Last Mention Ever for AnimEigo. They Have Miike's 'Big Bang Love' for America.

How was their Dora-Heita release?

Me thinks it may be just their releases of older stuff one may have to be wary about.
Not all of these films are going to warrant the sales for lone wolf esque clean-up.

Anyways, i'm preordering GoH regardless.
Don't really care for BBL.

I bought the Dora-Heita release and to me that was just as piss poor as their Shinsengumi or Trail of Blood. You know theres trouble when the Lady Snowblood or Babycart Series made thirty years ago look better than something from 2000.

I was talking to another film afficionado/small scale licensor about movies this week and one of his big complaints about AE was their extremely crude translations of colloquial dialog. Not sure if that's as relevant here as some of the older Japanese films that they've presented, but I thought it would fit in a bitch thread.

At least hardcore fans will be able to rip the subtitles from this DVD and use them with their Japanese R2 import.

Is it just me or is everyone being overly critical of Animeigo? I really thought the transfer on Shinshengumi was actually pretty well done. Then again who am I to say that? I don't know. I think they are doing a great job and should keep up the work. They only messed up on Trail of Blood and Samurai Assassin in my opinion. Again the transfer on Shinsengumi look solid to me.

overcritical? no. these labels get what they deserve if they present bad licenses in bad editions on a regular basis. people will turn on the spot and rotate 180 degrees on their opinion because each mistake costs money, removes what perhaps constitutes the once chance to get a decent edition of the film, and detracts from actually putting decent stuff out that people are actively pulling their hair out to recieve...

the 'shinsengumi' transfer was leaps and bounds towards worse transfers in comparison to 'trail of blood' and 'samurai assasin'. a VHS would have done better. easily. VCD even. tissue paper with hand-drawn adaptations of the story printed on it would have been less painful, and far more useful...

Everyone has been giving Animeigo too much of a hard time, but more importantly: logboy really, really needs to learn how to write. From the ground up, sentence structure, forming a paragraph. The works. The guy's stuff reads like the mad ramblings of an illiterate.

There is a school of thought that thinks colloquial Japanese should never been translated with more than a hint of colloquialism in the English. There is nothing to be done with these people except pity their joyless existences.
I've never seen anything worth objecting to in Animeigo's translations. And since the only DVDs of theirs I have are Lone Wolf and Zatoichi, I'm equally happy with their transfers.

wes, "Everyone has been giving Animeigo too much of a hard time, but more importantly: logboy really, really needs to learn how to write. From the ground up, sentence structure, forming a paragraph. The works. The guy's stuff reads like the mad ramblings of an illiterate. "

well, wes. we've discussed this between contributors in the forum, not specifically about me but about writing on blogs and readers reactions to it, in the recent past.

twitch contributors write on a voluntary basis, that's part one of what you or anyone need to realise.

secondly, i personally tend to write about this that either interest me but about which i am not entirely directly in posession of knowledge surrounding. that is, i'm interested in seeing and experiencing things i've yet to, for the most part, but about which i've a sense of why i'm interested in it. we're working across borders, around the globe, into unknown territory, far in advance of even the possibility of a chance to see many of these films, dealing with repeating issues, and in general uncertainty.

thirdly, some visitors like the clinical heavily-researched style approach and comment on it, others like the informal conversational styles and comment on it, others stay quiet; i like to write around the issues relating to things, so if i give one headline and go off on a tangent, it's because this isn't really about trying to do just one thing at a time in a clinical fashion as much as it's about me trying to communicate my own journey, thoughts, and all the connecting issues, at the moment they're going through my mind. we don't tend to be based around the idea of crafting out a post in the same way more formal places do, so you can expect the charm found within the relatively ramshackle approach to stay - because i wouldn't be here, personally, if there was an attempt to supposedly professionalise it. there's no desire here to create that kind of barrier between writer and reader.

finally, if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing nobody.

as i've said in comments many times before, take from it what you will, what you can, and leave it at that - because it's about the films firstly, the communication of information relating to them secondly but no less importantly; we're here to tell people about the films, but in no one given fashion for any given indefinable group of individuals, because it doesn't relate to the field of interest we have, i think, certainly not the nature of how writers come and go, how tastes vary within the writers, where we're based (different countries), how much time we can offer (for free), what we want to talk about (and the avoidance of collusion to have a general approach or opinion) because we're one place with many blogs placed within it, essentially.

when all is said and done, an interest in strange films more of an effort to follow a journey based on individuality, inherantly lies in an issues-laden place, involves many unknown quantities, and shoving a load of writers with different tastes and approaches in together will not find a consistent approach that's pleasing to everyone - however many rules, regulations, structures you hope to have everyone working to, they'll never all be manageable, and even when they're strictly applied their room for interpretation.

it's something which will lead to clashes in opinions on what's right and wrong between readers or writers, if attempts are made to control or structures it (however desirable that might sometimes seem to be), so it's best to accept it as it's just a tug of war that can go in different directions but never be won. doesn't mean we don't wrangle over trying to improve our own (or each others) communication, it just means it comes from the writer first and foremost. and i've explained why i write how i do.

Wow. This place can become intense pretty quickly. My last post was my first post on this website and I just wanted to once again say that the transfer of Shinsengumi looked solid to me. Again, it was nowhere near as bad as Trail of Blood or Samurai Assassin. I think Animeigo is doing a great job and should keep up the good work.

Judging from the comments to the review over at Dreamlogic, the problems appear to be hardware dependent. Personally, I had no problems with dvd.

sharkbait - that review at dreamlogic you're linking too contains a discussion between myself and the writer of that review, it was the first i could find that offered some kind of talkback with the writer and i wanted to see if we could delve deeper into this particular release. i went looking for reactions to the disc after both seeing the trashing it got at dvdtalk.com in their review and later experiencing the disc for myself.

firstly, there's a prejudice going to be applied when a company makes a mkistake and appears to have do so in a fashion which they would have been well aware of before the disc hits the shelves; they're the ones who know the underlying issues concerning why the presentation is as it is after all - it says you're dumping on your customers, and this wouldn't be the first time for this company as we've had two others mentioned here also, already, that have caused some bursts of angry discussion in sites associated with the kind of releases we're discussing.

secondly, there's always new issues to consider, this time around (for me) it's about how having upgraded to HDTV (LCD variant, as many have been and will be, sony set which does 480p, 720p and 1080i - 32") after having had a CRT HDTV for almost 5 years (toshiba set which does 480p). the LCD sets can be unsympathetic to bad encoding. a CRT will manage to smooth over bad encoding. so, considering the reviewer at dreamlogic says he is CRT and I am LCD, and because i can't see people either explaining it without it being open to interpretation (because the numerous interpretations are caused by no explanation or backtracking by the company), I think there's always room for movement even in how the technical, underlying encoding issues of a disc are portrayed in reviews. It's also a common initial reaction to LCD, that they're somehow technically inferior with handling information, because spot the faults in their superior new sets they wouldn't have seen showing up in lesser, older, CRT sets - it's not to be taken at technically-based faults, it's to be taken as a fault showing up because of technical superiority. after all, these HD sets are the same sets handling PS3s, HD formats, and super DVDs incredibly well, and so highlighting the crapness all the more...

honestly, when you can see films that look like they were made yesterday (even on a CRT, or even on an LCD, depending on your current perspective) and yet they were made almost 50 years ago, and when you can see films made last year which look like they're been dragged behind a car, through a muddy field, and only then mastered, it's no surprise the promises of DVD and the eternal bad licensing / bad marketing / cack-handed treatment is being ignored or misinterpreted either to cover-up such practices (by saying it's down to people having filled their shelves, not through people having grown wiser to the disservice they recieve - people will buy until the cows come home, given the chance, there's enough proof of that level of comitment shown online to DVD, even if it does get a little OCD at times) is resulting in a huge downturn in the faith held in the format, any subsequent formats, and the companies that handle those businesses, as well as the undoubtedly wiser purchasing base realising this is an expensive hobby and yet they still regularly get shafted - in obvious fashions that don't get mentioned or spotted, or in subtle ways which erode without people realising each release that's of no use is certainly forcing out the potential for a film to find a home and actually have people who are greatful for a little more insight, understand, decent treatment, and generally superb practice to repay the dedication, time, money they pump into these companies more in hope than in secure faith; companies that manage good work also find their decent stuff sidelined unintentionally by being clouded by a mass of crap, so it's unfortunate for the superb companies like blue underground, panik house, noshame, artsmagic, mondo macabro, BCI... because they display the personal interest, careful-but-singleminded licensing, longer-term vision, good quality productions, great prices, decent publicity, and general all-round-goodness that we probably all expected to be the general norm. okay, so they're not perfect companies, with perfect choices and so on, but they show more nounce than the average companies - still, i say smaller labels made a mistake in developing a habit of relying upon the flushes out youth attitude major chains had to filling their shelves with anything and everything, as it seem many can't leave that habit behind and have gaines some bad practice as a result. they're paying for it now, it seems.

I still prefer japans 'get it done once, get it done right' culture to america's 'if we cock it up, we'll sell it to them again down the line - suckers!' culture.

Well DVDtalk's review of Shinsengumi agrees with logboy

I'd do well and stay the hell away from that turd spun into a disc

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=27901

Well, I'll add my last two cents to this. I brought the dvd to work today out of curiosity, where I played it from a Philips DVP 9000S dvd-player, upscaled it to 1080i with an Extron USP 405 scaler and blew it up to cinema size with a Sony SRX-R110 4k-projector. It still looked okay to me. Sure, it's soft, but it's nowhere near unwatchable. I still think the problems some people have with this disc are hardware-dependant. I'm not saying it's a flawless disc - it's clearly not - I'm just saying that your mileage may vary, and that it seems a tad rash to just completely write off AnimEigo over this.

sharkbait -

not writing them off. saying my faith has gone and i won't support what i dont have faith in unless it changes my mind. i'm also tempted by other labels bad practice, and do give slight nods towards these issues in a less specific manner all too regularly, but
considering many know or have dealt with lackluster work (or tried to), and considering animeigo plods on regardless (or seems to; seems contemptuos to me), i'm more inclined to snap over their work.

plus, i like miike more than most, so this 'big bang love' release needs to be good. that's the selfish element, and i suppose you can't level that as a criticism because we're writing from personal perspective and hoping people get something from it rather than directly trying to give some supposed service which corrupts everyones personal taste, the control over it at least...

I've ordered the german release from Rapid Eye Movies, and I hope it's good quality. Anyway, I've decided to rip and translate the subtitles with some help of the fansubber community, so you might not have to wait for this particular release.