Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Evangelion 1.0 English Trailer Perspectives

Funimation has recently released the first trailer for their English release of the first of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies 'You are (Not) Alone'. Unlike the Japanese trailers, Funi's trailer is decidedly oriented towards the 'action' scenes, and gives a good indication of how they intend to market the movie to an American audience:

I'm sure Funi's second trailer will be better, and I hope they work very hard to clean up the dub acting as the trailer does not seem to capture the spirit of the movies or the English dialog present in the original series.

In contrast, the much better original Japanese trailer (set to 'It's a Beautiful World') focuses more appropriately on setting the tone for the characters and the tribulations they will face as they fight a hopeless battle against the Angels:

I also like the very tastefully done 'Fly Me to the Moon' Japanese trailer:

After all, Evangelion is NOT really an action or giant robot Anime, it's a brilliant Existential journey into the nihilistic nature and ultimate futility of life told from a uniquely Japanese perspective. Personally I think Funi will do better with it if they market it from that point of view rather than just another Hollywood style action flick. But what do I know. :-)

2 comments:

DJTyrant said...

Well, the dub is already done. I saw it at Anime-Expo and I thought it was pretty good, but I'm a dub fan. I think the only recording left is for 1.11 unless they've done it already. I had seen 1.0 previously (AX 2008, sub) but that was before I saw the TV series.

I thought the dub was good though but I don't think that will be the opinion of everyone ;)

Robert said...

I never was too happy with the dub Manga Video did for the Eva movies either. Funi's dub does not seem bad, but I don't think it’s up to par with the dub ADV did for the original series. I'll be watching it in Japanese, but I hope dub fans aren't disappointed with it. One thing ADV could produce were good dubs when they wanted to.

In any case, it should make for some lively discussions. What I mostly wanted to point out was that the way Funi has decided to approach the marketing seems to diminish it for what it is, and we WANT them to be successful with it's release as the R1 fate of the other 3 movies will be on the line.