Tag Archives: anime

Nov 28 2012

This is Sternbild watches the dub (and other things)

Aki and I have been watching the English dub of Tiger & Bunny. Neither of us expected to get this into it, but here we are. Dying for episode 9 dubbed.

The start with the dub was pretty bumpy – which I think was a combination of the voices sounding unfamiliar after seeing the original so many times (read: we lost count how many times), and the voice actors themselves still settling into the roles. By episode three that had evened out. The translation has some minor issues and a couple of derps a fan will notice, but we can forgive those. As a whole it works, and the important character chemistry is still there.

The dub cast is also really good. Wally Wingert may not sound anything like Hirata, but he’s gotten the feel of the character down. Yuri Lowenthal is excellent as Barnaby. What really blew us away was Liam O’Brien as Lunatic. Yusa Kouji was awesome in the original, but the dub version is better in our opinion. Yuri Petrov and Lunatic actually sound different in the dub, and the choice of voice and style of speech for Lunatic make him more menacing. Or as Aki put it…

Aki_the_geek: NO LUNATIC YOU SHOULDN’T SOUND LIKE YOU WANT TO BANG EVERYONE

Yeah. I was going to add some snippets of our dub watching chats here but since they mostly consist of capslock keysmashing because of FEELS, I’ll just leave it at that. The dub has gone from being an excuse to rewatch the series to something we’re looking forward to every week.

Live-Action Buddy Cops

Earlier this month, ANN posted some news about T&B’s character designer Katsura Masakazu appearing in a TV series written by Nishida Masafumi. So far we’ve seen two episodes of Jikken Keiji Totori. Nishida seems to like the age gap theme, this time the rookie is the older of the duo. For a Japanese drama, Jikken Keiji Totori doesn’t really have that j-drama feel, it’s more Western. That’s not very surprising, though, Tiger & Bunny wasn’t the first Western style thing Nishida wrote. He’s also written and directed one of the few Japanese sitcoms filmed in front of live studio audience. The acting in Jikken Keiji Totori is pretty good, too. We’re really enjoying watching it, and if you like Nishida’s writing it’s definitely worth checking out.

(I tried to keep this short and sweet, because I’ve been down with a flu for the past week and that doesn’t really enhance my ability to stay coherent.)

Oct 4 2012

English dub impressions

We’ve been a bit quiet here at This is Sternbild recently. Mainly for two reasons: I spent the last two months on my bachelor’s thesis, and Aki was getting ready to go to Japan for a year. Now my thesis has been defended and Aki’s getting cozy with all the Taibani available in Japan so we’ll be more active. So, down to business.

The English dub of Tiger & Bunny premiered a couple of days ago on Viz’s Neon Alley PS3 service. I don’t own a PS3, nor do I live in North America where Neon Alley is available. There’s a rip on the interwebs that I watched instead. This is all my personal opinion, Aki hasn’t been able to watch the dub yet.

I think that when you rate the dub, you have to take into account that the English dub actors had an advantage over the original seiyuu. The original version was recorded with the seiyuu getting only the information necessary to play their characters correctly, they didn’t get any extra information until they received the scripts. The English VAs on the other hand have had the opportunity to watch the series and build their performance from that, and there’s a lot more background material available now. The Japanese version is also more subtle, the English dub is blatant with some things compared to the original. It’s a cultural thing, Japanese language just works differently from English. I think they also added some lines to make some things clearer or to substitute things that wouldn’t have worked in English.

Individual voices

This is a short version because Kotetsu’s got the most lines in the first episode, hard to judge the others based on just a few lines. Continue reading →

Sep 18 2012

Friend Rice Week 2012 – The Pictures!

It feels like it was only yesterday but Tiger & Bunny really ended a year ago… This year’s Friend Rice Week wasn’t as hectic as last year’s Friend Rice Event, but we still got lots of pictures. This time we were open also for cosplay and fan art, so there’s a lot more difference in the pictures than in the previous event. Thanks, and thanks again, everyone!

We hope everyone had fun cooking – and eating! Let’s believe heroes and support Tiger & Bunny!

On to the gallery! ->

Aug 19 2012

Hero Station special on BN Live TV

So, yesterday there was a 3 hour long special broadcast on Bandai Namco Live TV, all about what’s going on with Tiger & Bunny. To sum the whole thing up in one picture:

Yep. I think I need to work on my stamina, I was starting to be really out of it after the first two hours. I was gonna write this all down yesterday but I’d promised to do some stuff in the evening and I just couldn’t brain any more Japanese at that point anyway.

A lot of stuff they showed was things we’ve seen before or already knew about, but there were a few new and interesting things:

My Private HERO iPhone/Android app. Basically you can have Kotetsu or Barnaby in your smartphone and he’ll react to things, like movement. If you poke him, Kotetsu will laugh and Barnaby will act coldly. Ozaki himself showed the app. I’m really hoping it’ll be available on Android market because DO WANT. (They also showed actual gameplay of the PSP game and it does look really good!)

They showed videos from the stage play rehearsals and video messages from the cast. The important thing about the stage play TIGER & BUNNY THE LIVE is that you can pay to watch it online. (I’m ashamed to admit I actually completely missed this fact during the broadcast, I think I was trying to save a screencap when they talked about it and I was too distracted to notice it.) After poking a while around the site where you’ll be able to watch it I concluded that you’ll need to make an account at Bandai Channel before you can order it (which is pretty simple process) and you can then pay the ticket by credit card. I am not sure if the stream is region blocked, though. Normally Bandai Channel is only available in Japan, but Bandai Namco Live TV is also available overseas. The player on the stream page loads for me, so that seems to indicate it’s not restricted. The stream is of the performance on September 1st, and it’s a live stream as far as I can tell, so it won’t be available on demand. If you buy the ticket in advance you get a discount.

There’s going to be a live viewing event with the Tiger & Bunny -The Beginning- World Premiere, and it’ll include performances by the artists whose songs are featured in the movie. But that’s not all, there’ll also be a Hero Song Live, with the character songs.

Ozaki had a report of his trips to Anime Expo (in the US) and Japan Expo (in France), and they showed the same sample clip of the English dub we’ve seen before. They also talked about Namjatown café event, and merchandise and again merchandise.

If you missed the stream yesterday, there’s a recording of it available here. The caps I managed to take during the broadcast are in our Facebook album.

Cute cast being cute.