by Ryan Mathews

---

July 2000

Technology marches on. The unceasing and ever-accelerating growth of technology has influenced every aspect of life on this planet, and anime is no exception. The following is a story of how new technology may change the way anime is presented in the US, and how the resulting controversy revealed how much fandom has changed in recent years.

There are two aspects to anime translation. The one that comes easiest to mind is the translation of the dialogue, which can be accomplished in one of two ways, via subtitling or dubbing. However, there is often more to translate than just dialogue. Often, Japanese text appears on the screen, usually in the form of a sign, which may need to be translated in order to make clear a plot point.

How to translate these signs has been a difficult issue. The most common method was to place a discreet subtitle somewhere near the sign. The problems with this approach are that the subtitles cover up the artwork, can be difficult to notice in some cases, and pull the eye away from where it's supposed to be looking. Nevertheless, no better solution was found. Several were tried:

• Subtitles under the dialogue: "Sign: 'xxx'". Even more confusing, as the subtitle is nowhere near what it's translating.

• Subliminal single frames: Not a joke. Pioneer did this with the first LD of Phantom Quest Corp. You had to use freeze-frame to read the subtitles. It kept the subs from covering the artwork, but the technique was more of a novelty than anything else, not really useful.

• Cover the Japanese text with a block of color and place subs on top of it: Solves the location problem, but is really, really ugly. Also, the block of color tends to cover more than just the text

ADV had been practicing digital editing of anime for some time, primarily for the purpose of replacing the Japanese titles with title graphics of their own devising, editing them into the anime frame-by-frame, so that the new title is integrated with the animation. The new approach was to use digital editing to remove Japanese text from the picture and replace it with English. The advantages to this approach were considerable. If done right, absolutely none of the picture would be lost except for the Japanese characters. The new text would be in precisely the same location as the old. And best of all, the new text could be creatively drawn, as opposed to a standard subtitle font, preserving the artistic feel of the frame.

To avoid over-crediting ADV, they weren't exactly trailblazers here. Text overlays had been tried before, for example, in The Right Stuf's Captain Tylor tapes. However, this was the highest-profile use of the technology to date, and Evangelion required that it be used a lot.

When the DVD was released, the effect in the fan community was explosive. And not in a good way.

Here's where you would expect me to say "the fans were incensed". But they weren't. Not all of them. Only some of them. And therein lies the point of this editorial.

You see, when I became involved with anime fandom, back in 1991, there wasn't a lot of variety when it came to fan opinion on certain issues. It's never correct to generalize, to place people into one of two buckets based on their opinions. Whatever the issue may be, people tend fit along a sliding scale. Nevertheless, in 1991, that scale didn't slide very far. There were the fans, and there were the casual viewers, and there wasn't a lot of room in between. If you met another fan, you could be fairly certain that he agreed with you on certain things, among them: dubs suck, Japanese animation kicks Disney's ass, and most importantly, no-one should edit anime.

Carl Macek was the antichrist as far as we were concerned back then, because of his habit of rewriting dialogue for the anime series he purchased, and then not offering subtitled versions. A vocal minority of fans now felt the same way about ADV's use of text overlays in Evangelion . It was an edit, and therefore to be despised.

Now, I was certainly no fan of Macek. Flip through your back issues of Animerica and you'll find a letter from me trashing him for his treatment of Castle Caglostro. (Brief digression: Manga's new DVD of Castle Caglostro doesn't use the Streamline dub, but a new accurate dub produced by ZRO Limit! YAY!) But I love the idea of text overlays. Anything that touches as little as possible of the picture is okay by me. I'd rather have overlays than a subtitle splayed across the animation.

But the said vocal minority obviously preferred the subtitles. During the near-flame war on Usenet, which lasted over a week, no good reason was given for this. The best I can figure is that years of watching subtitles trained the viewers to think of them as not really there, whereas the text overlays were an undeniable alteration to the image.

Let me get to the point. These fans I was arguing with were old-school purists, the type of fan who was in the absolute majority back in 1991. If I'd come out in favor of altering the picture back then, even just to replace text, I'd have been eaten alive. In 2000, my position was supported, and many posters treated those fans with derision, throwing about terms like "anal-retentive", and "hysterical".

It seems that sliding scale I referred to earlier slides a great deal farther than it used to. You still have the hard-core fans on the one end, and the casual viewers on the other, but now there have appeared a large number of moderate fans in the middle, fans who participate in fan activities such as conventions and Usenet discussion groups as much any fan, but who don't hold as fast to the old-school views. These moderate fans don't dismiss dubs out of hand, and many of them openly prefer dubbing to subtitles. Heck, some fans are on Usenet defending the Kid's WB dub of Card Captor Sakura. Time was, anyone fan enough to post to rec.arts.anime would have very little good to say about a television dub.

I'm not moderate enough to like what was done with Card Captor Sakura. But on the whole, I think having moderate fans in the majority is good for the anime market in the US. These moderate fans represent a group with taste, but not so extremely purist that they can't be pleased. And as for the hard-core purists? Well, there's always imports.

Enough rambling! On to the web picks!

On to the web picks!