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

the_narration

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

May 30, 2009 18:33

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 ( Read more... )

reviews, noir, anime

Comments 19

spectralbovine May 31 2009, 06:04:24 UTC

All right, all right, all right, it sounds totally awesome!! I will move it up in my mental queueueueueue.

the_narration May 31 2009, 14:46:15 UTC

Awesome. I do not think you will be disappointed. :-)

Heh. Yeah, the review sort of wound up being a lot longer than I'd planned. Even the intro to the review wound up running long. Sorry about that. I set out to sum up all the things that are great about it and it just sort of turned into an essay. (I meant to do this sometime last year, but I'm kind of glad I didn't... I understand more about it now than I did then.)

drenkrelar May 31 2009, 23:53:30 UTC

Wow that's a long review, and I actually read most of it instead of just skimming.

I've seen you mention several times how much you enjoy Noir, and this review makes it seem like I might like it too.

I'm not sure if I could watch it in the original Japanese, since I don't always read fast enough to catch subtitles when watching foreign films. Is the English dub good enough to still catch some of the hidden meaning in the dialog or not really?

the_narration June 1 2009, 02:26:59 UTC

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 ( ... )

drenkrelar June 1 2009, 03:07:14 UTC

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 June 1 2009, 03:44:23 UTC

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 ( ... )

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