Just writing to say thanks for your review and commentary on Shingu. It just finished a run (dubbed only) on Comcast on-demand. The last time I gave up on it after a few episodes because it seemed so stilted; perhaps that is just the dub, but the way some of the characters spoke just seemed to much like a teleprompter in use with artificial cheer injected. Except for Nayuta...
If all you've heard is the dub version of the show, you've missed much of the fun. I listened to the dub for a while, but I couldn't listen to it for long.
The voice actor who did Muryou was awful. Just the pits. He made Muryou sound like an arrogant prick, which is the opposite of how he comes across in the Japanese version.
And if you listened to the English dub, then you missed out on the Japanese voice work for Nayuta, which was absolutely sterling. And of Kyoichi, who has the same seiyuu as Kyon in Haruhi. This part is even more fun than that one.
You also missed out on Kugimiya Rie doing a non-tsundere loli in the voice of Futaba, Hajime's younger sister. (And Kyouko, Hajime's mom, has the same voice as Akane in Ranma 1/2.)
Generally I am a believer that the Japanese sound track is nearly always better than the English dub, but in this case there isn't any doubt whatever about that. The Japanese voice work was head and shoulders above the English dub.
Anyway this time I caught every episode, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm not sure it would be in my top 5 list, but its definitely good, and I'll be keeping an eye open for a affordable disk set at some point. I think I'd like to watch it subbed.
It's already out as a budget thinpak, for $45. That's what I got. It won't be getting any cheaper than that any time soon because Nozomi is not interested in engaging in cut-throat pricing like some release houses I could name.
So there's really no reason to wait, and it is worth that price.
Having a five and seven year old about the house means that if it's dubbed, we're listening to that version. Once they're in bed and it's Martini Time, then my owner and I watch the subs.
PS We just started Shingu here, too. Coming off of Strike Witches, my wife commented, "Everyone is just so pleasant in this!"
Posted by: Tiberius at October 06, 2008 09:34 AM (VD/19)
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I wholly agree about the original Japanese almost always being better then a dub. There are two shows I think are much better in English, Cowboy Bebop and Black Lagoon. Black Lagoon is currently being released and it's dub is simply excellent. It helps that both those shows have settings outside Japan (mostly in the case of BL) and that lends itself to being more believable in English. Speaking English in a Japanese setting with Japanese characters kind of breaks the "suspension of disbelief" for me.
Posted by: Doyen at October 06, 2008 12:28 PM (99V/z)
The dub for Shingu is pretty bad, one of the most deadening I've heard. Only the girl with the pigtails comes off well, and since that's such an emotional role that doesn't surprise me.
Some dubs can be very good, but I think you need someone who understands acting to be in charge. The dub for Shingu was directed by the engineer and the script adaptor. I guess they made sure the sound was right and the words were right, but they seemed to have forgotten about the acting.
Posted by: BeckoningChasm at October 06, 2008 07:28 PM (fnoZ9)
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Likely the dub budget was low. RightStuf aka Nozomi has been farming out their dubs, and everything else too.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 06, 2008 08:26 PM (+rSRq)
ANN had an article (SPOILERS) the other day about Shingu which said some things about it I found frankly astounding.
I strongly disagree with the guy's opinion about the music. I think the music is outstanding. But what really blew me away was this:
Shingu did not do well in Japan, having been beaten into the ground in the ratings from nearly the first episode and finally truncated to 26 episodes (from its originally planned 39).
The series doesn't feel truncated to me. It really feels as if it happened the way the director wanted it to happen. How in hell could it have originally been planned for 39 episodes? I think he must be wrong about this.
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I have to disagree about the music. The OP and ED were just horrible.
Take your prior statements about what the OP should be like, and compare to this show. The music is gently nostalgic, hearkening back to a simpler, slower world.
Is Shingu about nostalgia? Arguably, yes. From an artistic standpoint, it is pretty obvious that the
writer/director was creating a retro-future that reflected his
nostalgia for his childhood years; the 1970's. Unfortunately, while it
was right for what he felt and wanted to portray, it was utterly wrong
from the standpoint of marketing the show.
The otaku demographic isn't in to nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia. You can capture their attention with good writing, fanservice, vivid characters, action, "wow" factor, and probably several other items I can't think of right now. I am pretty sure nostalgia isn't on the list, however. Nor is a niche style of music that was never all that popular to start with, having unsurprisingly (and mercifully) faded into obscurity. (Every time I heard it was like fingernails on a blackboard. I kept having flashbacks to Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera. Bad times. Very bad times.)
This was a story driven by characters and mystery, and the OP's visuals and music should have reflected that. A j-pop song would have been wrong also, but still a better choice; insipid and ordinary, rather than actively, painfully bad.
As for the length of the show, I felt that there were parts that could have been explored more, but they didn't need to be. It was as long as it needed to be; if that report is accurate (and I have my doubts), then cutting it to 26 episodes was the right choice.
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Ubu, you can disagree all you want, music was great. OP could stand a little reduction in Muryou's screen time. Also, screw otaku demographic.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 17, 2008 10:47 PM (qNSKg)
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This information corresponds with my own experience.
When TRSI began marketing Shingu, somebody on the anime forum that I frequent asked about it, and nobody had heard of it (and these are hardcore fans covering the entire spectrum of the types of stories that anime presents). When the original title was retrieved, the strongest reaction I heard was, "Oh, yeah, that. Mediocre."
Sometime later, I picked up the series on one of TRSI's sales and loved it immediately. I brought it to the weekly anime viewing group that I attend, and they enjoyed it immensely.
All of us are over 30, and several are over 40.
I'm becoming convinced that if you're not over a certain age, you're just a lot less likely to enjoy Shingu. And yeah, we always skipped over the OP and ED.
Posted by: pflorian at May 18, 2008 05:00 AM (Ipvhu)
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I really do think along with pflorian that people over 30 will most likely enjoy Shingu. I think it is the mix of the non technology vs technology feel of the show as shown in the paper sumos bit. Electronic video games and such only started in the 1970s but most games were still your classic board games and such. Sort of like being in the advance guard of the technology front without really being immersed in it as in the newer generation. TVs without remotes, record players and so on.
Posted by: ColoradoJim at May 18, 2008 06:50 AM (hFzCW)
Ubu, I'm not talking about the OP and ED, I'm talking about the background music in the show. There's one scene in particular where the music is absolutely brilliant. Without going into too many details, it's where Futaba is sobbing while talking to Muryou. The music is a dirge, it's the kind of Dixieland music they used to play while carrying a coffin to a cemetery -- and it's really outstanding.
My point about the length is that taking a show which had originally been plotted to 39 eps and after going part way suddenly being told to cut it to 26, well, that's going to leave scars, I would think. And I sure don't see any.
6
Ok, now if you're talking about the score, as opposed to the OP and ED, then yes, the music was at least "good," and probably better than that--I'm not enough of a musician (try none at all) to grade it better than that.. Unfortunately, it's the latter pair that come to mind when the words "music" and "Shingu" are placed in proximity to each other.
And I am also skeptical that the series was cut from 39; it feels too "right" to have been a change.
Note also that our expectations and focus as we watched the series for the first time might have been different from the original Japanese audience, due to the title change. Their focus might have been on Muryou, whereas ours was on Shingu. And the mystery; it's subtitled "Secret of the Stellar Wars" after all. If you're thinking of Muryou as the hero (not the focus, but hero) of the story, you're probably going to be disappointed by a seemingly lame resolution of his mystery. Which it wasn't; it was perfect.
As for the otaku demographic, I can't say "screw it," because we wouldn't get any anime without it. Anyway, my point had less to do with their taste than with the "my ears are bleeding" OP that probably drove them away in, well, droves..
You know, with all the times I've watched Shingu, Secret of the Stellar Wars, I've never listened to the dub, until now.
Just for the hell of it I think I'll listen to a few episodes. I seriously doubt I'm going to want to watch the whole thing that way, though. First thoughts:
The English voice of Hajime is excellent. Toshio and Jirou are also excellent. Yamamoto-sensei I'm not as thrilled with. And the voice of Muryou was terribly cast, and badly directed.
Muryou is a very even-tempered characters, mild mannered. There are only a couple of times in the series where his voice gets sharp, and only one time when he gets outright angry and yells at someone.
In the Japanese original, in the second episode during the duel on the roof with Moriguchi, Muryou's calmness almost comes across as disdainful. It certainly is part of what makes Moriguchi see red. In the English dub, Muryou comes across a lot differently. He sounds angry. It's wrong.
I haven't heard enough of Nayuta's voice yet to know whether it's going to be good, but it's unlikely to stack up against Paku Romi's work in the Japanese, which was absolutely brilliant, one of the best voice performances I've ever heard.
Futaba's voice was a pleasant surprise; much better than I expected.
A disappointment, but not a surprise, is that they're botching some of the names. Futaba's name is getting pronounced as foo-tah-bah -- which is wrong. It's ff-tah-bah, clearly, in the Japanese dub, or almost so. The "u" sound in the first syllable is seriously deemphasized.
I've got it going with the original Japanese subtitles while I'm listening to the English dub, and one of the big differences is the names people use. Where Moriguchi uses "Subaru" in the Japanese original, he uses "Muryou" in the dub. Even sempai to kohei, they wouldn't really be on a first name basis given that Moriguchi is massively suspicious of Muryou and is actively trying to kill him. (Or something close to that.)
Generally speaking, first names are getting used a lot more than they really should be, not just that particular example.
Reason I'm paying attention to the dub is that I'm giving a copy of Shingu to someone as a gift tomorrow, and he isn't likely to watch it with the original Japanese. I want to know how much the series will suffer when watched in English. So far, the answer is "not much". Dubs are almost never as good as the original, but this one seems to have been done pretty well.
UPDATE: If I had been involved in the casting, I'd have swapped the voices of Moriguchi and Muryou. And I'm not really happy with Setsuna's voice. Not at all.
UPDATE: They've changed the character of Muryou. It's not just the voice performance; they've rewritten his lines to make him more edgy. I don't like it.
UPDATE: Shun's voice is not bad at all. A bit unexpected, but I think it works for me.
UPDATE: Badness, but it's a spoiler:
Three times so far there were cases in which one of the adepts sent a telepathic message to someone else. There was Hachiyou in the second episode, Nayuta in the third, and again Nayuta in the fourth. In the Japanese original they electronically modified those to make them sound a bit strange, indicating that they were not spoken. In the English dub they didn't bother.
The last one is particularly egregious. Nayuta uses a telekinetic blast to save Hajime from the Zaiglian operative, and warns Hajime first. It sounds like she's in the same room and shouts "Duck!" But she's actually in the next room and there's no connection between the two of them. (Yet. She hasn't put a hole in the wall yet.)
Bad, bad, bad. There's one more coming up, where Nayuta sends a telepathic message to Hajime and we see her while she's doing it. Her mouth doesn't move. I wonder how it will sound.
UPDATE: Alas, Nayuta's English voice is only barely adequate. It's not as bad a casting choice as the voice of Muryou, but she just cannot measure up. I didn't think she would; no one could match Paku Romi's original.
Her reaction when Hajime pointed out that her name was on her shoes ruined the joke. It just wasn't good enough.
UPDATE: The English voice of Nayuta is giving it a good try.
The scene where she cusses out Muryou on the bridge wasn't bad. Not as good as the original, but not shabby.
UPDATE: The voice of Jiltosh sucks royally. What a horrible casting choice!
1
Not having seen Shingu, I'm not sure if this is relevant, but with respect to the sub and the dub using a different name... I've noticed that sub-title translations on Japanese movies (non-anime) often use names that aren't being spoken in the Japanese audio track. The one I remember was a character called "Shozo Hirono." In the audio, I could clearly hear people referring to him as "Shozo" but the subtitle said "Hirono." This seemed to happen quite frequently. I always chalked it up to the translator wanting to be as consistent as possible so that the viewer wouldn't get confused (it was one of those complicated Yakuza movies with a million characters and complex relationships between them). However, I don't know enough about the language or Japanese names and customs to make sense of it all.
Posted by: Mark at October 30, 2007 09:14 PM (2cMUJ)
2
The real problem here is that English usage of names and Japanese usage of names don't exactly correspond to each other. It's -much- more acceptable to use first names here even in adult life, and almost completely reversed in a scholastic situation; an American student who insisted on using last names with his fellow students would seem unbelievably standoffish, whereas a Japanese student who did the same thing with first names would be incredibly forward, the equivalent of someone who invades your personal space constantly.
I don't like swapping the names, though, because there's information contained in which name is being used, and switching the names tends to confuse that information channel. Unlike with suffixes, where leaving them off doesn't actively throw off the viewer who doesn't understand them, you can get the wrong idea from bad name swapping even if it's intended to give you the correct idea about character relationships. (And meh, Japanese is pretty finely-grained in that respect compared to us egalitarian English speakers...)
I try not to comment on dub quality. Dubbing is HARD. I suck at it personally. Anyone who's not killing your ears is putting a lot of effort into it. Doing a good job on subtitles is much, much easier.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 30, 2007 09:26 PM (LMDdY)
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Weird. I had line breaks in that comment when I wrote it. Pixy?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 30, 2007 09:27 PM (LMDdY)
What browser are you using? The line-break behaviour is browser-dependent, not to mention a little weird.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 30, 2007 09:52 PM (PiXy!)
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Avatar, if you're doing anything to interfere with Javascript, then it isn't going to work correctly. The comment entry box is supported by a hell of a lot of Javascript code.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 30, 2007 09:56 PM (+rSRq)
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Line breaks never work for me either (didn't realize till comment #3 that they were supposed to), so I use paragraph tags which seem to go through ok. I've got javascript turned on, but I'm also using Safari which may be the problem.
Posted by: mparker762 at October 31, 2007 04:54 AM (kiA4J)
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With a few month old SeaMonkey, Line break codes show up in the preview, but show up correctly in the edit window.
Although, things look like they might have changed since I used SeaMonkey here last. On my laptop, I use older versions of netscape and firefox. I remember having to put double angle bracket br codes on a seperate line for it to work. On another computer, I've used a newer firefox, but I forget the behavior.
I am no longer noticing the Seamonkey behavior I mentioned at the start. It now functions like my netscape, and I can remember what to do easier. Thank you Pixy.
Posted by: PatBuckman at October 31, 2007 01:47 PM (DZ471)
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Nah, it's more or less a plain vanilla Firefox install here. And normally I don't have any problems with line breaks.
Weird. Ah well, teach me to use preview.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 31, 2007 06:13 PM (LMDdY)
I've worked out a heuristic to manage the line breaks when something screwy happens (Javascript disabled, unsupported browser, or just an inexplicable glitch), and I'll try to get that into the next release.
I might even be able to make it retroactive.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 31, 2007 10:40 PM (PiXy!)
I've found another site bug, which this post is a good example of. When you have a post with a large spoiler section like this, when you expand it the comment section doesnt move down enough, and you end up with the text box covering the images and text of the spoiler. Once you click in the comment box it then moves down to where it should be, but it doesnt seem to move the post buttons reliably, I had to refresh the page to unexpanded mode to get a usable comment area on this one.
Posted by: David at October 12, 2007 09:31 PM (eJmmz)
Author has some examples of face faults by Nayuta in Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars. As such things go, they're not very extreme. But I like this particular image of Futaba:
Author also talks about being freaked out by the one-and-only panchira in Shingu. I can't for the life of me understand why!
I mentioned the other day that there are good sides and bad sides to having commenting enabled. Right now it seems to be going well on Chizumatic, and let's hope it stays that way.
I find myself frustrated right now because Author doesn't allow commenting. I fully understand why, but it leaves me in the position of having to quote essentially all of his most recent post about Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars so that I can respond to it. Alas.
I don't like wine or ballet. I wish I did, because it's clear from the people who do that I'm missing out on something grand, something complex, and subtle, and altogether wonderful. I can even tell from tasting or watching that all that complexity and subtlety is there; I'm just not wired up to appreciate it. Nobody could enjoy what happens in my mouth when I take a sip of wine, and while I can see the ballerina is athletically gifted, she's not communicating anything to me.
Shingu works on me the same way. I can see the story and the characters are great--and I have to struggle to watch the whole thing. I can't even figure out why I don't like it (although the character design and the music leave me completely flat).
*Sigh* Maybe I'll get it someday. I hated coffee and whiskey until I was in my thirties, and then (thank you Niven and Spider) I discovered that Irish Coffee is why Darwin gave me taste buds--and somehow that flipped the right switches, and now I enjoy coffee and can even have a sip of whiskey now and again.
Here, I'm not going to eat these olives, either. Do you want them?
(Sorry, Steven, I just had to get that off my chest. It's been driving me crazy.)
Posted by: refugee at August 22, 2007 08:51 AM (ya+0h)
By the way, my criticism of the Shingu OP has nothing to do with whether the song is any good. It happens I think it's "meh" but that's because I'm not a big fans of ballads.
My criticism of the OP is of the visuals. There are two problems with it: it's dull, and it doesn't tell us anything at all about the series.
For his 19th wedding anniversary, Author's wife got him a copy of Shingu. If that's not love, what is?
UPDATE: I don't drink anymore. I stopped drinking 13 years ago and I'm not tempted to start again. Alcohol wasn't good for me. I'm better off without it.
But before alcohol became a problem, it was a beverage, and often a pleasure. I used to really like good cabernets; that was my favorite wine.
I remember one time, round about 1977, I was on a road trip and went through Napa Valley, and visited Beaulieu Vineyards and took their tour. And, of course, I visited their store afterwards and bought a few bottles. BV was actually my favorite wine at the time, and I picked up one bottle of their 1973 "Private Reserve". Cost me $30 -- which would be about $100 today. (It would have been even more expensive at a store.)
Eventually there was a special occasion and I opened it and shared it with some friends. And it was magnificent.
What was different about it? It's hard to really put into words, of course. I don't recall that it tasted different than a regular cabernet. It was more like it was richer. It was the same flavor but more so. A truly remarkable wine. I'm sure it can't be found anymore, and anyway it would be past its peak by now. But it was what all wine should be, but of course isn't. (The vineyards would love to do it if they could, but no one knows how to do it consistently on a large scale.)
After drinking that wine, regular cabernets tasted watered down. Kind of thin, really.
Something like Haibane Renmei is qualitatively different from other shows. There's never really been anything like HR, before or since. It's not only really, really good, it's also unique.
Shingu isn't unique. It isn't even really all the original. It's more like that magnificent cabernet: the same as a normal one, but richer, more intense. It's what all shows should be like -- but somehow, they aren't.
In the sixth episode of Shingu, at one point Hachiyou's grandfather and Nayuta's father talk to Hajime about something that happened in ep 4 (which I'm not going to describe). Nayuta sees this, and calls him away. He comes over to her, and she asks, "What did my father say to you?"
And Hajime says, Musume o yoroshiku tte sa.
Musume == "daughter"
o is the object particle
yoroshiku is a very versatile word. In this case it means "please think well of" or "please take care of".
But the icing on the cake is sa. It is like trailing yo, an emphasis, but when a man uses it, it indicates that he thinks what he's saying is obvious. So what Hajime said was:
"Please look out for my daughter," obviously!
He's teasing Nayuta gently, and she knows it. Her response is "Baaaka!" What he's really telling her is to mind her own business.
