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Anime
May 18th, 2008 by witherow
My sisters and I have seen our share of anime, or Japanese cartoons, which can be extremely weird. Now, to be fair, I will say that I have watched some series that I rather enjoyed, so I’m not knocking the genre completely. But there are some things that are somehow lost in translation and end up sounding very funny to Americans.
Theme songs, for instance. For some reason, every Japanese cartoon has to have a theme song that may or may not be related to the content of the cartoon. This is strange to Americans, whose cartoon theme songs basically tell you the entire plot of the cartoon. That way if the simple scenarios and exaggerated characters confuse us, we can always look to the theme song to help us understand what’s going on.
Not so in Japan. If you have a cartoon about seven girls with blue hair who are trying to fly a spaceship to the Charmeleon Galaxy and make the perfect teriyaki recipe on the way, the theme song will be about riding bicycles through the snow with the boy you like and hoping he will smile at you and say hi. And unfortunately the lyrics don’t quite make sense in English. One series I’ve watched has a very catchy theme song with subtitles reading things like, “If I could be a bird, or the wind, will my dreams come true?” and “When my memories that frolicked made a pinky promise on love, ‘thank you’ distressed my heart.” (I am dead serious. That’s what the translation says.)
So one afternoon I thought I would sit down and write an anime theme song. Thirty seconds later (literally), I pushed back my keyboard and read my creation:
Like a tree, I know my true feelings
But cannot find my roots
But you are there with me
And I can smile
And we can go to the beach
Walking along the water
With pebbles in our pockets
And songs of wings in our heads
And I will cry and you will laugh
Love memory
I sent it to my sister Heidi, who is a die-hard anime fan. She laughed and then sent me the translation to another theme song I had heard. Mine actually made a ton more sense!
Then, of course, there is the extremely popular “Pokemon” series that took America by storm. Children all over the country were pitting monsters that look like fuzzy blue turtles against neckless animals with pincers coming out of their heads. This is all part of cultural awareness.
So one day Becky and I were emailing back and forth, and I happened to mention something about Lima, Peru. The conversation somehow degenerated into the following:
BECKY
Lima-chu, I choose you!
EMILY
*A pale green llama with soap powers jumps out of a ball much too small to fit its body*
BECKY
scenes continually cut from my face to your face to the strange streaks of color and then to the Lima-chu in all of its soapy glory.
EMILY
Everyone gasps three and a half times, taking turns to do so, before Lima-chu is interrupted by a commercial break.
BECKY
after countless commercials for other cartoons and unhealthy breakfast cereals, we recap all of the scene cuts and gasping. i then say something clever, such as “who will it be today, villain?”
EMILY
The villain, who has purple and orange-striped hair and a scar over one eye, merely yells “argh” in disgust and calls out his own monster, that looks like a giant olive with big, mean-looking eyebrows. The aforesaid villain then laughs maniacally.
BECKY
a contest of who can make the loudest and longest grunt now begins, until suddenly a third guy with a green mohawk jumps out of the woods and joins the grunting contest.
EMILY
The grunters then send Lima-chu and the Evil Olive and the mohawk guy’s monster, which looks like a dustpan with buff arms, after one another. It appears that the monsters are traveling toward one another at great speed, but actually they’re staying still while the striped background quivers slightly.
BECKY
the scene then cuts to a large
TO BE CONTINUED…
and then the credits roll on for endless hours filled with non-American names
EMILY
In the next episode, the olive monster will explode in a fantastic display of blue, red, and green flashing lights, which will send children nationwide into epileptic seizures.
BECKY
yet the show grows ever more popular…
Posted in Most popular posts, Poetry that oughtn't, Strange E-mails | | | 0 Comments
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