I managed to whip together a third quiz quicker than anticipated, and I’m terrible at keeping finished content waiting, so here we go again! As always, it’s 10+1 sound clips from various anime, and the goal is to post a comment with all voice actors named correctly. Bonus fun points for getting the characters and anime right, but no worries if you can’t. Only one try, though.
It took no more than 30 minutes for the readers of this blog to solve my precious quiz yesterday, so I’ve made a new one, which will hopefully take slightly longer to puzzle out. Either way, it’s clear to see that anime has a lot of very unique voices working in the business.
Again, I’ve chosen 10+1 clips, but this time I made an effort to pick different series, since there seems to be an interest in identifying the characters in addition to the actors. The next quiz will probably be posted some time next week, and if you happen to have sound clips of your own you think would fit in a quiz like this, feel free to mail them to me, 5-10 seconds in 128 kbps mp3 format. Include actor name, anime series, and character name, please.
Ever since I started studying Japanese and watching unsubtitled anime, I began to notice that I could recognize more and more actors by the sound of their voice. Eventually it became a hobby of mine to watch all the new shows in a season and try to identify as many voice actors as possible, and while I admit it’s a tiny bit geeky, I’m now able to discern some people from a single breath.
To see if there are other people like me out there, I asked Omni if I could try to make a new section, and this is it: a voice acting quiz with 10 (+1 bonus) sound bites taken from various anime. The challenge is for you to listen to each clip and identify which seiyuu it is, and then write the ones you got in a comment. I’ll post the correct answers in the next quiz, and give a special mention (!) to whichever poster got it right first. You only get one chance, though, so make sure before you hit submit!
Omni’s response to watching the clip was that it was too easy, so I’ll be happy to receive feedback, and comments on whether you think this is a fun addition to the blog.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if all those sexy hotness animu characters existed in real life?
I know I’ve been posting a lot of PVs lately, but there have just been a lot of good songs and videos that have gotten my interest. May’n’s latest falls into the former category. You may remember that I wasn’t too keen about Shangri-la as a series, however one of the bright spots was the May’n opening song. It’s very catchy, and May’n shows off more of the vocal talents that we heard in Macross Frontier. The title also has some interesting background to it because it’s based on an old poem of the same name by Yosano Akiko. The PV, unfortunately, isn’t that great since it just has May’n singing and dancing, and there’s not a lot of variety in camera shots. I realize of course that I’ve been spoiled by some good videos lately, so your mileage may vary. In fact, when Divine saw the video, he mentioned that he was content with just watching May’n dancing in that outfit for four minutes. In any case, I love the song, but the PV not so much, and I’m still not that inclined to find the time to watch Shangri-la.
The single for Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare is already out.
A commenter on the Negai post last week reminded me of some of the past groups I’ve posted about, and one of those groups put out a really good song recently. MONKEY MAJIK is a band that I talked about a few years ago but haven’t been paying attention to for a while. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, they’re a group led by a pair of Canadian brothers who speak Japanese. Aishiteru is the aptly-titled theme song they perform for the NTV drama Aishiteru (which incidentally I hear is quite good). It’s a really nice love song that, like their others, is a mix of English and Japanese. The PV was very interesting to watch too because it’s a combination of papercraft-esque animation with ragdoll characters and real life. I’m not sure I completely understand it, but it appears to tell the story of a guy in love who falls out of heaven, gets eaten by a fish, and the girl saves him in the fish market. I know it sounds like of stupid, but I thought it was worth the watch and definitely the listen. I’m even curious about the drama now.
The single for Aishiteru is due out June 10th, 2009.
Edit: Thanks for all the messages of support – it really means a lot to me.
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In the comments of Jaalin’s Queen’s Blade post, a number of people were wondering how the other channels would censor the show since AT-X was going to be the only one airing the uncensored version. Well, the first episode aired on Chiba TV today, and the answer is that they made good use of cropping, bright glow, and fog, as you can see in the images above. A poster on 2chan even made some comparison images (NSFW). It was kind of amusing just to see how much censoring had to be done for this show, but I can’t say I’m surprised. To answer my own question though, I guess the series still has a very strong voice cast, and if you can’t watch the uncensored version on AT-X, then this might be better than nothing. As for me, I could care less about the plot or the nudity, but what I am curious about is what the absolute limit that AT-X will let them show is. I suspect that it might be even more hentai-ish than just what was in the first episode given how the promo videos had tentacle monsters.
So I was listening to the radio while working on the Spring Preview, and GReeeeN‘s 「刹那」 (Setsuna) came on. The song immediately stuck in my head, and so I went and looked up the PV for it since it’s a very recent song. To my surprise, the PV was actually really amusing. It’s one of those music videos that actually tells a story, and in this case, it takes on a tokusatsu/sentai flair with the redemption of a washed-up hero. It’s cheesy, but that’s what’s so fun about it, and I enjoyed it enough that I thought it was worth sharing, so here it is.