flemmings | (no subject)

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shiny_monkey I am currently watching Kyou Kara Maou, which is evidently being rebroadcast somewhere that doesn't have commercials. This is nice. It's about the only thing that is nice because otherwise I have never /met/ a more irritating anime; or rather, one that irritates in this particular way.

I don't know if it's a problem with the rebroadcast or if the original series was like this, but I haven't heard such mushmouth from a bunch of Japanese since my last viewing of Seven Samurai. Given when and where Seven Samurai was filmed I'm not surprised the sound sucks, but what's KKM's excuse? The dialogue isn't that difficult, what I can make of it: certainly not on the hair-tearing-out level of certain scenes in Gankutsuou; but I'm constantly straining my ears to hear what people are saying. It's like sitting in the dead spot in the theatre- nothing registers.

And then of course there's the FRIGGIN' SOUND TRACK. Note that it takes a lot to drive me to capslock, but KKM's LOUD AND INTRUSIVE sound track has done just that. It never stops. It never shuts up. And it blares in the foreground while the thin-voiced mush-mouthed VAs twitter in the back.

And what drives me to distraction is the fact that I shall go on watching KKM, cursing the production all the while, because the series is too good not to. But argh. Just argh. Arghity argh argh argh.

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Hrm. I would have to wonder at the source quality -- the fansubs I watched have been crystal clear (first DVD just made it in, so I'll have to compare at some point). Mushmouthed is definitely not something I'd've thought to have ever heard Saiga Mitsuki (Wolfram) described as, and the cast as a whole is generally delightful.

The other series on the tape are quite clear- well, Tactics is quite clear: Gankutsuou has these little vocabulary problems, as I say. But KKM is such that I still don't know which character is which. However after googling- Wolfram has a high-pitched voice that breaks through the dead spot the way sopranos do in opera houses. It's the tenors that get lost.

Ah. It might be that several of the cast members have voices I recognize 'on sight' as it were (Condrad and Gunther initially -- and now Yuuri), so perhaps it just seemed clear to me.