism in favour of "realism". But if you check out the anime films from 1979 to about 1985, they had more moodier color palettes and more abstract visual techniques. Golgo 13, Space Adventure Cobra, Galaxy Express 999 and Adieu, Dagger of Kamui, and Locke all have this moodier, more expressionistic visual look to them than some of the later anime of that decade. This gave those films something of a dream-like, nightmarish feel. The rougher, more raw character designs of the early 80s also added to the fever dream-like feel.

[llj]

Picked up a set of the recent Golgo 13 TV series. It's very faithful to the original manga. Obviously, as an anime it still doesn't hold a candle to the 1983 film, but by being less impressive it probably is more in keeping with the original manga there, also.

I have to say, though, re-watching a bunch of anime made in the 2000s, I'm of the mind that a lot of the non-HD anime animated digitally aren't going to date well visually. They all have this persistent hazy look to them, and the "clean digital" linework doesn't show up well by today's HD standards. The colors don't pop. You can't do true high definition masters of most 2000s anime, either. The best you can do is upscale them and it still wouldn't look that great.

You can remaster the 80s-90s cel animated stuff, the ones animated and shot to film, pretty easily. The older cel-animated stuff lends itself well to high definition. Pre-HD digital animation doesn't. I think 20 years from now, people are going to consider 2000s anime to have visually dated the worst out of any decade because of the limitations of pre-HD digital animation. I find this somewhat ironic, considering what people were saying about the benefits of digital over cel about 10 years ago. Who would have thought that HD would make the previous decade almost completely obsolete while giving new life to stuff made decades before?

[greg]

I'm enjoying a lazy weekend at the in-laws' place up in the mountains of Nagano-ken. I took my laptop with me. I just finished watching Venus Wars on DVD (I intend to replace it with the Discotek re-release). I've now started on watching Harmony Gold's Lensman dub. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-td8Jp0hJVA I've never seen it before. Hurry up and watch it before it gets removed!

[danth]

I watched a bit of that Lensmen dub and was surprised to hear some recycled Robotech 2: The Sentinels music. The Streamline version has the original music, according to Wikipedia.

[greg]

I watched a bit of that Lensmen dub and was surprised to hear some recycled Robotech 2: The Sentinels music. The Streamline version has the original music, according to Wikipedia.

I wasn't aware that there were two different versions. I just looked at the Wiki article and it says that the Streamline version has a different dub (Secret of the Lens). The two I watched on YouTube last weekend, Secret of the Lens and Power of the Lens, both had Robotech music. I thought the dubbing was great, and it was nostalgic to hear the Robotech/Macek voice actor circle again. I believe I may have come across this as a kid on Nickelodeon, but I do not remember it clearly.

So Secret of the Lens is the movie version, and there are two versions of this. The first I saw was Power of the Lens, which was a movie made from a few episodes of the TV show. In the TV show, Kim is already a member of the Space Patrol, and when he gains the Lens, nobody really seems to think much of it. In the movie Secret of the Lens, he's just some guy who encounters a member of the Space Patrol who crash lands, and this guy bequeaths the Lens to him before dying. (Seems similar to the Green Lantern...)

Novels of the Lensman series can only be found in used book stores. I bought Triplanetary and First Lensman, but I have not yet read them. Doc Smith had first written Triplanetary, and then he later re-wrote/retconned this novel to fit in with the Lensman series of books. I remember a few years ago, Triplanetary was published by some small publishing company and I bought it at Barnes & Noble. Then I got online to read about it, and I found out that despite the book claiming that it was the first in the Lensman series, it was actually the original, first version of Triplanetary. I looked up the publisher's homepage, and it made no mention of that book in their library at all. So, I took it back to the store and returned it. I bought a used version later at a used book store.

They say that Doc Smith was the father of the space opera genre of SF, which includes Asimov's Foundation series as well as Herbert's Dune series. Those are two other books I have yet to read...

[davemerrill]

I actually got into the Lensman books because of the anime; when I was in high school a friend of my parents came back from Japan with comics for me and my brother, and one of them was a volume of Murano's LENSMAN manga based on the film. I took it to school and a friend of mine did a double take, because she was familiar with Doc Smith's original books. So I had to go out and buy the things.

TRIPLANETARY was retconned into the Lensman universe, FIRST LENSMAN was written as a prequel, GALACTIC PATROL was the first Lensman serial to be written as a Lensman serial proper, followed by GRAY LENSMAN, SECOND STAGE LENSMAN, and CHILDREN OF THE LENS, all of which were serialized in "Astounding Science Fiction." "Masters Of The Vortex" is set in the Lensman universe but doesn't really have anything to do with the Lensman story.

They're good blood and thunder space opera reading. Smith's prose gets a little baroque at times, but his style has a lot more life to it than much SF of the era (or any other era, really). I can also recommend his SKYLARK books and the stand-alone novel SPACEHOUNDS OF IPC. His later stuff, SUBSPACE EXPLORERS and SUBSPACE ENCOUNTERS, not so much.

The Lensman anime takes great liberties with the source material and throws out much of what makes Smith's books entertaining in favor of fakey Star Wars-type nonsense. On the other hand, the character designs and the mechanical designs are terrific. I've never seen the 'Secret Of The Lens' or 'Power Of The Lens' dubs of the TV series, but I did see the Streamline dub of the film in a theater. Like most Streamline dubs, the audio mix was terrible; the music on the soundtrack was mixed way too low and scenes that should have been really impressive were instead faintly confusing.

[greg]

The Lensman anime takes great liberties with the source material and throws out much of what makes Smith's books entertaining in favor of fakey Star Wars-type nonsense. On the other hand, the character designs and the mechanical designs are terrific. I've never seen the 'Secret Of The Lens' or 'Power Of The Lens' dubs of the TV series, but I did see the Streamline dub of the film in a theater. Like most Streamline dubs, the audio mix was terrible; the music on the soundtrack was mixed way too low and scenes that should have been really impressive were instead faintly confusing.

So true about Streamline's audio issues. They never seemed to get it right for most of their releases. And you are right about the mechanical designs. The Britannia is like a cross between a Star Destroyer and the Vic Viper from the Gradius games. Very cool! I'd love to get my hands on a model of that for a fairly decent price.

[davemerrill]

So true about Streamline's audio issues. They never seemed to get it right for most of their releases. And you are right about the mechanical designs. The Britannia is like a cross between a Star Destroyer and the Vic Viper from the Gradius games. Very cool! I'd love to get my hands on a model of that for a fairly decent price.

We saw Streamline's FIST OF THE NORTH STAR in the theater, and it was embarrassing. First off it was promoted as this art-house "animation" experience sort of thing, which the movie is not - it's a overblown heavy metal fantasy for 13 year olds. So the audience was not prepared for the cheese level that FOTNS brings to the table, which is large. There's the big climactic battle between Rei and Raoh, and if the audio was mixed correctly, the soundtrack is that great "Heart Of Madness" song by the Kodomo Band, really loud and impressive. Streamline's mix has the song very quietly playing in the background, which totally deflates any importance the fight might have had. It's deathly in a small theater where you can hear every cough and embarrassed chuckle.

The same thing happens in their LENSMAN. Their AKIRA was mixed decently. Their VAMPIRE HUNTER D had all sorts of weird dub issues, but I can't remember the mix being one of them.

[greg]

Yes, I was going to say that Akira seemed to be done right. The audio mix on Robot Carnival was not done right, either. IIRC, the voices were muffled in that one.

I never did see any Streamline movie in the theater back then. I am not even sure if any were shown in the Phoenix, AZ area, except maybe the Valley Arts Theater in Tempe, but that was very far away when I was in high school (I graduated in '94). The first anime movie I saw in an American movie theater was Mononoke Hime.

Streamline really mucked things up quite a lot, and even though I don't care for English dubs, I still have a soft spot for that company for nostalgic purposes. I didn't really appreciate them at all at the time, but looking back now, I can appreciate the role they played in promoting the genre.

[llj]

I can appreciate Streamline dubs more now that they're usually included as an extra track instead of being forced on us on modern DVD re-releases. They certainly played fast and loose with the scripts, but they have an endearing "B" quality to them that's representative of a totally different era of dubbing and indeed, acting. Truthfully, they usually weren't all that poorly acted. If you've picked up the Dirty Pair film/ova DVDs from Nozomi and compared the Streamline dubs to the ADV dubs, I daresay the Streamline dubs were better acted, if not as faithfully adapted.

There are also certain qualities I like more about the Streamline dub of Akira over the Animaze dub. It's unfortunate that some of the later releases of Akira have excised the Streamline dub from existence.

As for sound mix, Streamline dubs seem to always have emphasized the dialogue audibility over the BGM. It's unfortunate that they never mastered balancing BGM and dialogue audibility levels equally.

I lived in suburban Ontario for most of my youth, so I never did have access to theatres that would play "arthouse" releases. I probably wouldn't have been aware of them anyway, I wasn't a very adventurous sort of kid when it came to film.