| Wednesday, May 11, 2005 |
11:42 - Let's Fighting Love
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Okay, I know I'm really asking for it here, but I've just got to get this off my chest:
Why is it that there's not a single anime show out there that has a comprehensible English title?
Sailor Moon. Yu-Gi-Oh. Dragon Ball Z. Big O. Trigun. Fullmetal Alchemist. Even the ostensibly "best" shows suffer from this odd obsession with language that sounds almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English: Cowboy Bebop. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Love Hina. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to just leave it in the original Japanese, even if that means giving up a rare appropriately translated title like Case Closed in favor of one that renders literally as "Story of the boy with giant glasses who solves mysteries" or something.
I understand that all the little colloquial nuances of English aren't the easiest thing for a non-native speaker to get a handle on, but there are ways to absorb information like this if you're going to make a living off it, especially in developing copy for an English-speaking audience. If Yoko Kanno can do such marvelously perceptive and inventive things with Western-style jazz, there's just no excuse for a title like Fruits Basket.
Sometimes it seems like they're trying to come up with a clever pun, like Disney's capable of doing with their translated anime names, like the well-crafted double-entendre of Spirited Away. But more often than not, anime producers/translators seem to go crazy with their puns and mix way too many metaphors, ending up with insane zombie titles like Wolf's Rain and Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex. It's really like they're trying way too hard. The impulse is admirable, but the result is merely that an excellent show gets saddled with a bewildering and weird name. Tartakovsky gives us Samurai Jack. The anime world gives us Samurai Champloo.
I mean, what's the huge problem with coming up with anime titles that are not instantly and obviously recognizable as being anime titles?
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Brian Tiemann
