NOIR: one of the best shows you've never heard of

[the_narration]

It was back in 2001 or 2002, when it was still new, that I first saw Noir. A friend and I were trying to watch all the best series out there, and when we found this one we tore through episodes as fast as we could download them. Although I now realize that we didn't really grasp more than a small portion of what was going on beneath the surface, at

Comments

[the_narration]

The review sort of took on a life of its own. I was originally thinking it would be one page, maybe two. But there was just so much cool stuff I wanted to mention.

I'm doing a side-by-side comparison of the Japanese and English versions right now. (Heh. Any flimsy excuse to break out the DVDs....) I don't want to be too down on the English dub's voice actors, because they're not awful by any means. They definitely at least gave it an effort, unlike a lot of dubs, and even tried to have a little fun with it. But it's a lot more... flat... than the Japanese. The voices have less personality. And maybe I'm biased, being a total anime snob and all, but the characters just don't sound like themselves. English Mireille lacks the playful edge to her voice that Japanese Mireille often had. English Kirika is working so hard to sound as soft and young as the Japanese Kirika did that she can't really add the nuances. English Chloe lacks the childlike quality of Japanese Chloe. And English Altena sounds too grave and ominous, whereas what made Japanese Altena so creepy was that she sounded so not-creepy, like she could be somebody's mother. And overall, they're just... not as good. They don't do as well at nuances or at the big emotions, IMHO. The Japanese voice cast included some moderately big names among Japanese voice actors. The English voice cast don't seem to be very well known. It's a bit like if you took an episode of TSCC and redubbed the voices of Lena, Summer, BAG, etc. with the voices of some moderately-enthusiastic C-listers. You can get by that way, but it's not as good.

But I digress. The subtitles on the DVDs are a decent size and pretty easy to read. And I've always found a handy trick when there's too much on the screen to read is to pause it just long enough to read the writing, then continue.

[drenkrelar]

I could do that, but that takes effort, and split-second timing.

My peoblem isn't usually the font size, it's the amount of text on screen at any given moment and how long it gets left on screen.

So far my only experiences with anime have been watching the official English dubs, and they didn't seem that bad, but then again I wasn't comparing them with the original Japanese.

[the_narration]

I will admit, dubbing has gotten a lot better than it used to be. There are plenty of dubs that sound perfectly passable, whereas the standard used to be terrible. The market's a lot bigger now than it was ten years ago, so they can pull down some better talent. But the Japanese voice actor talent pool still has them outclassed by a pretty fair margin, and the best English voice actors are usually doing original stuff instead of redubbing imports. Generally, the original version for anything is going to be the best, and for anime that usually goes double.

The subtitles on the DVDs never seemed to me to be too long or go by too quickly. But then... I'm used to it. I've watched so much subtitled stuff in the last eight years that my brain absorbs it on reflex. Not everybody is the same.

Well, that's why both options are available, I suppose. If you find that the subtitles go too fast or that having to read them is too distracting, then switch to the dub. It won't be as good, but it won't make you want to shove cottonballs in your ears, either.

[drenkrelar]

I'll give it a try with the subtitles first. If I can't keep up. I'll switch to the dubs.

I'll let you know when I start watching it.

[the_narration]

Cool. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it.

[drenkrelar]

After a bit of looking I've only been able to find English, French, or German dubs, and not the subtitled Japanese.

Any advice on where I might be able to find it, or should I just start watching it in English?

[the_narration]

Hmm... where have you looked? Let me see what I can find....

I'm hunting for decent BitTorrent downloads as we speak. The problem we might enocunter there is that this series is almost eight years old and Bit Torrent tends to be best for recent stuff.

It seems like this person has got the fansubs up on YouTube through episode 9. Of course, it's YouTube so the video quality is... well, YouTube-esque. And the fansub translation can be a bit awkward at times.

Will hunt for something better, at least until I have to go to work....

[the_narration]

Best torrent so far... choice of Japanese or English audio tracks and English subtitles... probably a DVD rip... download speed is shit, tho...

Or this one.

This one is apparently the same as the first one.

Jeez, the internet has never failed me this badly. Something old like this I'd probably have more luck with DC++, but you probably don't have DC++....

I'll look more after I get back from work...

[the_narration]

Okay, those torrents sucked. I left them running overnight and it only managed 0.4%. Assuming it's not a problem on my end (They has enough seeders they shouldn't be that slow!) then those torrents are useless if you don't want to wait three months.

I managed to find links to places where the episodes can be streamed on AllUC. Japanese with fan-done subtitles, but with a better quality of translation than the ones I found on YouTube, and it appears to be the whole series. Here. The first episode had the sound and video so badly out of synch that it was unwatchable, but the second seemed okay. Just another example of why I usually avoid streaming video in favor of downloading.

I'm actually kind of annoyed at the internet right now. It shouldn't be this hard to find.

[drenkrelar]

Tell me about it. All the torrent sites I looked at the other night either didn't have the subtitled versions, or had dubs only, but with no seeders. Grr...

I'll try the streaming video. Or maybe I'll just ask one of my RL friends if he has it on his hard drive somewhere. *shrug*

[the_narration]

The truly ironic thing is that I've got the whole series on DVD and I still have my old fansubbed copies burned to CD-ROM. So I have exactly what we're trying to find, but no real way to get it to you. I can only e-mail files up to 25MB.

....waaaaaait a minute. Perhaps I do have a way.

[the_narration]

Okay, I'm an idiot. But luckily I'm a stubborn idiot, and I eventually remembered that I have a Mediafire account. Which means I can upload files and give people links to said files. Which means I can upload my copies of the fansubs and you can download them.

Uploading episode 1 now.

[drenkrelar]

Sweet.

I'm sorry I'm making you do all this just so I can watch it.

[the_narration]

No worries. This is the sort of thing I do for friends and aquaintances all the time. Plus, now that I've started I'm too stubborn to stop. :-)

Here is the folder I'll be uploading the files too. It's going damned slowly, however. (It's been saying 20 minutes remaining on episode 1 for about an hour.) I'm going to start it going on a bunch of episodes and then turn in. I'm hoping that they'll pop up in the folder as they upload.

[the_narration]

It helps if I actually remember to paste the link....

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=3b71a1ee82bdb434d5a101cf914073b489acd0de3ebfa103

[the_narration]

Okay, I've worked out the kinks in the process so that it'll actually work now. :-P

Episodes 1 & 2 are up. The rest should go up at the rate of about ten minutes per episode.

(Note to self: find Mediafire programmers and slap them silly for designing such a terrible website.)