Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Trailer
tetsuo13 writes "Bandai Entertainment Inc. in conjunction with Production I.G. has acquisition of the home video and broadcast rights in North America for the highly anticipated anime television series - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Created by Production I.G., original story by Masamune Shirow, directed by Kenji Kamiya, and music by Yoko Kanno Stand Alone Complex is the television series sequel to the animated film that redefined Japanese animation, Ghost in the Shell. A trailer was released a few short days ago for those that just can't wait!! Get it here (45 MB download)."
Okay. A link to a file which will no doubt be extremely popular has just been posted on the front page, and it's 45 fricking megabytes. The /. effect on a news site or whatever is one thing; being totally inconsiderate to the poor sod who's hosting that file is quite another.
Save it for the P2P nets, kids. This is a real good example of where we should be using them legitimately.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
OK Since I'm currently in Japan, currently speak Japanese, and am an insane anime fan (please don't slashdot my homepage) I can sort of speak on this subject with at least some sense that I know what I'm talking about.
I will agree that learning Japanese will benefit your enjoyment and understanding of Japanese, especially of Japanese culture. You can tell who these people are when they laugh at the scene in TenchiMuyo OVA ep1 where Aeka sneezes right after Ryoko talks (those who've seen it know what I'm talking about). Cultural nuances like that will fall on deaf... eyes, unless you provide liner notes or something. Also there are plenty of things in Japanese which just do not translate. There is no good way to translate the fact that certain people in Scyed talk in Keigo all the time. There is no good way to translate the pun in Puni Puni Poemi involving 80 gram breasts (and it's a brilliant pun).
However, that's absolutely no basis to say that learning Japanese is a necessary requirement for watching Anime. A good subtitler (like I am, I'd like to believe) will spend a whole lot of time to get things just right, and to communicate as much information as possible in the most natural way with losing as little from the original as possible. A good subtitling job can usually provide 95% of the meaning, tone, and nuance of the original. There are plenty of ways to translate things which give you a very good idea of what's going on, and to say that watching raw is necessary is just rediculous.
Would I not watch film just because I'm not familiar with Goddard's New Wave editing technique? No - that's silly. Would I not drive a car if I didn't know what the inner workings of my timing belt were? No.
Would I not use a computer if I didn't know the source code for my operating system by heart? No.
That's analogous to what you're saying. Even if you cannot get the complete 100% picture doesn't mean you can't enjoy it, grow from it, and then from that maybe decide it would be a good idea put in the effort to find out what that bit you're missing is.
Various other responses:
To the obvious troll. Jesus man, you'd learn C just so you could hack your operating system? Get a life!
About the mention of vocabulary in Anime: That's a bunch of bullocks. Anime's vocabulary, style, and everything else about its speech is generally on par with Japanese people. Take a look at American television. Does everyone there talk in really funky accents and use huge amounts of slang? No. Could you imagine Dan Rather saying "Next in dis hizzouz we be hitting up our home skillit down in Tehran for a breaking news up-dizzate!" Japanese television has people talking in just that - Japanese. Anime is no exception. In fact Anime is closer to the actual way Japanese people talk since most (almost all) of the time, it's fiction, and therefore the characters in it are suppose to be talking like real people, as opposed to the newscaster whose pronunciation has to be immaculate before they let him or her infront of the camera.
"I want to get more into theory, because everything works in theory." -John Cash