Pokemon Anime General Discussion

[Radiant Hero Ike]

3 hours ago, precita said:

I stopped watching the dub by the end of DP, and that's when a lot of people did.

To this day I have no idea what the dub voices of Iris/Cilan, or Serena/Bonnie/Clemont sound like because I didn't see any dub eps of those seasons. LOL.

I did think the DP dub was semi-decent, they still removed too much of the Japanese music but for the first full series with the new voice cast it was alright. Dawn, Paul, Zoey, etc. all got good new voices. Still the Japanese version is much better.

4kids dub was waning in its later years but it was still funny. May's dub voice by Veronica Taylor is still to this day one of my favorite female voices in the show.

 

Dub Cilan is the guy who voiced Sonic right before Roger took over, Jason Griffith.

[PC the Hedgehog]

I never really cared for Griffith as Sonic, but my gosh, I can't even think of Cilan without hearing Griffith's voice. Guy was an absolute perfect casting choice for that character.

[Big Panda]

Meanwhile he's voiced in Japanese by freaking Light Yagami off Death Note.

[E-122-Psi]

Meanwhile James and Meowth are voiced by Jimmy Zoppi, none other than Mr Find The Computer Room himself.

The altered soundtrack tends to be a big off put for many fans of the original (though in DP's fairness it did have some episodes done by a different studio that kept the soundtrack COMPLETELY intact, silent moments and all, not even early 4Kids did that). BW improved, though XY took a nose dive with SM being largely the same (though SM arguably is better at keeping more fan-nostalgic tracks like the Sinnoh and Kalos battle remixes).

The dialogue and actors are also hit and miss. They keep slapping in corny one liners or slang with some of the characters (eg. Ash speaking in 'totally awesome' dialect non-stop, Team Rocket making bad alliterations and rhymes). They're not good at variation in actors either, most of them sound like standard 'fake kids' voices, perpetually shrill and ditzy with no volume control, even ones that are supposed to sound soft spoken and sophisticated like Lillie. You can tell some of them are genuinely trying, but with the direction and material they're given, it doesn't quite work out.

That said I hear that some of the dub actors are victims of cyber bullying from some purist fans, which I do think is going too far with the ordeal.

[Red]

Ash's current voice actor, Sarah Natochenny, is a victim of cyber bullying as well. When she was announced as the voice of Ash for the 20th movie, Veronica Taylor purists swarmed her Facebook page with hateful messages and said she doesn't belong in the series.

[PC the Hedgehog]

I think both the voice cast and acting in the current series are pretty good. Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld, voice of Bonnie and Sophocles among others, is a personal fave of mine.

There are a couple bad voices in the dub, though, particularly Lillie. Not a bad actress, I guess, but she sounds like she's trying way too hard to sound like a cute lil' girl.

Oh, and Jessie. You'd figure after ten years Michelle Knotz would have made the voice her own, but she still sounds like a bad Rachel Lillis imitation.

[Big Panda]

The actors are good enough (except for Zoppi). Too bad they're giving such dumbed down scripts to work with.

[Big Panda]

Snippet of the new Pokemon theme:

[Big Panda]

My thoughts on I Choose You:

Overall, I liked it a lot. The story and the way it was paced was different from past movies, and it was a change I appreciated greatly. I also just flat out enjoyed seeing a new twist on Ash's early adventures. I didn't even mind too much about Misty and Brock not being there. I actually becamerather fond of Sorrel for reasons I can't really pinpoint. I can't say the same for Verity unfortunately, who was literally discount Misty, right down to the water Pokemon affinity.

The movie was also really bloody weird in a couple of places (in a good way), one of which is that climax that just about everybody has talked about, the other being a sequence where Ash has a nightmare where he lives in a world without Pokemon and goes to school like a normal kid.

The downsides are mostly dub-only, like the innevitable replacing of the background music, though the music they replaced it with wasn't particularly bad, just felt meaningless since the Japanese soundtrack was new renditions of old music ("Tears after the cloudy weather", "Meetings and partings", etc.)

Speaking of dub music, I'm really torn over my feelings for the new rendition of the classic Pokemon theme. On one hand, the instruments and backing vocals are heavily based on the original version, which is great, but the singer, while not bad, just lacks the passion that the original singer had.

My biggest disappointment with the movie, which is again dub-only, and related to the music change is the ending theme.

The ending theme in the Japanese version was a song called "Theme of Oracion ~ Let's Walk Together", sung by the singer who sang the ending theme to the Jirachi movie, and to the melody of "Oracion" from the Darkrai movie. I personally think it's a beautiful song.

I knew they weren't likely to keep the song in (even though I believe it would've been a perfect opportunity to do a throwback to Jirachi's English ending theme by doing an English version), but the absence of the song ended up stinging all the more because the song they made in its place was soooooooo fucking boring, not to mention incredibly lazy: they didn't even bother to write lyrics for the whole thing, the majority of it was instrumental.

Also, the cinema showings came packaged with the first three episodes of Pokemon Generations interspersed with those CGI skits of the Alola starters, followed by a random music video of the movie's Pokemon theme using clips from the previous movies. These all came after the ending credits by the way (though I heard they came before in some places).

[E-122-Psi]

3 hours ago, Ernest-Panda said:

The downsides are mostly dub-only, like the innevitable replacing of the background music, though the music they replaced it with wasn't particularly bad, just felt meaningless since the Japanese soundtrack was new renditions of old music ("Tears after the cloudy weather", "Meetings and partings", etc.)

Out of curiosity, did the Japanese version have renditions of any old game remixes like 'Burning Battlefield' (Kanto Trainer theme)? If so I'd be way more steamed about the dub replacing them.

[Big Panda]

16 minutes ago, E-122-Psi said:

Out of curiosity, did the Japanese version have renditions of any old game remixes like 'Burning Battlefield' (Kanto Trainer theme)? If so I'd be way more steamed about the dub replacing them.

I'm not 100% sure. I think that piece that's a remix of the Kanto wild encounter theme is in there.

Also, I realised they did actually keep one Japanese piece:

 

[Big Panda]

Holy shit we're here already?!

[SenEDDtor Missile]

3 minutes ago, Ernest-Panda said:

Holy shit we're here already?!

If it's going like that, I get the feeling that they're going to transition from Sun/Moon to UltraSun/UltraMoon for the adaptation.

[Radiant Hero Ike]

I actually really liked the English ending song for I Choose You. It was sung by the girl who voices Serena, too.

That said, I haven't heard the JP version yet, so IDK.

[Big Panda]

 

[Kevin]

3 hours ago, SenEDDtor Missile said:

If it's going like that, I get the feeling that they're going to transition from Sun/Moon to UltraSun/UltraMoon for the adaptation.

That wouldn’t be surprising since the anime tends to adapt quickly to the game’s plots.

[Red]

Going to be seeing I Choose You! tomorrow! I'm pretty pumped for it. I heard Generations episodes are being shown before the screening, but not sure if that's for every showing or just some. I hope Australia airs them!

[Big Panda]

5 hours ago, Red said:

Going to be seeing I Choose You! tomorrow! I'm pretty pumped for it. I heard Generations episodes are being shown before the screening, but not sure if that's for every showing or just some. I hope Australia airs them!

Or they'll be shown after. It varies in some places. The showing I saw (in the UK) had them after, but a friend in Belgium said his showed them before.

[Kevin]

Well the 1000th episode of Pokemon aired last aired things are getting quite tense!

It looks like I'll have to wait for the TV airing of "I Choose You" since they're showing it at theaters that are pretty far away from me at inconvenient times.

[PC the Hedgehog]

Just got back Pokemon: The Movie 20. What a mess. It's like they mashed a bunch of different ideas together, threw in a (surprisingly few) select moments from the original series to pander to longtime fans, and blended them together into a sludgy mess that satisfies neither old or new fans. None of the new characters brought anything to the table that Brock, Misty, and Gary couldn't. Ed Goldfarb's dub music was surprisingly good, but nothing compared to all the great classic music the Japanese version had that they completely stripped away save for the ending. The worst part is, the fleeting moments of nostalgia I did have were swallowed up by intense apathy. Instead of feeling nostalgic, I was mostly...bored.

On the plus side, that was the best rendition of the original theme since, well, the original. And I loved all the cameos during the credits.

[Big Panda]

I take it the majority of you saw that music video/movie clip compilation after the ending credits right?

If so, who else noticed they left out movies 4-7?

[PC the Hedgehog]

6 hours ago, Ernest-Panda said:

I take it the majority of you saw that music video/movie clip compilation after the ending credits right?

If so, who else noticed they left out movies 4-7?

Could've sworn I saw a clip from Jirachi.

[AdventChild]

Surprisingly, Double Toasted just recently talked about the recent Pokemon movie, but not in a review sense mind you, but to a particular scene which I'll post it in spoilers as a warning for those not yet seen:

Spoiler

 

 

[Big Panda]

13 hours ago, AdventChild said:

Surprisingly, Double Toasted just recently talked about the recent Pokemon movie, but not in a review sense mind you, but to a particular scene which I'll post it in spoilers as a warning for those not yet seen:

  Hide contents

As people said in the comments, it sounds like an error on the dub part for not making it clear that it was supposed to be Ash imagining it.

 

First of all why is it only the dubs fault if the intention wasn't clear?

Second, I thought it was plenty clear

 

the speech occurred after Ash had gotten the shit knocked out of him from the combined attacks, and we heard it while looking at Pikachu through Ash's blurred perspective, implying Ash was delirious or something.

[PC the Hedgehog]

It was like an inoffensive 5-second moment. No idea why everyone seems to be getting so up in arms about it when there are so many other things wrong with the film.