×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more
You are welcome to look at the talkback but please consider that this article is over 6 years old before posting.

Forum - View topic
Isao Takahata: Endless Memories


Goto page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5  Next

Note: this is the discussion thread for this article

Anime News Network Forum Index -> Site-related -> Talkback
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
Lemonchest



Joined: 18 Mar 2015
Posts: 1771
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 12:46 pm Reply with quote
Thanks for this, ANN. I'd been a little disappointed by how Takahata's passing seemed to barely register with much of the weebsphere (at least the parts I find myself in), so this retrospective is looking like a real treat.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
FireChick
Subscriber



Joined: 26 Mar 2006
Posts: 2475
Location: United States
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 1:31 pm Reply with quote
Wait, the Anne anime actually has an English dub?! Awesome! Where can I find it?! I'd love to watch it again! Is the dub any good?
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
wutsdisred



Joined: 02 Aug 2018
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 2:14 pm Reply with quote
I searched it up, found the dub on youtube. Don't know about the quality yet, but I'm ECSTATIC!!!! I love that show, as well as Heidi and Marco. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Kougeru



Joined: 13 May 2008
Posts: 5573
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 3:03 pm Reply with quote
Lemonchest wrote:
Thanks for this, ANN. I'd been a little disappointed by how Takahata's passing seemed to barely register with much of the weebsphere (at least the parts I find myself in), so this retrospective is looking like a real treat.


I think this is really just because the majority of anime fans are "new". Most people in the world were born "Recently". Anime stopped really being niche in the late 00s. So for most people...."casuals", they don't generally look at the names of who made things and even more rarely watch older anime even when recommended to them. I'm not stating this as fact, but just as an observation from my own end. And that's fine that they do that. I wish they would do otherwise, but it's their lives to live. I did notice many of them after 3-5 years of being an "Anime fan", do start to dip more into older stuff.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message AIM Address My Anime My Manga
Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4777
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 3:59 pm Reply with quote
Thank you so much for this fantastic retrospective. Ashamedly I haven't yet managed to sit down and watch any of Takahata's works despite owning a few of them. I'm hoping this will spur me on to finally fix that.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Jose Cruz



Joined: 20 Nov 2012
Posts: 1796
Location: South America
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 4:19 pm Reply with quote
Takahata was indeed a genius, he was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century in my honest opinion being perhaps the one most responsible for the development of animation as a general medium for artistic expression.

But among his film I myself must say that his output is kinda uneven. For instance, while he made impressive artistic masterpieces such as Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday and The Tale of Princess Kaguya he also made a few relatively unimpressive films like My Neighbors the Yamadas and Pom Poko.

Even though Pom Poko was Japan's submission to the foreign movie Oscars I wouldn't think it was an exceptional anime film. The people who choose those submissions are not anime fans but people from the live action film industry who don't know much about anime and also they choose an anime film that they perceived would be more accessible to the old white men of the Oscar Academy, hence why they choose a movie with heavy handed ecological message, featuring talking animals and with no violence and no general adult content. Despite featuring tanuki using their balls as weapons against the police in my opinion it is a movie that is the among the closest that Ghibli movies get to the set of stereotypes that characterize American animated films.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website My Anime My Manga
Swissman



Joined: 11 May 2006
Posts: 792
Location: Switzerland
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 5:08 pm Reply with quote
Jose Cruz wrote:
Even though Pom Poko was Japan's submission to the foreign movie Oscars I wouldn't think it was an exceptional anime film. The people who choose those submissions are not anime fans but people from the live action film industry who don't know much about anime and also they choose an anime film that they perceived would be more accessible to the old white men of the Oscar Academy, hence why they choose a movie with heavy handed ecological message [....]

Pom Poko won the long feature award at the Annecy International Animation festival – the world's most important animation festival – in 1995. If that's not a good-enough credential for the movie being just a really good movie, then I don't know what is Wink

Jose Cruz wrote:
no general adult content

I have to disagree here: The whole idea of losing one's homeland and old identity and bearing the suffering of a new surrounding/identity is, in my opinion, very much adult content. It really isn't something you can truly understand unless you've reached a certain maturity in your life.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website My Anime My Manga
DerekL1963
Subscriber



Joined: 14 Jan 2015
Posts: 1120
Location: Puget Sound
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 6:37 pm Reply with quote
Swissman wrote:
Jose Cruz wrote:
no general adult content

I have to disagree here: The whole idea of losing one's homeland and old identity and bearing the suffering of a new surrounding/identity is, in my opinion, very much adult content. It really isn't something you can truly understand unless you've reached a certain maturity in your life.


To far too many people "adult content" is limited to boobs and blood.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
tojikomori



Joined: 08 Jan 2017
Posts: 71
Location: Minnesota
PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 9:36 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
the decision took big balls


Oh, you.

I've been looking forward to this series since Zac mentioned it on the podcast. Great start.

Is there an official English translation of the biography mentioned here? That Hideaki Anno anecdote is new to me; I'd love to read more.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message My Anime My Manga
CandisWhite



Joined: 19 Apr 2015
Posts: 282
PostPosted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 1:00 am Reply with quote
Sir! The maple-syrup in my blood demands satisfaction: Not only was the Animaze dub of Panda Go Panda treated as the sole one ("the English dub, produced decades later" ) but this then led to a slight on the honour of Canadian legend Walter Massey, who was erased from existence as Daddy (called so in his dub) Panda. THAT's the Papa I've known since I was very young.

I think Takahata and Co. were thinking WAY too hard about adapting Anne; Candy Candy was not only doing gangbusters at this time in Japan but was inspired by Anne of Green Gables. It's nice they put so much effort into character and authenticity but Anne herself is Pollyanna of Canada™; Her charm is innate.

I wonder if Anne being dubbed was held up by being not popular enough a property to warrant dubbing an old show in most English countries and TOO popular a property, but not expected to make enough money back for the legal quagmire, to warrant a dub in Canada.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Turro



Joined: 22 Jun 2016
Posts: 76
Location: México
PostPosted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 1:10 am Reply with quote
Thanks for this articles ANN! Looking forward for the rest of the week...I think i will indulge myself this weekend with a few hours of classic Heidi and Horus.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
fuuma_monou



Joined: 26 Dec 2005
Posts: 1846
Location: Quezon City, Philippines
PostPosted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 1:11 am Reply with quote
CandisWhite wrote:
I wonder if Anne being dubbed was held up by being not popular enough a property to warrant dubbing an old show in most English countries and TOO popular a property, but not expected to make enough money back for the legal quagmire, to warrant a dub in Canada.


Circa 1998 I watched it dubbed in English on JET TV*. On-screen credits were left in Japanese, though, so I never knew for sure who did the dub, though they certainly seemed to try to make the characters sound Canadian.

*(Japanese Entertainment Television, a now defunct Asia-wide cable/satellite channel. Funny thing was half the shows were dubbed in English while the other half was left untranslated.)

What legal quagmire are you referring to?
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
CandisWhite



Joined: 19 Apr 2015
Posts: 282
PostPosted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 6:32 pm Reply with quote
fuuma_monou wrote:
CandisWhite wrote:
I wonder if Anne being dubbed was held up by being not popular enough a property to warrant dubbing an old show in most English countries and TOO popular a property, but not expected to make enough money back for the legal quagmire, to warrant a dub in Canada.

What legal quagmire are you referring to?

I don't know how the licensing of the Anne franchise for past properties would work, especially for dubbing something that was licensed in another country. I don't know if it works in the same legal realm as licensed song covers or it doesn't or, if it does, the estate could give a flying expletive about re-releases. Would it being dubbed in PEI change anything?

For example, if I wanted to release Mattel's Barbie and the Rockers specials and/or the soundtrack, I would have to not only license the animation and original music from Mattel but would need to simultaneously re-license the covers from both Mattel and the original song owners; Biker Mice From Mars was stuck in this hole, leading to its Season 1 release to be Swiss cheese at times. Mattel has been having enough trouble with the stuff it 100% owns so the specials were last seen on VHS, 30 years ago, and the soundtrack has only been on cassette, not CD or digital (Beyond Pink has been available digitally for years).

If the Anne anime were to be dubbed in Canada, and thus almost be guaranteed a release in Canada, would there be an extra cost, due to Anne's wild popularity in Canada, that a dubbing company could not justify spending?
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
Posts: 13613
Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP
PostPosted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 9:25 pm Reply with quote
While "Anne of Green Gables" is now public domain in many countries from copyright , the author's estate has a trademark on the name. That means, to use it in the title, nominative fair use aside, you would need to get permission from that estate. When you trademark something like that, it acts as a perpetual copyright from a practical standpoint. Perpetual copyright is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
uguu



Joined: 02 Oct 2010
Posts: 220
PostPosted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 7:25 am Reply with quote
The Chie the Brat coverage follows the age-old anime critic tradition of vaguely dismissing something old and underrated as 'not engaging' with only microscopic reasoning - could be something straight from Jonathan Clements or Helen McCarthy. Covering the history then ending it in a meaningless dismissal of its merits as a stand-alone work.

"Given Takahata's interest in world animation, he may have taken note of the American films by Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic), which also celebrated blue-collar downtown." Or you know... the countless Japanese anime and manga from the same time (Joe season 2 aired in the 80s) that focuses on the exact same thing, from Ashita no Joe to Notari Matsutaro.

The whole film is about tackling a heartfelt dramatic set-up using unpretentious low-brow comedy and silly cartooniness. The author's only reason for saying the film is unengaging and unfunny is the fight between cats at the end which really just continued that theme.

Please watch Chie the Brat. It's a blast not even as a "history lesson" (though it works as that too) but as a fun, charmingly stupid movie with a lot of heart and subtle maturity.

Another note, it would've been interesting to note Gauche was key-animated by one person.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic    Anime News Network Forum Index -> Site-related -> Talkback All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Goto page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5  Next
Page 1 of 5

 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group