The top ten reasons why anime are “lost in translation”…

10: Lip Sync and Line Length
Lip Synchronisation, known in America as “fitting the flaps”, is a means of ensuring that the sound of the words being spoken matched the lip movements of the onscreen speaker. This can often lead to the addition of words on the spur of the moment in the dubbing studio – in erotic horror like Return of the Overfiend, this usually means the use of the F-word as a bonus adverb, adjective and noun! Subtitles normally suffer from the opposite problem – the deletion of parts of a script in order to make the lines fit a pre-determined length. Subtitlers must take into account not only the meaning of the line, but the reading speed of the average viewer…

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I don’t expect your sympathy. Anime for you is a free choice. You find something to love and then you love it day after day, hour after hour. Modern technology has created binge fandom, consuming entire serials in marathon sessions. Some anime, like Gantz, seem tailored to this market, designed to be watched in real-time, without week-long gaps between episodes. Which is great, if you like it to begin with. Some anime, however, feel like you are trying to pull out your own teeth.
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This article first appeared in Neo #50, 2008.

Back in April 2003, I attended the Tokyo demonstration of Blu-ray. I rushed home trilling about the benefits of an entire TV series on a single disc! Except this was precisely what the Japanese TV industry didn’t want. At meetings with expensive biscuits all over Tokyo, people fretted about Perceived Value. It’s all very well, they said, to cram the entirety of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis onto a single disc, but how much can we charge for it? Will our target 16-year-old buyer really drop £100 all at once on that single disc, particularly if he’s never seen an episode beforehand?
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Today’s Independent newspaper has a nice chunky feature on manga, which, for a pleasant change, actually talks a bit about real Japanese comics. There is even a Schoolgirl Milky Namecheck, since, as ever, I am the bad guy who dares to suggest that manga come from Japan.

(You can view the article here)

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As part of the process of getting Schoolgirl Milky Crisis ready, the Big Giant Heads asked around the anime industry if, you know, a book of my speeches and articles was a good idea. These are some of the very nice replies they got back:

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It was the best of shows. It was the worst of shows. Whenever I had to cover my tracks, I simply called it Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

I have been writing about Japanese comics and animation for almost two decades, taking potshots at anime, manga and related fields, spreading scurrilous gossip and telling tall tales. And my friends in the business didn’t seem to mind, as long as they had plausible deniability, which meant that sometimes, even though the real name of a work was obvious to everyone, I needed to call it something else.

So I picked three random words out of nowhere: Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. At first, it was one of many fake titles, along with such creations as Warriors of the Test Card, Geek Gets Girls and Devil Devil Beast Beast. But there was something about Schoolgirl Milky Crisis that captured readers’ imaginations, and the non-existent show began to crop up regularly in my columns on the UK Sci Fi Channel’s website, in Newtype USA, and later in the Judge Dredd Megazine, NEO, and SFX Total Anime.

As time passed, colleagues approached me with woeful grievances and axes to grind. They would press documents into my hands naming names and stirring trouble. All they asked was that if I talked about this terrible show or that awful production experience, I should make sure everyone knew it was Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

This blog is just a taste of the kind of things in the book that is due for publication in early 2009. The book contains serious newspaper articles, seminar speeches, frivolous web journalism and bitchy gossip from the specialist anime press. There is hard, useful information there, even in stories about gloves full of custard and snowball fights with martial artists. As part of the selection process, my editors and I have focussed on material that educates and informs, even if also discussing the ethics of sending celebrity guests to bondage clubs.

Schoolgirl Milky Start!

Jonathan.