A Whole Bunch of Anime Issues

Dragon Ball: Origins, Anime Dubs Vs. Subs, and the issue of censorship of anime in Western countries.

Ok, so I watched the Appleseed OVA today. As far as dubs go, it was pretty understated. There was a lot of swearing, more than I have ever seen in an anime outside of Welcome to the NHK! and Genshiken. After reading You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming you kinda get the idea that the Japanese weren’t originally visited a lot by the Sweary Fairy. They expressed their anger and insults through devaluing the honour of another person, using harsh but not vulgar words. But it is a James Bond novel and Ian Fleming was, always, kinda biased towards the British Way. You still get an idea of pre-otaku boom Japan though, from that book. Back when you could visit Japan and still not see a single manga volume on a shelf in a young man’s apartment.

In any case Appleseed OVA was an entertaining enough experience. Even though it was dubbed. I’ve seen much worse dubs (I wince when I rewatch Pokemon dubs) and the Sweary Fairy has not been locked up so the kids can watch it. Manga Entertainment, who apparently have given the Australian distribution rights to Madman Entertainment, haven’t pulled any punches with either the violence or the swearing. It has not been censored for an Australian audience. And yet Dragon Ball: Origins, which is a video game which was mistakenly viewed as being aimed at children, had to be reclassified from a PG to an M rating. M is our version of America’s PG-13 rating, so don’t go saying Australians are entirely a bunch of prudes.

It’s just the old bastards and politicians who are making this country an embarrassment to be a part of. We have double standard laws which allows Ninja Scroll to be given an R Certificate (the Aussie version of the NC-17 in America, MA is our version of America’s R rating) but we cannot even give video games the same understanding?

Every time somebody calls Australia “Failstralia” because of our idiotic laws and controversy over the loli ban, it hurts inside because I know part of it is scorn directed at our government’s deaf ears. It hurts to be Australian, I feel, because my own dearest blogger buddies have lost faith that we’ll ever see a redemption of my nation on the level of a new Mad Max movie ever again.

Some people don’t like buying licensed anime DVDs because they feel the Americans censor them every time. This is not always the case. Some series and anime movies aimed at adults do not receive the 4-Kids butchery treatment, and in Australia at least the subtitled version is available on the DVDs if you don’t like the dubs. If Genshiken ever comes out on DVD in Australia, the official arse end of the earth, as Paul Keating said, it probably won’t be censored anywhere near as much in the subtitled version as it would have been twenty years ago in the bad old days of anime distribution.

I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a book about a Dominican nerd with a history of tragedy in his family who is believed to be cursed. It’s mostly a story about his family and how they got their shit ruined by the dictator Trujillo. But there are references to the early days of anime fandom in America. Could you believe they used to call anime “Japanimation” in America? It’s kinda surreal hearing somebody describe a movie like Akira as “Japanimation”, in the same way you wouldn’t expect somebody to use the term “information superhighway” to describe the Internet in a contemporary novel. Admittedly Junot Diaz’s book is set in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. So there’s some interesting insights into how Western audiences reacted to anime which was licensed in America at first. Weaboos didn’t exist. Only nerds who had nothing better to do than watch Appleseed OVA and Akira over and over in their college dorms.

But I don’t live in America, and I have to make do with the experiences I grew up with. Stuff like dubs which sounded good at the time but when you heard them later on you realised they were awful. One of the reasons I like the Disgaea anime is it doesn’t have an awful dub, because of the over the top source material the voice actors could get away with getting silly, but when they needed to get serious they could. That said, I’ve been waiting ages for Akira to be released on Blu-Ray here in Oz, and with no reliable sources apart from certain forums with certain connections, we’re starved of HD anime content in Australia. Only two movies have been released here for anime on Blu-Ray, Paprika and Tekkonkinkreet. Those are some quality films but compared to America’s Blu-Ray library it’s pathetic. Again, the way media corporations distribute their films to Australia make me embarrassed to be a citizen of this country.

We are the Last Place any media item gets licensed to. We are the Last Place the Western World cares about that isn’t a third world country. And it’s gotten so bad it’s no wonder Aussie anime fans download fansubs. It’s the only fucking way we even get to watch most recent anime shows, because there’s only one major licensing company for anime, Madman Entertainment. They do a great job at what they do release, but most times we get everything after everyone else has seen it.