Neon Genesis Evangelion

[ShineCero]

Neon Genesis Evangelion returns to the English world with a brand new dub to replace the older one, with new casts, new direction and better translation/dialogues (hopefully), set to premiere on Netflix on June 21, 2019.

Few things to note: Fly To the Moon will not air (until decision is changed) at the credits due to not getting the rights (there are different remixes of the song in each end-credit episode). There is word that Kaworu's Homoeroticism was downplay in this new redub. However, it seems to be available on Netflix Japan, so it possible that it's a copyright issue.

So anyways, I haven't managed to catch it today, so how's the dub so far? :think:

 

[JamesYTP]

Well, I was shocked to not hear fly me to the moon...but then I had to wonder why I was shocked, it's a damn Frank Sinatra song that as you said they did multiple covers of so of course that was gonna be tough. I shutter to think the hell they're gonna go through in 20 years trying to re-license something like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure for that purpose. 

As for the dub...I'll probably say more of what I think after I finish or get further in since I've only seen 4 episodes but...understanding that Evangelion is possibly my single favorite work of fiction in any medium and definitely my favorite anime of all time and I've watched it with the ADV dub many many times and have that firmly ingrained in my head, that this is a highly biased opinion but for the first two episodes I utterly hated the new dub. The new voice for Shinji's performance reminds me a bit of the early Funimation DBZ dub when they were just taking over for the Ocean Dub and were all trying to imitate the old cast. The new Shinji sounds a lot like Spike Spencer but with a slightly flatter emotional range and with a slightly girlier sounding voice. Not horrible but also makes you wonder why recast if they were just gonna go that way...the new Misato on the other hand is totally wooden. She really has no semblance of comedic timing on her reads, doesn't really change her inflection much at all, to the point where the scene where she jokingly said she wouldn't be making any passes at Shinji on the phone with Ritsuko if I hadn't seen this series like 10 times I might think it's something she actually does. Apparently she used to do a lot of voice acting for 4Kids back in the day, she was Mokuba in Yu-Gi-Oh most notably that I could see...that made things make sense there. Since she's directing this dub that REALLY makes me nervous. Just watched the third and fourth episodes before coming on and I will say that now that they're on characters that have already been recast before and I'm not really used to any 1 voice for them it is a bit more palatable. They seemed to make a point of trying to go for voice actors who haven't been in a lot of anime recently and haven't been heard as much, which did make the choices of Ben Diskin and Johnny Yong Bosch as Kensuke and Toji stick out quite a lot. Rei hasn't had a lot of lines thus far but she seems a bit too...natural so far. This is supposed to be a character that seems very robotic and unnatural, I've heard it speculated that she was meant to be a sort of...I dunno, fictional stand-in for lack of a better word for an autistic person. So far I don't get that from her, if I were a noob I'd think she were just a background character like the other nerve agents at this point, not really well, what she is. 

That said...I also feel kinda sorry for the people just getting into it now that it's on netflix. Half the talk about it online are either people yelling DON'T BINGE IT (I've always watched it in chunks aside from when it was an episode a day on adult swim, seeing as how the first 18 episodes were later released as two stand alone films it almost feels like it begs to be watched in chunks, but I've actually been doing 2 episodes a day so far to kind of experience it that way. I bet they're just saying that because they want to see live reaction from people who would inevitably ship Shinji and Rei to episode 23 lol), the other half are old curmudgeons like me complaining about the new dub, which to someone who isn't comparing it to something else is probably gonna sound as good as any run of the mill anime dub they'll hear. Anime fans being anime fans they might just scare them off and I hope that doesn't happen. 

I also worry that there might be some kind of EVA-Gate coming, people online seem to largely seem to share my negative opinions on the new dub...Shinji's new VA openly identifies as gender non-binary. Given  how these things tend to go that makes me very nervous for this poor soul...praying it doesn't go the billion bad ways it could go with these facts in mind but I have a bad feeling about this.

 

[ShineCero]

Well, I was shocked to not hear fly me to the moon...but then I had to wonder why I was shocked, it's a damn Frank Sinatra song that as you said they did multiple covers of so of course that was gonna be tough. I shutter to think the hell they're gonna go through in 20 years trying to re-license something like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure for that purpose. 

As for the dub...I'll probably say more of what I think after I finish or get further in since I've only seen 4 episodes but...understanding that Evangelion is possibly my single favorite work of fiction in any medium and definitely my favorite anime of all time and I've watched it with the ADV dub many many times and have that firmly ingrained in my head, that this is a highly biased opinion but for the first two episodes I utterly hated the new dub. The new voice for Shinji's performance reminds me a bit of the early Funimation DBZ dub when they were just taking over for the Ocean Dub and were all trying to imitate the old cast. Sounds a lot like Spike Spencer but with a slightly flatter emotional range and with a slightly girlier sounding voice. Not horrible but also makes you wonder why recast if they were just gonna go that way...the new Misato on the other hand is totally wooden. She really has no semblance of comedic timing on her reads, doesn't really change her inflection much at all, to the point where the scene where she jokingly said she wouldn't be making any passes at Shinji on the phone with Ritsuko if I hadn't seen this series like 10 times I might think it's something she actually does. Apparently she used to do a lot of voice acting for 4Kids back in the day, she was Mokuba in Yu-Gi-Oh most notably that I could see...that made things make sense there. Since she's directing this dub that REALLY makes me nervous. Just watched the third and fourth episodes before coming on and I will say that now that they're on characters that have already been recast before and I'm not really used to any 1 voice for them it is a bit more palatable. They seemed to make a point of trying to go for voice actors who haven't been in a lot of anime recently and haven't been heard as much, which did make the choices of Ben Diskin and Johnny Yong Bosch as Kensuke and Toji stick out quite a lot. Rei hasn't had a lot of lines thus far but she seems a bit too...natural so far. This is supposed to be a character that seems very robotic and unnatural, I've heard it speculated that she was meant to be a sort of...I dunno, fictional stand-in for lack of a better word for an autistic person. So far I don't get that from her, if I were a noob I'd think she were just a background character like the other nerve agents at this point, not really well, what she is. 

That said...I also feel kinda sorry for the people just getting into it now that it's on netflix. Half the talk about it online are either people yelling DON'T BINGE IT (I've always watched it in chunks aside from when it was an episode a day on adult swim, seeing as how the first 18 episodes were later released as two stand alone films it almost feels like it begs to be watched in chunks, but I've actually been doing 2 episodes a day so far to kind of experience it that way. I bet they're just saying that because they want to see live reaction from people who would inevitably ship Shinji and Rei to episode 23 lol), the other half are old curmudgeons like me complaining about the new dub, which to someone who isn't comparing it to something else is probably gonna sound as good as any run of the mill anime dub they'll hear. Anime fans being anime fans they might just scare them off and I hope that doesn't happen. 

I also worry that their might be some kind of EVA-Gate coming, people online seem to largely seem to share my negative opinions on the new dub...Shinji's new VA openly identifies as gender non-binary. Given  how these things tend to go that makes me very nervous for this poor soul...praying it doesn't go the billion bad ways it could go with these facts in mind but I have a bad feeling about this.

Yeah, I didn't quite understood the outrage that Netflix opted out trying to get Fly To the Moon, especially since it is readily available in Netflix Japan; it's a clear licensing issue, but you know Twitter, angry is practically an tradition on there. Angry first, logic later.

Personally, I don't mind recasting if the voice direction is actually good or noteworthy. I prefer if they actually hired people with skills or experience within the voice-acting community and perhaps, they should have used the old ones and give them proper and actual lines from the show. Regardless, I have to applaud Netflix for taking the step of leaving old cast behind (because let's be honest, the old dub, just like Funimation Pre-Kai Dragon Ball dubs is not up to par in any standard), but at the same time, if they're going to attempt to recapture the tone the old cast did... they might as well use the old ones.

I hope not because we all know how it turns out. They claimed that the boogeyman sjws is taking over anime (it's not) and forcing everyone to accept diversity (it's not) and try to rationalized their [pathetic] movement to justified harassment against people because in actuality, they don't have a legitimate reason to be angry.

How did far did you get on the redub?

 

[JamesYTP]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Eyup, rage first ask questions later lol. To answer your question [size=small][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]I've seen the first 13 episodes and the Death (True) movie, so about half...and I will say regarding the end credits, they replaced fly me to the moon with Rei I, which is one of the more memorable pieces in the soundtrack, but it's also one that was actually used very sparingly in the actual show to set the mood for some very specific kinda scenes, some of which were pivotal to understanding Rei. I wonder as I get further in to the episodes that have those scenes if having heard it so many times. [/font][/font][/size]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Well, regarding the old cast, yeah the old dub doesn't sound as good today due to the technical limitations of the time. I remember when DBZ Kai was first coming out in the US Sean Schemmel did an interesting interview about the differences in dubbing then and now, basically from what he said back then you maybe only could get 2 or 3 takes on a line at most because it took that long to rewind all the analog elements and stuff (obviously when you're trying to match the moth movements AND give a good performance that's hard, I'd imagine especially so for EVA). Like DBZ though Evangelion has had new stuff made with the same principal cast and some recasts over the years where they had the advantage of newer recording methods that allowed for more takes in less time to get it right, there was the 2005 release of the director's cut episodes and Funimation's dub of the reboot movies. In the latter especially the remainder of the original cast is great, some of the best performances in an anime dub I've heard. I'll wait until I've at least seen the end of the series to pass any final judgement on the new dub since episodes 18-24 are gonna be the real test for them, but I will say that as you get further and further in it actually feels MORE like they're trying to imitate the old cast to the point you can almost forget that you aren't watching the old dub during scenes where it's just casual banter and stuff going on,  which is kind of a double edged sword. Will also say on the bright side Misato and Rei do get better, on the not so bright while the new script does make the meaning of certain lines clearer it's also obvious that English wasn't the first language of the person calling the shots there with some of the translation choices (for example, they refer to Asuka as the "third children" rather than "third child", plural conjugations are not a thing in Japanese but I gather they insisted on that translation, which makes no sense in English). [/font]

Agreed on the SJW thing, I was legitimately kind of afraid that there would be some harassment. So far there hasn't been any thankfully but all it takes are a few assholes on some corner of the net somewhere, and I've kinda felt like whatever forces behind the anti-SJW thing have been trying to crack anime and make that a part of their culture war...the people on both sides of which I've spoken to seemingly don't get anime at all and don't seem to get that this is something that's made in another country from a different culture where our western squabbles about feminism, racism etc. are basically irrelevant since they're in a completely different orbit from us on those issues.

 

[ShineCero]

Well, you might've spoke too soon there, because apparently, there's some rounds about a word where they referred a group of terrorists as "leftist" (but in the context of Japan, leftist groups were a big thing during the production of the time for EVA), which resulted an translator being harassed. Don't know the validity of it, since you know, twitter.

 

[JamesYTP]

A bunch of terrorists...hm, haven't encountered that line yet. Any idea which episode that was from? Only thing resembling terrorists  in this series I can think of might be the Seele soldiers from the End of Eva attacking Nerv headquarters. Though there was an episode that ended up getting scrapped because it resembled a terrorist attack on a subway in Japan by a cult called Aum Shinrikyou (fun fact, this cult was also the inspiration for the Happy Happy cult from Earthbound). If thats what it is I'll be watching episode 24 and End of Eva tomorrow so I guess I'll find out.