 |
| From https://ssl-gfx.filmweb.pl/po/99/28 /309928/7077103.3.jpg |
Director: Noriyuki Abe
Screenplay: Hiroshi Hashimoto
Based on the book series by Toru
Tsunemitsu
Voice Cast: Hilary Haag as
Satsuki Miyanoshita; Chris Patton as Hajime Aoyama; Christine Auten as
Keiichirou Miyanoshita; Greg Ayres as Leo Kakinoki; Monica Rial as Momoko
Koigakubo
Viewed in English Dub
The town of Ghost Stories is very haunted, beyond its bright colours a morbid
place. This is apparent in that, over twenty episodes, even if anyone does die
in the prologue for each episode, no one really bats an eye to this or any
potential supernatural scenario. Clearly they're aware of how many monsters and
ghosts occupy the world or are totally oblivious to this to the point of full
amnesia, something to take in mind as all the beings sealed away by Satsuki's
late mother have been reawaken due to major construction across town. Armed
with her mother's (sometimes unreliable) ghost journal, Satsuki with her
classroom friends must re-seal them all over again.
Just in the school, rebuilt but
with the original decrepit school house still nearby on the property, there's
enough to worry about, from demon hands forcing you to choose between red or
blue toilet paper to one student resurrecting a school rabbit from the dead,
let alone the entire town being occupied by the likes of headless bikers to
cursed tower blocks. It also exists with a mirror world to itself. Not the
mirror world of evil doppelgangers in one episode, who all wear glasses which
are their own eyes and play video games on TVs with white noise, but an entire
mirror world where one version has everyone being sincere and speaking in
Japanese, the other full of foul mouthed vulgar heathens filling the English
language full of laments of Christian
Slater's failed career.
It feels like déjà vu, but I
covered Ghost Stories before in its
Japanese dub, the studio Pierrot production
doing so poorly that it was felt that, when ADV
Films got the license in 2005, they had to allow them carte blanche with
the English dub to sell it to the States provided they kept character and ghost
names; so ADV Films gave the dub
director role to Steve Foster, a man
whose relationship with faithful translations of anime scripts is like oil to
water. Thus in his dark arts, creating two very different shows from the same
footage, there was the original version and this new one. The original could
frankly drag a lot; the problem, taking over four months to finish it, was that
Ghost Stories' plots were the exact
same, the group of lead characters encountering a new ghost or monster, trying
to find a way to stop it, highlighted in the English version to sometimes be
convoluted or the monster literally changing its mind at the last second, and
repeat for the next episode. The version which Bloom brought in with the voice actors, improvised, turned it into
a comedy with equal opportunities offensiveness.
Here, Satsuki (Hilary Haag) is no longer the plucky
schoolgirl, Haag's trademark high
voice portraying the brash and usually pissed off figure who, with a convoluted
family background, has a gay deceased mother, a father who is a drunk perv, who
finds herself constantly questioning her own sexuality, and has a little
brother Keiichiro (Christine Auten) who
has a learning disability and becomes incomprehensible in speech when he is
emotional, leading to one of the many moments the world of Ghost Stories has dated drastically in ten years plus with jokes
about this like using the term "shortbus".
Nerdy friend Leo (Greg Ayres) is now Jewish in this
version, leading to some tasteless humour, alongside the running gag that he
may be secretly gay. Hajime (Chris Patton) is now openly a pervert,
which considering what are inappropriate amounts of underwear shots,
considering Satsuki is a younger teenage girl in a children's show, is almost
asking for such a character direction for Hajime to go further by turning him
into a sex pest. Then there's Momoko (Monica
Rial), once the meek older girl Satsuki's mother keeps possessing, now an
Evangelical Christian, every stereotypical idea which keeps in mind that the
dub was recorded in the midst of George
Bush Jr.'s presidency and a lot of a Republican bashing which, alongside
pop culture references, are entirely stuck within 2005 in reference.
This cast, nigh, no one in the
town in this version of Ghost Stories
is above comments about race, gender, sexuality and lots of material that over
ten years later would have been flushed out when political correctness entered.
They still live in a town with Japanese kanji everywhere, but everyone is now
American, not only an excuse for cheap Asian jokes but with these amateur ghost
hunters to obsess over mid 2000s references, voice actors working at ADV Films and the failing career of Christian Slater; thus what was a doll cemetery
in the original for a cursed doll to be deposited to, where dolls of the dead
are kept, is now in this world a place where gay publishers spend their free
time recreating Slater films, the
doll of use to play Tara Reid in Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark. Before we continue, considering a lot of the
references I have made have talked about a lot of gay and lesbian jokes, I must
point out dub director Steve Foster
is an openly gay man, so he has a lot of jokes involving gay Hell's Angel's and
female ghosts looking like drag queens; he also uses the word "fag",
characters having lisping voices and gay panic jokes however, which may un-impress
LGBT viewers completely.
 |
| From https://img.sharetv.com/shows/episodes/standard/925822.jpg |
The mirror worlds are in a strange position as, in both cases, the repetition of the plot structures is the huge handicap both had, let alone that with its bright aesthetic style. Ghost Stories is caught between wanting to be creepy but still a lot lighter in mood than horror usually is, what with the opening credits sequence juxtaposing horror imagery with a nice day at the beach, the end credits infamously having an utter earworm by CASCADE, a great song but in lieu to the audience meant originally to be family friendly, with inappropriate sexual connotations in the lyrics and the chorus including the phrase "sexy, sexy". It was cursed by simply being in a minor work in horror anime, not atmospheric enough and the English dub even mocking animation flaws in forth wall breaking.
The original version is sincere
however - episodes are usually one-offs, but the nature of the mother's death
is a major part of the show, the talk about life and death covered in a couple
of episodes in a bitter sweet way that cannot help but be meaningful, even if
one is in the episode where a bunny rabbit is resurrected from the dead and
munches on everything that moves. Naturally, the other versions take the ever
loving piss out of these serious segments as well as eventually lose steam,
where even the sense of shock value is ebbing away in the final five episodes.
Its arguably, when they beeped the swearing originally, when they given up with
this and just have the expletives heard, a literal sense of giving up and with
the sense that the English version is time stamped by its references and
moments everyone is bond to cringe once at.
It does however have the more
interesting characters as, unlike the original world of Ghost Stories, a lot more is to be found in the reoccurring jokes
per characters that, even if they are stereotypes, they develop personalities.
Even one off characters get more sometimes when the script's bothered to be
more inventive - a creepy doll and its posse of toys is actually scarier when
they're arguing which horror film to recreate on our protagonist as well as
funny. Some of the characters get more from their voice actors and a few good
one liners. I haven't even mentioned that, alongside having to rid the entire
town of ghosts, Satsuki and Keiichiro's pet cat in the first episode is now
possessed by the great demon Amanojaku, whose Japanese actor Ryusei Nakao is also great but gets
interesting when Rob Mungle plays him
in the English dub as a know-it-all egotist, reemphasising that, as he now
enjoys licking himself as a cat, Amanojaku in both versions is an arse who
until the final moment changes his mind and helps the cast, the charm in how
much of a bastard he is and when he does sincerely show concern for the kids,
even if the ending episode in the English dub is him wanting an Oscar winning
performance before the show finishes.
The other standout, which
interlinks with the amusing and actually emotional relationship between Satsuki
and her late mother, is Momoko, who I was prepared to be a one note joke that'd
get tiresome. Thankfully as the show goes on, whenever Monica Rial drops her high pitch voice down and Momoko's mask slips,
some of the funnier lines of the entire show are to be found, not the
sophomoric targeting at Evangelical Christians but when one in this case is a
lot more complicated due to the script wanting to find more jokes for her. When
she has more base thoughts and, in the funniest episode about a ghost nurse,
has a more complicated back-story including an apple juice addiction. It's
still very childish, trampling on one of the episodes entirely about Satsuki's
mother, but it's the one moment the dub, which squanders itself for the most
part of dumb humour, actually gets somewhere interesting.
These two versions exist in an
odd couple fashion. More know and love the English dub, but time has
immediately dated ADV Film's work; it even had a second (accurate) English dub
from Aniplex, which just adds to the absurdity.
Personally, it actually gains much more when you watch both - a mere change of
dialogue literally creates two worlds from one, the first sluggish at points
but with a fun to it, the other profane, frankly lazy, but more fascinating as occasionally
it succeeds and when you know the source text its trampling on. Also, as I have
spent nearly half a year watching this series twice, forty episodes altogether,
it's stuck in my mind even if I tried to perform a mental exorcism.
 |
| From https://img.sharetv.com/shows/episodes/standard/925838.jpg |
No comments:
Post a Comment