Shadow Chronicles and "ethnic gesture"

[robotech_master]

(Click to enlarge.)

Hey, maybe they were separated at birth.

One of the things that Carl Macek talks about in the commentary track to Codename Robotech, the movie condensation of the first third of the Macross saga on one of the Robotech extras DVDs, is how they retimed and edited the animation as part of the dubbing process to eliminate what he calls "ethnic gesture." (And no, that doesn't mean mean how furriners give the finger, either.) He's referring to gestures, motions, or silly faces that are distinctly Japanese, or else specifically animé tropes; back then they wanted to make Robotech look as American as possible, or at least avoid confusing people. (Examples of the sorts of things that got eliminated included Annie's eyes becoming hearts when she saw someone handsome, or Rand bumping his head and making a big-eyed, big-mouthed face.)

This is, in part, why I find the above picture so amusing. Anyone who watches a lot of animé is probably familiar with the gesture that the above pictures represent: closing one's eyes and smiling to denote real or feigned embarrassment, often accompanied by sweatdrops either on the smiler or on the consternated person who is the object of the smile. And it's all over the place in Shadow Chronicles. I'm kind of surprised that we didn't get the sweatdrops, too—after all, we did in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles.

There are other little animéisms, too, like the fish-eye lens effect used on Alex Romero a time or two when he's startled into incoherence or asking if Marcus is out of his gourd. But the closed-eyes smile is the most obvious.

I'm not complaining about it, mind. Just really amused, given that part of the whole point of the original Robotech adaptation was cutting that sort of thing out. I would be inclined to guess the change is because the American public is more used to that sort of thing now, what with animé having made it so big over here in the last few years, but thinking it was an intentional change is probably too big of an assumption. I imagine it was just one of those things that happened in the animation process and nobody really even noticed it was there.

Comments

[kensuke-aida.livejournal.com]

You should read the Carl Macek article on Wikipedia. It amazes me how some people are still passionate about him and his methodology after all these years.

I also wanna note that I threw SSL a bone on an edit I did to both the "Macross Zero" and "Macross DYRL" articles. Part four of the show we did Monday night has been cited as an audio reference. I cleaned up the BS entry that HG is blocking the release of Macross Zero. That's why I specifically asked Tommy that question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macross_Zero
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Super_Dimension_Fortress_Macross

Unfortunately, I'm currently engaged in an edit war with some people as to what exactly was said in that interview and the exact verbiage that should be used. See the discussion and edit history on both.

- John