04-01-2012, 04:55 PM | #26 |
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Maybe they'll pull a Simpsons and have the characters frozen in time in their respective grades.
I don't remember seeing the old dude outside of Hosaka's fantasies, I think I would have noticed him. Maybe at a cultural festival where he wouldn't stand out so much? Yo Talon! Since I discovered that you do not have a 24 hour hotline to immediately inform you of Minami-ke news, since you didn't know about season 4, it's possible that you overlooked the existence of something else. Have you ever heard of an OVA called Minami-ke Betsubara? I've never seen you mention it before. So if you haven't, here is my gift to you. Just click on this
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04-01-2012, 05:22 PM | #27 |
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I have. I consider it a little epilogue-esque thing to Season 3. It even reuses footage from Season 3 in its OP. One of the songs from the Betsubara OST is also on my iPhone. But thank you anyway. ^_^; Yeah, I don't normally mention it just because it's clunky to be like "Seasons 1-3 + OAV" or "Seasons 1-3 + Betsubara", etc. I consider it an unofficial part of Season 3 and I assume that most Minami-ke fans, who tend to be pretty clever people ;D, will figure it out on their own that (a) such a thing exists and (b) yes, they need to see it. I was kinda underwhelmed by it -- it wasn't as good as some of the best episodes from each of Seasons 1, 2, and 3 -- which is also why I don't usually bring it up. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't amazing either.
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04-01-2012, 05:38 PM | #28 |
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I thought it was pretty good! If it was inserted into season 3 proper, I would have considered it a well above average episode.
Spoiler: show
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06-20-2012, 01:34 PM | #29 |
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Speaking of things that give me warm feelings, I've found out some information on Minami-ke season 4. It's set to air in the winter, and it appears to have changed studios AGAIN! This time to Studio feel. The ones who made Yosuga no Sora and Kiss x sis. I know some of you guys watched them, so what do you think, an improvement over asread? Weird how asread responded to criticism and improved the look of the show so much for season 3, but ended up getting dumped anyway. Why the heck does this show jump studios so much anyway? I've never seen an anime change studios with almost every season.
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06-20-2012, 02:10 PM | #30 |
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You probably should have disconnected this idea from the above post and posted it in the Minami-ke thread but I'll reply to you here for now. Maybe Yuki will splice these two posts over, who knows.
I have no idea why we never got Daume (the studio who did Season 1) back. The fans loved Daume. And they reviled what Asread did to the project. I put off watching Minami-ke for about a year as a result of the horrors I saw in the first episode of Season 2. You put it off for three or so years. I've read posts on ANN and elsewhere from people who proudly boast that they still haven't watched past Season 1 of Minami-ke, that is just how badly the fans loved Daume's animation and direction and hated Asread's. But the fact remains that Sakuraba Coharu ended up picking Asread again for Season 3. He picked them over Daume ... or anyone else for that matter! ... and I have no idea why. I do have my theories though:
So now we come to Season 4. Here, Sakuraba clearly was able to freely pick a new studio because, lo and behold, he's gone and picked a third, different studio to handle Season 4. Why oh why he didn't pick Daume is anyone's guess but the possibilities include:
Now, to finally address your question! You asked us what we thought of Studio Feel. Well, I have to admit I didn't know them by name but you say they're the folks who animated Kiss x Sis and Yosuga no Sora. If that's the case, my opinion is that they're a great animation studio. I don't know about their direction or editing merits since I never played the Yosuga no Sora visual novel nor had I read the Kiss x Sis manga before watching the OAVs and TV show, but I do know that their animation is pretty good. They likely won't give us "the pastel fuzzies" feel of Season 1 that everyone so loves. Kiss x Sis and YnS are both incredibly sharp-looking productions. Skin is almost rubbery it's so shiny and taut. (sample; not explicit but still NSFW or with others looking at what you're looking at) But it's top-notch animation all the same. (See previous sample.) Why might he have gone with Studio Feel?
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06-23-2012, 06:37 AM | #31 |
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Yeah sorry, I'm so used to posting everything in the bbb suggestion box that I sometimes forget other threads even exist.
Daume hasn't made a show in a long time. Maybe they're defunct? Even their official website hasn't been updated in two years. It's possible that the manga author doesn't really care about the anime, or he simply doesn't have much control. One particularly notorious example of both these things is Akira Toriyama. He said in an interview that he barely even watched the Dragonball Z anime after a certain point, except a few times with his son. He also wanted to end the story after the Freeza saga, but Shonen Jump basically forced him to keep going. When he finally said, "Fuck this, I'm done" Toei went ahead and made Dragonball GT without him to squeeze some more milk out of it. When you agree to give your story to a publisher, you sell your soul to some extent. I'll admit that I don't know exactly how the industry works, but it's likely that the ones who are actually making the decisions about the anime are Young Magazine.
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07-07-2012, 09:01 AM | #32 | |
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Actually, Daume is not dead, they just haven't been the head animator for a show in two years. They're still doing minor stuff. So what caused this divide, who knows.
Quote:
Look at them chicken legs! Did you also find it weird how they put the ending credits like halfway through the show? I wonder how many people weren't keeping track of the time, assumed that was the end of the show, flipped the channel, and missed some brilliant bit in the last half.
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07-07-2012, 09:49 AM | #33 |
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It was VERY strange. I've no idea why they did that. What makes it even weirder is that you know it wasnt a quirky studio thing because the same exact studio did Season 2 and placed the ending where it belongs -- at the end! But it's okay though because ED 3 is one of the series' greats, below the impeccable OP 1 and ED 1 for me but above pretty much everything else. (Not surprisingly, Season 2 had the worst of both. Even Betsubara's OP was better! ) Heart-shaping dorky-cute Haruka is mai waifu. (And yours. And Hosaka's. And Natsuki's. And ...)
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07-07-2012, 11:12 AM | #34 |
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Well I do enjoy the part in OP 3 where Haruka brushes her hair, tosses it back then makes a slight kissy face.
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11-10-2012, 10:42 PM | #35 |
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The last time I checked to see if Minami-ke Omatase was out, no one had it. Checked on a whim tonight and it looks like there are several raws at different low resolutions (I assume one is the standard 480p DVD rip and the other is an upscale) as well as two different fansub groups who have tackled it, neither of them being Ayako, neither a particularly famous group either afaik. I went with both groups plus a copy of the raw as a result. I watched it with AhoDomo first. They did an okay job but they translated a lot of the syntax wrong. Meanings were overall okay but they weren't actually translating what the characters were truly saying and that bugs me so I'll definitely be trying the other group's to see if they fared any better. Regardless, here's hoping that a fansubbing juggernaut will pick up Season 4 when it airs this winter. The first thing which jumped out at me was the animation, specifically the new character designs. They're ... okay, I guess. ^^; Nothing beats Daume's original, of course, but right from the get-go I preferred these new designs to Okawari (Season 2)'s. And as the episode wore on and I got accustomed to the new designs, I think I may have warmed up to them even more than Okaeri (Season 3)'s, though that's hard to say because ... well, the one persistent problem I have with the new character designs is that they make all the girls look a lot more baby-faced than they've ever looked before. And I don't particularly care for that, especially not on the older characters like Haruka, Hayami-senpai, and Hosaka. But as far as solidness of animation goes, well, just see for yourself. It's not too too bad. Could've been worse. The second thing which jumped out at me was that this episode felt rather half-assed directorially. ^^; They recycled the Minami-ke Betsubara OP and ED, though in their defense they did animate a never-before-seen animation sequence for the OP, something which even Betsubara neglected to do, opting for a mishmash of footage from earlier episodes instead. But it wasn't just the recycled OP and ED songs which made me raise an eyebrow. As much as I enjoyed the episode as a long-time fan of the franchise, I felt that these were table scrap sketches dressed up as something else. The Hallowe'en sketch should have been awesome ... but it just shamelessly pilfered from earlier sketches. For example, the part where all the girls glomp-tickle Takeru-ojisan was reminiscent of the Season 1 scene where the elementary school girls all tackle Takeru because he seems like a suspicious person. The post-New Year's sketch was little different. It was weird jumping back in time to New Year's (considering that in the Minami-ke timeline we're currently somewhere in the spring, very very near to the start of the girls' next school year) but when it turned out that this sketch was nothing more than a version 2.0 of the classic scene which finished off Season 1, I didn't know how to feel. Conflicted? On the one hand, as much as I wanted it to be funny, it just wasn't funny the second go around. To be honest, part of that was probably because it was even less well-executed in its antics than the original one was. But on the other hand, I still love and still greatly enjoy the original scene every time I re-watch Season 1. So like, I know I am not tired of the gag period. I think it's just that my brain operates like this:
So yeah, don't get me wrong. Omatase definitely has its moments. (It's Minami-ke: of course it's going to have its moments! ) But this sketch about people's whims was pretty weak as far as Minami-ke sketches normally go. And the fifth and final sketch, with a grain of rice stuck on Maki's face and Natsuko in anguish as she tries to find a polite way to let Maki know, wasn't much stronger. It had some nice cameos from fan favorite Hosaka as well as Okaeri starlet Hitomi, but aside from that the sketch was pretty forgettable. (EDIT: Whoops! Skipped over the fourth scene, with the swimsuits!) The swimsuit scene was okay but staring at two lolis and Kana in their swimsuits for an entire scene isn't exactly my idea of entertainment. ^^; I did love the part where Uchida, one of my favorite characters, did the talking-into-a-motorized-fan thing that I used to always do when I was her age. (Still do it sometimes, in fact. ) See, it's the little things like this that make me love Sakuraba Coharu's material. I only wish the sketch had been overall as good as that one brief moment was. I think this is why they decided to do Omatase rather than just waiting for the anime to start in the winter. They wanted to cover some of the weaker scenes which previous studios had skipped over, hence why we traveled back in time to autumn and winter for some of the sketches. But they also probably wanted Season 4 to hit the ground running right from where Asread left off at the end of Season 3 (or more accurately, I guess, Betsubara). And so they created Omatase since it would allow them to go back in time for a few scenes from the past before creating a season that, like all the seasons before it, pretty much just goes straight in order through the calendar. Overall, I give Minami-ke: Omatase an 8/10 as a biased fan, perhaps more fairly a 7/10. It was good but it wasn't up to snuff with the series' greatest moments in Seasons 1, 2, or 3. Still, the new character designs offer some promise (though they will still take some getting used to) and it was great to see that most if not all of the original voice actors have reprised their roles. Speaking of Season 4, I'm pretty nervous-excited for it since it should bring with it some pretty big changes, most significantly the graduation of the seniors from Haruka's high school. What will become of Hayami and Hosaka? Only time will tell. All three of the Minamis have got a buffer grade (Chiaki goes to Grade 6, Kana to Grade 3, and Haruka to Grade 3) so we won't see any big shake-ups with them, presumably, but yeah ... Hosaka, oh Hosaka. What will become of you? Please tell me he becomes a sous chef at a restaurant in town and inches his way towards becoming Japan's next top chef.
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11-13-2012, 01:16 AM | #36 |
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So which sub ended up being the best? I'm all over this once I know that.
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11-13-2012, 01:51 AM | #37 |
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So far, I've only watched the first sketch of DeadFish's version. However, from just this one portion I can weigh in and let you get going on your own Omatase adventure! You're not going to believe this but ... the scripts are 100% identical. xfd; To be perfectly honest, I didn't notice at first. The giveaway was when both groups opted to translate itazura the exact same way and I was like "Hrm, I wouldn't translate it that way myself. " (Itazura is a trick or a prank. But they both translated it as "get harassed." ^^; ) So I then did a side-by-side comparison and ... sure enough, the scripts are 100% identical. What was funny is, I actually was more forgiving of the syntactical deviations when watching tonight with DeadFish than I was the other night with AhoDomo. Maybe because AhoDomo was my first and since Minami-ke is so precious to me I was in hyper-critical overdrive? ^^; Regardless, all the complaints I had the other night still stand ... but they bothered me a lot less this go-around.
So basically, you'll be making your decision entirely based on whose name you like more and which file size you prefer. Even the fonts used by the two groups are identical. So:
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12-11-2012, 08:46 AM | #38 |
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Yeah nothing spectacular in this special, except for Haruka in a succubus costume (damn Jimmeh). I'm in agreement about the quality of the animation and character designs: about as good as season 3, perhaps slightly better. Good to see Hitomi again, hopefully she'll be a regular character in season 4, since I enjoyed her episode in season 3 a lot, and was so disappointed that she vanished after that.
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12-15-2012, 01:35 PM | #39 |
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One more thing. You talked about how some of the scenes were inferior derivatives of classic bits. I love Hosaka, but the salad song was no curry song!
I read some of the manga a long time ago before the anime even existed, and thought it was okay but not great. That's why it was such a surprise that the anime was so good. But since I didn't keep up with the manga, I have no idea how much of season 2 and 3 was actually based off of it. Was this troubling mediocrity of a special conjured out of thin air by Studio Feel, or is it genuine manga material?
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12-15-2012, 04:54 PM | #40 | ||
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Quote:
Or at least, this is my conjecture. 'Cause I only own Volumes 1-4 and I still haven't read them all. Which brings us to ... Quote:
Lengthy, thorough answer to your question. Spoilers for people who haven't seen thru Season 3. Spoiler: show This is just looking at Volume 2. I only own Volumes 1-4 and don't have digital copies of the others, so I may or may not be able to answer whether Fuyuki and the bulk of Season 2 is made for TV or not. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of it were. ^^; But I'll find out in a bit. Until then, enjoy this meaty appetizer!
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12-16-2012, 02:20 PM | #41 |
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Ha. I'm picturing those clever bastards at Daume cherry picking all the best bits from the manga, then dumping the show on Asread who are left with B material scraps.
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01-05-2013, 02:25 PM | #42 |
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Sorry that I haven't checked the other volumes yet for content comparisons, Mcsweeney. I'll try to remember to do that soon.
But why then am I posting? UTW has announced they are picking up Minami-ke Tadaima. Fuck yes. While they're not as good as a.f.k.'s Strato was (that guy remains my hero ), they're still pretty good. Disappointed that Raze will likely not be on the ball for this one though owing to medical school and other obligations. They'll probably tap their translator who worked on Chuunibyou. That translator did an okay job, but still better imo (much better, tbh ^^; ) than Ayako's translator did with Minami-ke Season 1 thru 3, so this is definitely an upgrade. Let the good times roll!
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01-06-2013, 10:21 AM | #43 |
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Strato certainly is the GOAT of fansubbers. The perfect blend of accuracy, clarity, and localization when appropriate.
Out of morbid curiosity, I just checked The Triad's website to see if they finally released Kaiji episode 05. It looks like they are officially dead at last.
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01-06-2013, 03:10 PM | #44 |
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First episode of Tadaima has been watched. It was very umm....something? Honestly I didn't enjoy it too much. Alot of the humor felt forced. By the time the episode has halfway over, I was kinda hoping it'd end. Maybe it'll get better when the events pick up?
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01-06-2013, 11:08 PM | #45 |
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Four minutes in. Paused.
Subs: Wondering if I should drop everything and volunteer to sub / force my way into an existing group to sub / create my own fucking subs for Minami-ke. Would be a boatload of effort but the rewrites are really starting to get on my nerves at this point. They're nothing that bad, but it's just wtf unbelievable levels of rewriting because the words whose meanings they're altering are so goddamn basic. (Like, words you learn in your first year with the language.) When Chiaki explains her sisters' names: UTW's translated it as "_________ means 'Summer/Spring'. And true to her name, {she is} _________." But Chiaki doesn't say that at all. What she actually says is "True to her name, {Kana/Haruka} ____________." It's one sentence and there's no retarded "HEY GAIZ IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW DIS IS DA PUN IN DA MEENAMEEZ NAMEZES!" Why invent a sentence that isn't there? And why do it for a fanbase that cleaaaaaaarly already knows and loves these girls to pieces so much they don't want your patronizing and inadequate explanations of the girls' names' meanings? (Haruka doesn't mean "Spring" alone. It means "Spring Fragrance," 春香. Hence why simply saying "True to her name" alone with the Spring pun implied would have been better than lying to people saying "This is Haruka. Her name means Spring. And true to her name ...") Title of episode: it clearly says 春のはじまり,南家のはじまり. This reads Haru no Hajimari, Minamike no Hajimari or "The Beginning of Spring, the Beginning of Minami-ke" (on the one hand) simultaneously with "The Beginning of Spring, the Minamis' Beginning" (on the other hand). Regardless of the inevitable loss of the double word play there, why are we shifting はじまり "beginning", a Grade 1-level word, so badly as to mangle the title into "Spring is here, and so are the Minamis!" Yes, yes, the core meaning is still the same, but ... ugh! >_< Such sloppy translation work! I'm all for not being hyper-literal, trust me, but this is too lax, too rewritey! I dunno. Probably just tiny complaints. -.- This is my anime of 2013, no question about it, so I guess I'm as anal about the translation choices here as I was with Kaiji last summer. I'll try to tone it down, I promise. That ... or else I'll lose my patience so badly I really will drop everything and sub this myself. *gulps at how many hours that would take though given my perfectionism and the fact that I don't know every word* Show Proper: I am loving this! The opening sketch was very cute and was really a great way to get the new season started. Not sure if it's made-for-TV or what but it worked very nicely. Mcsweeney is sure to love the Kana-Chiaki dynamic in it, I'm sure. I love Chiaki's bit when Haruka walks into the room. The animation is so much better than I gave it credit for when we watched Omatase two months ago. I actually went back to re-watch some Season 3 episodes after those comments were made and I was shocked by just how poor Asread's animation was even in Season 3 compared with what we'd gotten to see in Omatase. And so far, I am seeing here that it looks just as nice as in the OAV. So that's great. There is just one small concern though, and that's that the new guys appear to be a studio who will shamelessly recycle cels ... as they're already doing it. The picture of Kana lying underneath the kotatsu with her "pincers" sticking out was lifted straight out of the OAV. I'm not gonna be nasty and call it "lazy" just yet, not when I understand the trade-off (prettier but fewer unique cels vs. uglier but more unique cels) and am appreciative of the beauty upgrade, but it's a little worrisome that they're already doing it as early as the season premiere. ^^; Anyway, those are my thoughts only four minutes in.
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01-07-2013, 12:36 AM | #46 |
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"OH. MY. GOD. OH. MY. GOD. " - me
Spoiler: show Since I'm paused and already typing, may as well add more comments. Spoiler: show Would love to talk more ... but I want to finish the episode! (Edit note: This post ended up taking a whole lot more time than I planned. ^^;;;;;;; Now back to the episode!)
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01-07-2013, 08:59 AM | #47 |
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The return of lazy Haruka!
The mediocre special coupled with bbb's chilly reception of episode 1 of the new season had me worried, but it turned out to be an okay episode. I detect some lesbo vibes too, and I don't watch anime while wearing a pair of yuri goggles. All the yuri undertones that APPARENTLY existed in Madoka went right over my head!
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01-07-2013, 02:52 PM | #48 | |
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That was pretty glorious.
Spoiler: show Quote:
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01-08-2013, 09:48 AM | #49 |
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I was not expecting THAT criticism. During my brief time with the manga, I recall several fanservice shots of Chiaki, so it's not like Feel is adding something that wasn't there already. This is why I originally wrote off Minami-ke as a mildly amusing manga for lolicons; it was not until the anime aired that I realized the story's true value. But Daume actually stayed less true to the manga by censoring all that.
If you mean to say that yes, the manga has lolicon tendencies, but that stuff should be eliminated from the anime version (like season 1 did), then sure. Still, considering this is anime we're talking about here, hebephilia of Kana is a minor crime. Asread did this too so it's not new (there was a number of gratuitous ass shots in season 2). If you're so anti loli, how come you think so highly of Today In Class 5-2? That's basically all about the naughty escapades of elementary schoolers!
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01-08-2013, 01:57 PM | #50 | |
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Quote:
Spoiler: show
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