The Shrine

Comes on Friday or Saturday at 9PM. Here's the voice actor preview.

http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/tv_shows/ ... index.html

Very robotic.....

Sounds like it suffers from first episode jitters. Some voice actors are like that. I'd be willing to give it time. (Samurai Champloo was the same way, but I like the voices now.)

Hmmm... the voice acting cast is hit and miss. Dave Wittenberg (Kakashi) is an experienced voice actor, who has played in GitS:SAC and Cowboy Bebop, while Maile Flanagan (Naruto) has only played one other role. Who the fuck is "STUDIOPOLIS"? They've only done one other production.

Watched the first two episodes. My review:

Most of the voices are fine, except Naruto. Maile Flanagan is an extremely inexperienced voice actor (only other job was a minor character in Astro Boy). Her female voice starts to crack into her male imitation of Naruto, not all the time, but there was one moment on the second episode where Naruto is talking to that grandson in the forest that really made me cringe. (Oddly enough, it was the first time I heard Naruto's US voice, and even on the second viewing, the voice was still way off at that point.) The voice is not quite right (though most of the time it's somewhat tolerable), and while I'll give her a chance to adjust, I really don't understand the idea behind hiring such an n00b voice actor for a really important role.

The other voices? A lot of them are just fine, including Sakura, the teacher, the grandson, etc., etc. The Fourth is a little too dark, but that's okay. I only heard Sasuke say one word in the first episode, and a few words from Kakashi from a commericial. Judging straight from those, it sounds like those voices could have been a little darker.

They have cut out the beginning and end songs with their own "rock" versions. I don't mind too much for the first season, as they sucked, but I kinda hope they keep the good ones. The in-episode music is the same, thank god.

Translation isn't too bad. They are translating jistu names, which is good, as it's a major part of the series. Most visual characters are translated, though I'd kinda like to know how they are going to handle Gaara and his kanji on his head. (It means love, and frankly, I was kinda pissed at the fansubs for not pointing this out until near the end of the Chuunin arc. It adds a whole new dimension of irony to his character when you first see him.)

I'm a little worried about the censorship so far. There has been no blood, though the only blood would have been the nose bleeds from the "Sexy Transformation Technique" (which shows a nonsensical nose plugs or the person wiping his nose scene afterwards). I guess they thought that there wasn't a point for that type of blood, but it really makes me worry about the later episodes. It -IS- TV-PG (V), which isn't TV-Y7, but it isn't TV-14, either. They are also showing episodes at 10 in the morning, so they might be lowering their target audience for this one. I really hope not, as it would mean a lot of censorship down the road.

Overall, it's not a bad translation, and it seems to be better than, say, first season DBZ or Kenshin or Inuyasha, but it could be a lot better. It's a shame that better care wasn't taken with the translation of the most popular anime in Japan. That sort of thing can produce bad word-of-mouth, and ultimately shitty DVD sales, which is the whole fucking point of this mess. DBZ survived eventually, but it took a lot of effort, and things like the horrid Frieza voice were never fixed. (Then again, Freiza looked like a fucking woman, so I guess the confusion was justified.) Naruto might be looking at a similar battle, but again, voice acting in the US, even the bad ones, have dramatically improved over the past 5 years.

There's just no fucking way that they would be able to handle the amount of blood, etc. that Naruto normally offers. I re-watched part of episode 6 and there's plenty of scenes that would be considered graphic for TV-PG. ShoPro is out of their fucking minds!