Jump to content

Neon Genesis Evangelion comes to Netflix

TwinIon

By TwinIon
in The Performing Arts Centre

 Share

Recommended Posts

TwinIon

TwinIon

Posted
Posted

For the first time ever, Neon Genesis Evangelion is readily available in the US thanks to Netflix. It's sure to bring with it a renewed discussion of the divisive classic. Polygon has done some good work on the topic, especially this piece on history of the show and its creator and this piece about the hoops you had to jump through to watch the show until now.

 

For myself, I first watched EVA in college thanks to our campus wide file sharing program. At the time I was intrigued, but didn't find myself enjoying the original ending or End of Evangelion. I'm going to go back through the series and I'll be interested to see if I get anything different from the show now, especially given my increased awareness of the creation of the series and its creator. I've also seen the rebuild films, and am very curious to see how the fourth one comes out. I thought the first was fine, the second was great, and the third kind of dropped the ball.

 

So, who all is going to watch the show again? How about for the first time? Any good reads about the show to share?

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
IdeaOfEvil

IdeaOfEvil

Posted
Posted

A lot of online comments are saying that Netflix's new dub is pretty bad all around - the voice acting ability as well as the translations of the original script.

 

Hopefully the ADV dub is still a viable track to include with future releases, cuz even if the new one was good I'd still want what I grew up with.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Ghost_MH

Ghost_MH

Posted
Posted
12 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

From what I understand they censored some of it.

 

 

https://www.newsweek.com/evangelion-netflix-shinji-censored-translation-1445207

 

That's not censorship. That's just a difference in opinion in how to translate that scene. There's supposed to be some ambiguity, like any good anime high school confession trope. It's the difference between like as a friend or like in a romantic sense. The original English translation threw all that ambiguity out the window, but old fans don't want it to remain closer to the original translation.

 

It's not too unlike the "I'm so fucked up line". Only that was never a proper translation, and people are still upset.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nokt

Nokt

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, SFLUFAN said:

If anything, Netflix has done everyone a favor by sparing them having to endure the truly tepid "Fly Me to the Moon", one of Sinatra's far lesser efforts.

Apparently thats why its not there. The Sinatra estate owns the music, not Gainax or Netflix. Problem hard/expensive to get rights for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Greatoneshere

Greatoneshere

Posted
Posted

Evangelion is one of the best shows ever made, and the last two episodes paired with the End of Evangelion is an expression of depressive catharsis as art on film as I've ever seen.

 

My favorite Rebuild film is the third one. Creator Hideaki Anno is doing things no one else is doing in anime or perhaps cinema. New dub is bullshit, but I'm glad people can see the show. Amazed so many here haven't seen it or don't like it. Code Geass? LOL.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nokt

Nokt

Posted
Posted
40 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

Evangelion is one of the best shows ever made, and the last two episodes paired with the End of Evangelion is an expression of depressive catharsis as art on film as I've ever seen.

 

My favorite Rebuild film is the third one. Creator Hideaki Anno is doing things no one else is doing in anime or perhaps cinema. New dub is bullshit, but I'm glad people can see the show. Amazed so many here haven't seen it or don't like it. Code Geass? LOL.

Curious as to why you like the third film so much. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Greatoneshere

Greatoneshere

Posted
Posted
22 minutes ago, Nokt said:

Curious as to why you like the third film so much. 

 

I know it's divisive, but I think this review explains most of my thoughts, please give it a read. It's an ambitious, inscrutable film. To jump past the apocalypse to show what comes next is ballsy. 

 

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/evangelion-3.33/you-can-redo/blu-ray/.98252

 

Read the review and let me know your thoughts!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nokt

Nokt

Posted
Posted
44 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

I know it's divisive, but I think this review explains most of my thoughts, please give it a read. It's an ambitious, inscrutable film. To jump past the apocalypse to show what comes next is ballsy. 

 

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/evangelion-3.33/you-can-redo/blu-ray/.98252

 

Read the review and let me know your thoughts!

I can't even remember what happens in 3.33 at all. I remember watching it and thinking that the entire film was just a waste of time. 

Even the review makes the first 40 minutes seem like a waste of time. I'll have to rewatch the rebuild series though and try to keep the review in mind to see if I find more appreciation for it. 

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
IdeaOfEvil

IdeaOfEvil

Posted
Posted
Quote

 

So there's actually a reason the translation is so hyper literal and stilted! I was actually there in Baltimore to witness the instigating moment for this, so, story time.

A bit of background for those unaware: there is an ostensible remake film series of Evangelion called Rebuild of Evangelion, that starts out fairly beat for beat but diverged more and more, so far culminating in the third film, which bears zero resemblance to the original work in any way and is more or less an original work with the same characters.

The third film, 3.0, also features Kaworu, the gray haired anime boy in those tweets, far more prominently than he ever was in Evangelion, where he's essentially a deuteragonist of the story with Shinji. 3.0 also extremely amps up the romantic overtones of their relationship to almost blatant heights, with one of the motifs in the film being Kaworu literally teaching Shinji how to play a duet on piano as part of a way to get to know each other.

So fast forward to Baltimore, 2013. 3.0 has been out in Japan for a couple months. Funimation has been working on the dub, and they're going to screen it in America at Otakon, one of the biggest anime conventions in America, in their biggest exhibit hall, which fits several hundred people. This was, as far as I know, the American Premiere, a full six months before it hit actual theaters. There is a massive amount of hype for this, because as I said, 3.0 was completely divorced from the original series and the rumors about it had completely reinvigorated the fandom to a fever loving pitch, so the room is packed to the loving gills, at full capacity. Some people come out, they intro the film, and the lights drop and it plays.

And what follows is a loving disaster.

So, I like 3.0. It's a movie that's willing to go completely loving batshit, and it more or less threw out every scrap of existing canon it possibly could in one of the most active attempts at audience antagonization it possibly could. But that's the problem, it actively antagonizes the audience. It starts with a twenty year time skip and all the characters berating Shinji, and refuses to explain anything for almost an hour of its run time. And the crowd loving loses it. There's cheering, there's laughter, there's groans, people shout "what the gently caress?" to massive applause. Most of the people in that room were watching it for the first time, and they were getting the both barrels treatment, so there was an extremely high level of energy for a movie screening.

So we get to the end of the first act, and Kaworu comes into the film for the first time, and this is where the wheels really come off the bus. Because funimation, at its core, still has a bit of the "by fans for fans" ethos going on, it's staff were all anime nerds, and shipping Kaworu and Shinji is one of the old classic ships of anime fandom. They'd been handed an official work from the original creator of Evangelion where the subtext of their relationship had been amped almost to text, so what did they do? They took the localization and pushed it even father. Every implication and hint is amplified, every joking line is uppsd to a full double entendre, and every double entendre is upgraded to full on flirting dialogue.

The crowd, being almost a thousand-strong people who were not only big enough nerds to go to a con but big enough to go to a movie screening AT a con, see this and essentially lose their loving mind.

From this point on, you could barely hear the actual movie, because people were cracking up at every single line, cheering every action, and just going completely nuts. Just a loving madhouse of hooting anime nerds. It continues like that mostly through to the end, people cheer, people leave, we all put the movie out of our minds and go get drunk as you do at anime cons, everything's right with the world, etc. Etc.

Except it isn't.

As the months go by, 3.0 has a slow rollout, leaves theaters, and news slows down. The first home release date in america blows by, no release. Second one blows by, no release. People start asking questions and answers are really cryptic. People are wondering, why the gently caress isn't it out on blu ray yet, Japan has had it for almost a year now.

After a few leaks and a public announcement comes out, a picture starts to form. Funimation is delaying the release because they're working directly with Khara to ensure "a better translation," and as such, are retranslating and redubbing the entire movie, from scratch.. Because it turns out, there was somebody actually from Khara itself at the screening at Otakon, and witnessing the crowd reaction had mortified them. The film was supposed to be taken seriously, you see; and witnessing an entire room losing their loving mind with laughter at what was supposed to be a serious film had set off every alarm bell in this person's head. I don't know if anyone tried to explain to them that Americans generally react more animatedly at the movies, or that the crowd at that particular showing was a unique experience, but if they did it didn't work; Khara latched on to the liberties taken with the localization as the reason, decided that people didn't take the movie seriously because the translation wasn't precise enough, that enough care wasn't taken with their project and changes had to be made.

Khara brought in their own translators and took a direct hand in the new dub of 3.0, and had to approve every single line, every single delivery, every single change. Funimation tried to push back but could get zero ground, and almost all the localization was stripped out in favor of a dry, clinical direct translation. The home release of 3.0 in the west eventually didn't land until 2016, a full three years after the movie came out, because of this.

Ever since, khara has been extremely hands on with any and all translation of their work, which includes the Netflix dub. This has the same translation team Khara brought on for the 3.0 dub, and it's full of absolutely bizarre choices that make no sense in English, like referring to the (singular) character of Shinji Ikari as "the first children" and cutting out all of the memorable adlibs from the first dub.

What's actually happening here with Kaworu is that in the original Japanese episodes, all of his lines have a large amount of ambiguity that you can't really translate directly into English. This is where localization is extremely important - you need to look at the context of his character and decide which choice makes more sense. But since khara doesn't trust localizers anymore, they mandated a translation that maximizes ambiguity at the cost of not sounding like anything an English speaker would ever say.

 

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3853977&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=683#post496129527

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Ghost_MH

Ghost_MH

Posted
Posted

Like I said, the original translation threw a lot of the ambiguity out the window. Complaining that reintroducing that original ambiguity is censorship is silly. Does that make a full literal translation good? Not exactly. I'd just argue that dropping the fucked up line is worse than switching love for like. Like it's closer and still has the ambiguity you'd want, even in English. Fucked up does a better job of directly translating the thought of the character in the moment for an English-speaking audience.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Greatoneshere

Greatoneshere

Posted
Posted
8 hours ago, Nokt said:

I can't even remember what happens in 3.33 at all. I remember watching it and thinking that the entire film was just a waste of time. 

 

Even the review makes the first 40 minutes seem like a waste of time. I'll have to rewatch the rebuild series though and try to keep the review in mind to see if I find more appreciation for it. 

 

Nothing about the film is a waste of time, it's just difficult to follow and understand without paying really close attention to not only the previous two films, but 3.33 as well. The world has changed and the 15-year time jump throws audiences completely out of it because all the characters have changed but we haven't seen what happened to cause all the rifts among the characters. 

 

It's a great movie, and if nothing else, there's nothing else like it. I'll take unique and interesting over yet another typical film any day. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Anathema-

Anathema-

Posted
Posted
On 6/22/2019 at 1:17 PM, Ghost_MH said:

 

That's not censorship. That's just a difference in opinion in how to translate that scene. There's supposed to be some ambiguity, like any good anime high school confession trope. It's the difference between like as a friend or like in a romantic sense. The original English translation threw all that ambiguity out the window, but old fans don't want it to remain closer to the original translation.

 

It's not too unlike the "I'm so fucked up line". Only that was never a proper translation, and people are still upset.

 

I saw somebody try to make the point that "love" in the untranslated dialogue was important because it's the naive kind of love one kid would have for another and I'm like, that's what "like" means in English! Two American kids would express that level of affection by saying "like," not "love". It's like people are so focused on an "accurate" translation they forget the rules of the language that's being expressed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Ghost_MH

Ghost_MH

Posted
Posted
23 minutes ago, Anathema- said:

 

I saw somebody try to make the point that "love" in the untranslated dialogue was important because it's the naive kind of love one kid would have for another and I'm like, that's what "like" means in English! Two American kids would express that level of affection by saying "like," not "love". It's like people are so focused on an "accurate" translation they forget the rules of the language that's being expressed.

 

Like it's a much better word to use here in English. That grace line is awkward as all hell and probably shouldn't have been written that way, even if it is a literal translation. Like was never the right word to use, but it ruins the ship for fangirls and boys and that gets the biggest eyeroll I can muster.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 1 month later...
IdeaOfEvil

IdeaOfEvil

Posted
Posted
9 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Are they going to release it on blu-ray? I've been waiting quite a long time for that.

 There's always been problems with Japan's business side in getting bluray's to the US, but now with this whole Netflix translation debacle it's gonna be even longer =/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...