Dub Talk 257: Sonny Boy

0:03 all right class i'm mr roots and i'll be your sub for the day the old guy in the ray-ban said you were a dusty bunch but frankly if i could handle those freaky ass kids in shadow's house last week there should be a cakewalk i got three rules for you ankle biters rule number one shut your yap disclaimer this episode may contain adult language in situations that aren't appropriate for all audiences listener discretion is advised rule number two shut your yeah this episode also contains spoilers for the series sunny boy and possibly other anime and films keep this in mind as you listen rule number three you should know by now it's shutter yep finally opinions expresser those are the individual participants it may not reflect those of the dub talk podcast as

0:48 a whole okay you kids keep changing my hair the dog into sugar water so you're getting a video today but it's actually going to be educational take that you little thirds enjoy the show pull up my little noodies there we go hello and welcome to a brand new episode of dub talk show where a bunch of nerds get together talk about the latest and greatest in anime dubs and voice over um i am your host tonight patrick aka roots of justice and tonight for my special birthday episode i feel so old

1:34 um i am joined tonight by one andrew howdy guys how you doing jet you do i'm on hey and the show we're covering tonight is none other than the summer i can't exactly probably can't call it a hit but oh man does it hit uh sunny boy sleeper hit seems an apt term one of those cult classics that'll be talked about religiously in like 10 years you didn't watch sunday boy shave on you we also know we're

2:30 so this is going to spoil the whole show but this is secretly going to be a thesis statement about doing this i'll also partially admit yeah you are here right now because i really really really wanted you to watch the show you did give me an opportunity to watch the show i do appreciate it like we reeled you in because we wanted you to listen to the soundtrack oh yeah which just because i don't know when i'm gonna get to bring it up did you know shinichiro watanabe was the music advisor for sunnyboy yes i did that makes perfect sense and you could absolutely tell because that man has a godly taste in

3:16 music he has the good stuff he knows the good [ __ ] so what's this about i'm glad you asked because i happen to have a plot description right here courtesy of a n empty classrooms boring days it was supposed to be a normal summer vacation just like any other suddenly the school begins to drift through another dimension and 36 boys and girls are left there awakening to their supernatural abilities amidst a whirlpool of questions that come to mind one after another survival in a supernatural world begins man that was just the elevator pitch that like shingo natsume told to producers and then just lied to them

4:05 and he was like i didn't lie i only told you half truths there's 36 boys and girls and they have to survive is it a death battle anime uh yeah sure or whatever well sure whatever gets me funded death battle anime shingo natsume let's go yeah so basically the same thing you can harvest to do every time he puts in the new show and somehow people keep falling for it you think bless his heart they all think they're going to be the ones who get ikahara to do a normal thing they're all convinced but yeah i mean penguin was like the

4:51 most the closest i think he didn't even that's like too abstract for most people anyways shingo natsume is a name y'all should really be familiar with by this point yeah i think yeah i need the most surprise yeah i think i mean it's not surprising but it's like the more i think about it it's like that bad has a lot of range of the director it's pretty impressive he's it's kind of amazing how many friends in high places he has and how good wait did he write the script for this whole show too yeah he wrote it yeah this is this is his baby through and through wow yeah so in case you want to see pure unfiltered shingo natsume

5:38 this is sunny boy and it it's great because the show feels like it was made 15 20 years ago and then somebody at mad house just finds it in a vault and it's just like oh this is so perfectly good let's put it on air so what you're saying is it kind of feels like an era from a time long ago yes like it feels as out of time as the actual students in this drifting classroom are hmm [Music] i i have some thoughts about that that i'll probably get into later

6:24 yeah yeah we're spending more time talking about the show than the actual dub but that's probably going to be the whole move tonight i feel oh i actually we'll we'll get to it so in a conversation about anime dubs um we do kind of have to segue into who worked on it uh so let's start with the crew uh directing the show is alexis tipton um and it's been strongly implied that sarah ragsdale also provided assistance to some degree um it's not listed on a n but a couple

7:11 of the actors have mentioned her in their their tweets of gratitude for being cast on the show i'm willing to vouch for it i think it's i think [Music] i did kind of want to put in that little disclaimer ju just in case we're wrong so that if i need to take an l i'll take an l okay yeah it's perfectly reasonable i have long since grown up from the days of 91 days um speaking of 91 days um doing the scripts for sunny boy are none other than tyler walker and matt shipman um in terms of directorial work for

7:56 alexis tipton you would know her from such things as restaurant to another world uh the dragon goes house hunting and this season you can hear her work in occupies sailor uniform oh yeah she is um sarah sarah ragsdale i actually could not find any adr production credits for um so if she is doing some sort of directorial work this is probably her debut which good job um tyler walker's scriptwriting you would know from such things as ace attorney uh dr stone and this season um along with ben phillips you can see his work in miss kurozu from the monster development department

8:42 um and matt shipman who did some script writing for episodes four five and nine of this show um you would know his work from things such as back arrow i know kusabi and he did write a couple episodes for another shingo natsume project boogie pop and others all right so let us get this discussion rolling and i think i'm gonna start it with um let's start with jet okay um yeah uh uh yeah uh directed why they think this dub is uh really solid that's right this is definitely uh that this [ __ ] was definitely more abstract art than like dramatic so

9:28 they simply didn't call for you a lot of like very uh theatrical performances in a sense that's a it kind of go it got a call from performances that were more i guess fairly down to earth in a way and this show definitely deliberate on that end as a lot of the characters had a pretty natural sounded pretty natural um definitely it's like more or less gave off the vibe that yeah like these characters or like you know actual teenagers but maybe like what you know like maybe you know one or two characters who's had like maybe a little deeper than i should have but otherwise like but otherwise it was pretty sweet across the board on that end and oh and uh script wise but also pretty happy with how that turned out as

10:15 i i did i didn't finish watching the entire show in japanese but i didn't get at least up to episode 8 and like from what i was able to observe um type uh tyler walker matt shipman's adaptive script is not a direct one to one but it is pretty exciting but it is pretty close which in any other instance might be like a little questionable but it but again this is like abstract art so for this kind of shoe i feel like it's definitely better to stick to the script as much as possible because you know uh lots of hidden meaning gained like a lot of dialogue and all that good stuff so that definitely very important that they get a lot of that intact but at the same time you know uh they still did a good job of making sure that like a lot of the

11:02 conversations between characters flow naturally which is oh it's a plus and um yeah um this is a pretty well put together democrats board job to everyone okay um why don't we move on to andrew then so this is a very interesting show and a very interesting dub um so this isn't i don't know how to describe it in that this show is very very dense this is the kind of thing where i feel like the material and subject matter is extremely it's artsy and dense in a way that is

11:48 very fascinating but almost a little bit intimidating so to speak i i i think that the i'm a big fan of like what i heard of the sub because i thought it was very interesting but i also got the feeling that for me this was a much easier show to digest and process in english mostly just because i felt like i was able to parse it and like vibe with it a lot easier and also man is this show a looker man is this show a pure looker this is a much bigger ensemble

12:33 than i expected it to be but for the most part there's a lot of one-off and occasional incidental characters throughout so it's got a pretty big cast but it's mostly like a lot of like side or secondary characters with a cor the core of the heart and soul being like maybe like a handful of like 10 to 12 actors but everybody sounds like they're doing their best they're giving it their all and it's a solid effort there's a couple i think that are a little are a little awkward at first or something i thought sounded a bit older than i would have assumed for what our middle school characters but i don't think anybody gave a bad or particularly poor performance at all um i think yeah no the direction and the

13:19 script really complement the show extremely well giving a lot less i feel like i'd say a lot of these are way less anime performances and a lot more just down to life performances which i think worked to its favor of the characters and the show and dub as a whole like i said i i i think this is a very solid dub and i really enjoyed my time with it i think alexis and her team did a very very bang-up job all right um i'm on what are your thoughts i'm really impressed by this dub

14:06 because i'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here we never go on tangents here at dub talk how dare you i know uh i when i started watching this show and this was not an impression that stayed throughout per se just because the show does go places but when i started watching it it reminded me a lot of a movie i'd see are any of you familiar with a movie called last year at meerum bad no i'm familiar with the name i just haven't seen it uh early 60s french movie notoriously like very abstract and very unwilling to give details the plot is nominally about a man and a woman who had met at this hotel that's like a former you know palladial glacial mansion in france they may or may not have

14:52 consummated an affair the movie does not tell you this uh and this is then like a year later having now met again and the woman's husband is maybe husband is maybe there um it is not very interested in linear narratives or even telling you what year you're supposed to be in uh there's a famous shot that looks really wrong and you're not sure why until you realize that what's wrong is that all the people have shadows but none of the buildings do this reminded me a lot of that it's very self-consciously artistic and advanced in a way that at least in this form to be honest i'm not used to seeing an anime in general like there's a lot of experimental anime but it doesn't feel like it's it's drawing on the tradition that i think i got from

15:38 watching this initially this is very much something that has a lot of big ideas but also isn't it's honestly trying to purposely alienate you but it also knows what it wants to say and if it like it'll it'll give you some things to help follow it along but on some level it doesn't it's not particularly concerned with whether or not you get it on the first or second time around um that sounds like something really hard to adapt because usually you have things to latch on to uh there's stuff to latch on to here but a lot of it's way more like mushy for lack of a better word in a good way um yeah i was just really impressed by this this this dub is really well put together i think it's really well acted

16:24 and written and directed despite being a excuse me um just despite being something that i don't know if it necessarily lends itself to being an easy adaptation necessarily just because there's a lot that you know there's plenty here that you the viewer have to kind of figure out on your own in order to make sense of what's going on and i feel like that is doubly so if you're trying to adapt this into another language where you have all sorts of just new considerations to consider like ah we have this this line of dialogue is this something is this something more pretentious like can we mistranslate this and just close off a bunch of the narrative by complete accent oh dear this is this is yeah like this i'm impressed by how good this came out just because this is clearly

17:10 a hard job to do uh and i have a lot of kudos to alexis and her team for being able to pull this off this is yeah this is not an easy feat [Music] um one thing that i do want to mention that hasn't been said yet is um not only does it do a really good job of sort of covering some of the more avant-garde aspects of the actual series um it actually does a very very adequate job of feeling like a dub out of time um that feels like a central theme of the show itself

17:58 it does not play with linearity like at all um and this this dub despite having actors who really kind of broke out in recent years um kind of in a similar vein to the um to the space battleship yamato reboot um this dub feels like it easily could have just been unearthed in funimation's archives like hey this is this is from like 2010 seems pretty good let's run it like it flows really well the conversation this isn't really that much of a

18:45 kind of quote-unquote snap and banter kind of dub um it's very conversational i think i also remember seeing actually because i i think i remember it came up during uh because there was a making of sunny boy video that was posted on funimation's youtube i think uh natsume himself mentioned i don't think there's any internal narration at all throughout sunnyboy and if there is it's extremely minimal okay there is one there is one episode that has internal narration and it's literally because one of the characters powers is

19:32 listening to monologues um oh yeah yeah okay yeah but i'm pretty sure everything else is either conversational or shown by like character body language yeah um the show's episodic nature lets it tell really beautifully intricate stories that you really don't appreciate until it's over and you've kind of given it about half an hour to an hour to process um and the dub is just really great at like just feeling like middle schoolers having conversations about all these weird

20:20 situations going on um it's in a way it's really hard to describe which sums up a lot of the show um um but i think for now um we're gonna go ahead and move to our first group of characters um this will be our student council um they are three elected body uh three members of the elected body um and in the first episode they sort of act like antagonistic forces but over the course of the show

21:07 they sort of serve the role of keeping the kids relatively in order but also letting them explore and figure things out um so we have cap hoshi and machi actually on the subject about them seemingly being antagonistic i think the biggest shocker to the show is that hoshi was not a more sinister character yeah oh oh this this yeah what who's who's the guy from devil man uh are you talking about rio yeah this rio [ __ ] that was that was the absolute vibe he came when you show up it's like uh you're gonna be a problem aren't you

21:52 jesus christ and the surprise twist is that he's actually like a moral center for a lot of these characters to the point he effectively he effectively is like a savior to most of them yeah i don't remember what the exact line was i remember like i said i remember like the interview goes out to me and went like he described and when he described hoshi i think he specifically described him as kind of like a politician and that makes perfect sense yeah yeah it absolutely does um hoshi actually seems to have some is the one that actually seems to have some kind of ability where he can hear quote unquote the voice of god

22:40 so in terms of actors uh cap is played by patrick seitz hoshi by ry mckeen and machi by lauren landa uh you would know patrick's sites from such roles as dio from jojo's bizarre adventure um wolfgang grimmer from monster and frankie from one piece uh ryan mckean um relative newcomer uh you would know him from such roles as rito from two lover uh mia from skate the infinity uh and a little bit of a surprise pika from one piece oh my god oh my god [ __ ] pika and lauren landa you would know from

23:27 such roles as juno from b stars kyoko sakura from madoka magica and merlin from the seven deadly sins um so i think to start this off we will have andrew oh lordy um so this is an interesting ensemble of characters i'll start with lauren landa who i think she does a good job sounding like the serious girl trying her best while also letting it letting her mask slip a little bit noticeably her contempt for uh izaho notably because she had a past with misaho because media ho was like oh you totally botched this award you botched this vote

24:12 like you used connections and [ __ ] and then hoshi like traced her her anonymous [ __ ] talking posts on the internet which that's a scary thing for that kid to just know how to do uh but yeah no she's got a bit of contempt for uh miso ho but i think she does a good job pulling up pulling rank and being like this stern serious person who's trying to keep order amongst the class and she does a good job she's got a very authoritative voice but like i like her relationship with uh hoshi and cap and i even like before they take off to the unknown and she kind of like bonds with mizuho one final times or

24:59 like letting all those bygones be gigons before taking off which i thought was actually a pretty sweet scene uh cap patrick sites as cap he's big he's he's commanding he's intimidating he's also a little bit of a goof but he's also a bit power hungry but yeah the biggest the biggest thing patrick sites has to do is pretty much sell the history of an entire fake fictional baseball league of monkeys to the audience without showing any of them and managing to sell that quite exceptionally

25:44 yeah like man oh man the monkey baseball episode man i was gripped into the saga of blue monkey and like the catcher like the umpire that was that was insane and that was a nice parallel to the concept of the pro like basically the prodigy versus the pers like the hard worker who is drawn to the fairness of the sport but i i was also thinking of it more like a you know like kind of i guess going against the norm and like uh it's not what the majority wants and all that stuff but yeah no i think i think patrick science really sold the entire gripping

26:29 saga of the monkey league while like just really drawing me in like with his voice and stuff i was pretty impressed with that and he did a good job and then there's rye who oh man that tiny little shrimp is intimidating as all hell and rye sells how intimidating and seemingly two-faced this character would be like hoshi would be okay how do i describe this patrick you wouldn't quite understand this because you're still very new to this hoshi is your schemer two-faced conniving bastard that makes

27:16 everybody's lives in the danganronpa all that more troublesome oh like what's his nuts with the glasses yes like what's his nuts with the glasses i think ryan does a good job making him sound like very two-faced but also very sincere and noble and i did like the fact that he actually just does care for his classmates and really wanted to see them prosper he he knew everybody was going adrift because the voice told him and he's like well i mean my classmates are kind of [ __ ] idiots they can't do [ __ ] if i'm not there to help them out ed he was just right he he was just right and he he basically just became noah

28:03 like actually noah and just guided them to travel the world in their giant 3d polygonal cube which you know you could have way worse looking ships so hey good for him and i think rob ryan does a very good job making him very complex and interesting but also making him very sincere and helpful he does he does a great job as a little shrimp also it's very intimidating watching a very menacing godly voice imbue itself through this small child that it is um you all set yep all right i think i will move the conversation onto a jet okay uh guess what

28:50 so um yeah i will also start with uh lord landa as i as machi i thought he did a pretty good job of kind of uh coming off as like absurd as a look kind of like a bit of a start authority figure about like the students as a very much like trying to keep things managed but also just you know like very clearly spiteful with especially george mesa who and another lord did a really good job of like uh getting that sense of fight across it is interesting that we never that we basically never learned exactly what it is that went on between them but at the same time it's one of those things that i don't think it really

29:37 matters to what the show is going for anyway so i guess uh i guess you could not submit like glue that up to interpretation i'm not i said i got here leaving it up to interpretation or just kind of one of these like i don't really need to bother going back to this i don't know can i make a can i make a stupid point that just occurred to me what i'm kind of glad this didn't get more popular because the sheer level of sunny boy explained videos they'll be clogging up youtube right now would make you want to hurt somebody it is funny you say that because i'm pretty sure that actually didn't make one that's that's kind of amazing actually i i you see a n e n n has enough reasonable people there that i feel like they're not yeah stupid is what i'm thinking of all right

30:23 who's gonna be the one with the just the thumbnail set that just has the word cancelled all over it or problematic no problematic who's the problematic one in the thumbnail oh oh take your pick what do you want to focus on oh good anyways continue continue with your actual point there's an ass abbot yeah but yeah i definitely liked lauren's performance and like andrew was egg i did so i didn't like that it didn't kind of reconcile somewhat in the end but if again it would have been okay i mean again it wasn't like super important to learn what they did was between them because it's not like not important to what the show was

31:08 trying to say but i guess just you know but again i came but i guess just like you know daredevil's thinking it might have helped somewhat i don't know but either way lauren's performance was good um and then patrick science's cap was a lot of fun i mean patrick said his new stranger to playing meat heads and that's kind of what cap is early on that's a definitely a guy who is well if not necessarily used to being in charge he definitely as an ally coach he kind of described it he likes knowing what his position is that if that position is a position of power it's definitely one he is very happy to take a moment he gets power he will happily abuse it for his own benefit which patrick gets across really well and it was and it was definitely both music and terrifying just kind of like

31:54 seeing how like how spiteful he got like the moment someone dared to challenge him and another patrick i got that across really well and also made him sound a little uh unhinged when he hit that's a concert with that baseball bat so uh gun patrick and does it end up is it that definitely contrasted really well with how funny it was when like he got a penalty of it though and i had to like run around naked that was pretty funny yeah yeah and then it was interesting and it's interesting that the character is just kind of like relatively chill after that and it was definitely very interesting hearing him like narrate the whole like baseball walking soccer and dr patrick's side did a really good job of making that sound very engrossing even though we don't actually see any of it so

32:42 uh good job there and then uh ryan mateen is hoshi at definitely very interesting that this is definitely very interesting like y'all were saying i totally thought this character is going to be an antagonist early on he just very much gave that vibe and said very much gave the the idea that he's lives like i guess always up to something or if not like actively scheming i guess just like i mean i guess just you know like trying to keep things a certain direction i thought that ryan did a really good job of kind of uh getting that across but i guess like she could not she could not somebody described it this character is basically just a politician and uh ryan mckee does that really well he

33:30 i know this character knows how to talk to people how to decide how to move them and ryan mckee gets that across really well uh but at the same time he's also like slightly more benevolent than that would imply and ryan does a really good job of getting that across too uh was definitely surprised at how diddley helpful this character was so well with the other students towards the end but uh ryan did a good job of selling it and yeah baldi's performances were pretty good all right um i'm on a a thing that i appreciate about the show that i think i mean you see this in all the characters but something i kind of like is the show

34:17 likes to emphasize how these characters are in fact teenagers uh and i think hoshi i think is a good example of this um [Music] hoshi's entire deal makes you feel like we mentioned it he feels like he's gonna be a bad guy he doesn't end up being one but everything from like his design to how ryan plays him to kind of a lot of his actions early on he just feels nefarious he's not bad he's just drawn that way no well i think i think something that comes up is there's the bit where he figures out um who is it it's uh is it mizuho who's like [ __ ] talking machi online apparently or doing something yes yes he mentions like oh i had my my dad's people like track down who did it

35:02 and there's very much a sense that like hoshi means well but he is still a product of his upbringing he comes from a family of wealth who are used to throwing their power around and that's the only context he knows for how to help people and i i think i just i think it's a point like i think that's it one of the things this show reminded me of is a lord of the flies not specifically in the like man's inhumanity towards man aspect but sort of the sense of like if you take a bunch of kids and put them through british public school this is how they're going to act out in the world and a lot of these characters kind of feel like if you take teenagers and put them in these circumstances this is how they're going to react when they have to fend for themselves because they don't know what else to do with themselves because they're teenagers they don't they they don't have anything

35:47 else to work with so hoshi behaves like a shady politician because that's the world he knows even though that makes him look super [ __ ] sketchy even though he actually sincerely wants to help everybody and do the best he can uh and i think ryan does that really well like i definitely thought hoshi was gonna be up to no good and that never really comes together and i liked how rai played him because as time goes on you can tell that like no no he actually wants to do the right thing he's trying god damn it he just he also doesn't know what he's doing because he they're they're like the end of their third year right what does that make them like 16 or something uh probably closer to 14 15 actually yeah yeah i went uh yeah with the way japanese school didn't work yeah like 14 or 50 and everything yeah cool i know

36:33 [ __ ] about what i was doing when i was 14 or 15. kudos to this kid for like trying his best like god um and ryan's really good at that much the same way like uh like i think same thing with kind of machi like she is trying her best but like she is kind of confined by clearly a lot of like expectation and how she feels she needs to act to get anywhere in the world i think lauren does that well um also uh before i talk about patrick root uh patrick actual patrick uh how how how close how close is the baseball episode to just being a secret base episode oh man can we get do they have a patreon can we pay john boyce and alex rubenstein to

37:19 make a video about this fake baseball team oh man i would i would kill to see secret base do like like an episode or maybe a series of episodes covering like sports episodes in like anime and television samurai shamplo samurai shamploo i need it look all i know is that kofi who does a lot of videos with john is a big old weave so like who knows anyways patrick patrick is he's he's great here um because patrick is good at playing big lunk heads but also getting at like the inner life of those lunkheads

38:05 um the whole bit with the like the monkey baseball team is great but i think my favorite part is i believe also in that episode is he's talking about how the thing that initially attracted him to baseball is that you know it's fun but how so quickly that got swallowed up by like it's not about playing baseball it's about all the things that playing baseball can get you and you know we're going to go to nationals it'll get you into good college and all that kind of thing and just sort of his just is like melancholy at like i used to just play this because i liked playing it and then it became just an obligation and how you could tell that it was like in some like he's kind of happy this happened because he got to just reconnect with this sport he loved and not have it be like something he feels expected to do rather than something he wants to do

38:50 yeah like it's it's it's a it's a nice scene and i i i like that patrick is the kind of actor who can still make him feel like you know kind of the you know the big brawny guy who's maybe not stupid but just like has not been encouraged to think very hard about much of anything other than sports um but still has like a rich inner life that is worth talking about it's a good performance i like it a lot um so i guess i'll start with lauren landa um there really isn't too too much of her character compared to the the other two in this group but like i do like the the sort of mini arc that she gets during the um the second episode

39:38 where it's kind of explaining her relationship with mizuho and basically something happened between them and they don't like each other but over the course of the rest of the series they slowly warm up to each other like that was about the depth of her character and like i i really like those moments as she's warming up and it's great it's good patrick's sites is a lovable doof um the baseball episode is like one of the pitch perfect ones ah i see what you did there sort of the one-offs pitch perfect oh [ __ ] i made yeah you

40:23 did yeah you did i wasn't even trying you did not strike out at all i'm proud of you pitch perfect baseball pun there we go um it was just one of those episodes that really kind of like for patrick sites and the the monkey baseball episode it's just he finally gets to vent about how much he loves playing baseball but hates all the [ __ ] that surrounds it when you're playing at sort of a semi-professional high school level or middle school where it's basically just you know you've got to use this to ride

41:09 to the top and he doesn't like that and when he gets to sort of the island where most of the series is kind of focused around he's finally free and he comes to the realization that he actually kind of enjoys it and that's it it was really one of the it's one of the more beautiful arcs of of the show and i i thought patrick science was like really great in it and then um ray mckean does everybody has already kind of really adequately put it um he is basically a politician

41:56 um he means well and honestly i was going to bring up the subject of um lord of the flies at some point but yeah that's basically ryan mckean does a very good job with him in the sense that um he does really well with this child who basically all he knows to resolve conflicts is to get in the mud and the [ __ ] he is well aware that in in order to get anywhere in politics you've got to dig dirt up on people and like do all this shady [ __ ] and he just wants to help people and he

42:42 thinks that's how he can do it you know by the time episode 11 rolls around and he's finally concluding his his story arc where he's basically leading the students to find basically a new home um i i thought that was really really great really beautiful and really poetic um so really all all three of these guys just they give off such an energy in the first episode that completely 180s on you and the actors behind them just really wonderfully adequately

43:28 are able to portray that so big thumbs up all around and with that i think we're gonna move on to our antagonists um these are the actual characters that kind of throw a wrench in the works for everybody just kind of wanting to get home first off we have miss aki a a teacher who mysteriously re appears on the island after i believe the second or third episode um and just basically militarizes the kids um completely turns them against um

44:14 against nagara and just basically seems to be using all of them especially asakase to her own ends um and then it's it's revealed at the end of her at the end of her debut episode that um like she's not who she seems to be uh next up we have war a mysterious sort of figure that drifts along the other worlds and um his power seems to be something incredibly destructive um again like a lot of the powers in the show it's not clearly defined

45:02 um but he is clearly a dangerous figure um that a bunch of the stronger the kids with the stronger powers seem to be getting sent against uh even though he really only has like a flashback worth of screen time he is probably one of the most important characters that aren't the main body of students and then we have basically god but he is credited just under the name voice uh he manifests in the form of the principle of the school and is basically for reasons we're never clearly told

45:48 um stymieing every attempt to return back to the world from one cease kids cane getting onto the actors uh misaki is played by trina nishimura war by robert mccollum and voice or god or whatever you want to call him uh is played by frank dotaro uh trina nishimura you would know from such roles as mikasa ackerman from attack on titan uh jiro from my hero academia and natsume from decadence

46:41 deep cut um he is team goten in dragon ball gt uh frank tadaro is you would probably know him from such things as shudelkin aka creepy clown dude from sword art online alicization uh he is rodrigo in dragon quest your story or rodrigo i think it's just rodrigo i i can't remember like the king dude yes um and i don't know if it's still going to be ongoing by the time this episode comes out but you might hear him right now as um lord draluck from the vampire dies in no time

47:29 sad um so i think for this group i'm going to go ahead and pass the torch on to ammon to start with what a bunch of pieces of work these people are where to start uh so you know how hoshi just has bad vibes from the minute you see him yeah yeah yeah misaki has really bad vibes it's the way her eyes are drawn she looks wrong you know what yeah that that is it's like i i don't know the ones of you who have read it it's like you start reading

48:14 chain summon maybe you don't know anything about it something about maki just feels off and eventually i realized it's like her eyes look weird that's unsettling this is bad it's the same thing with her her eyes look wrong compared to everyone else and it makes her look nefarious they are cut from the same gaslight gatekeep girl boss cloth and they run with it yeah pretty much um what was i gonna say yeah this miss aki seems like she is bad business and trina sells that very very well like uh just for the minute she walks out of the ocean there's just a sense of like this isn't good i don't know what's gonna come of this yet but it's not gonna be great i don't think uh and trina just really sells that like she like just

49:01 she is a she's given a character who is a force of personality and absolutely runs with it the whole time um just delightful in a weird way even if it's not good necessarily um same with frank as the voice uh just what up what uh whatever he is uh and i think frank just does a good job of making him seem imposing but also just there's a lot of like what's your angle here buddy why are you doing there's a very there's a very like trickster god aspect to him that i think he does well i'm just a dude a dude who's clearly not being straight with anybody uh to to the point where you sometimes

49:47 might even wonder do you know what you're doing god are you are you making this up as you go along why are you why is this happening did i manipulate children because i really want to do a cool gunslinger thing yes maybe the teenagers aren't the only ones who act like teenagers in this show you might have a point there yeah uh frank frank's really good though as just this sort of imposing omnipotent being that just sort of does things and doesn't really let anyone in on his agenda including the audience uh i i guess i liked him a lot um my favorite of these three is probably robert as war just because

50:33 boy for a guy who only show he's only in the one episode right am i imagining that yep yeah yeah he shows up for maybe like 10 minutes robert's just really good at playing this just just a nefarious i was going to say slime bag but i feel like that doesn't describe him very well he's very broken the thing he reminds me of because my my braid is a junk drawer of everything i've ever read is uh there's stephen king did a weird fantasy series called the dark tower and the league character is basically uh what if clint eastwood's the man with no name but he's like the kind of [ __ ] up who often stars in stephen king novels uh there's kind of a point where he

51:18 not really intentionally but he is kind of obsessed on this quest and just sort of uses people around him because that's just what he does that's how he's programmed basically and ward just kind of feels like that like he's doing a thing and he's just gonna keep doing that and on on some level he doesn't quite care that it hurts anyone like he might feel more more steep down but that's not gonna stop him uh he just does stuff and he insults people because he he on like because he thinks slash knows that's what they want to hear and spreads diseases around he's he's a he's a real piece of work but robert plays it real well just very like striking and memorable uh he he feels like one of those characters where if i like didn't watch this for you know you know give me a

52:04 year i haven't seen this i would imagine his character is in more of it just because he feels too memorable to have only been in like maybe a third of one episode of these 12 episodes you know i like robert he's he's always playing these minor characters really really well and also being really upsetting at the same time uh call it quality programming all around good stuff okay um let's move on to jet okay um actually i guess i'll start with frank todaro as the voice i i i thought he did a pretty good job

52:51 giving this very kind of optimistic but also kind of mysterious presence because we never quite learned they never quite learned what this deal was or why he said this why he sent these kids to this world or what his agenda was but that's ah but again it's one of those things that doesn't necessarily matter anyway but at any rate grass performance is definitely really appropriate for was really appropriate without abide because it definitely gave it a very interesting air of mystery is that especially the like i said we toured the end when like uh it's not kind of towards the end of the show we're not going to be there or like if i get ready to leave and he just like

53:36 gives them this very vague warning of like oh that wasn't oh my oh you shouldn't leave and they're like well i mean you're not saying we can't leave and i thought that was like an interesting conversation and i said and enemy there are all sorts of ways you could uh interpret the meaning behind that but i thought that was like a very uh interesting conversation yeah and i thought that frank did a really good job of sounding that uh so uh trinity symbol as miss aki uh this is another character who i thought was going to be a lot more of an active antagonist than she actually ended up being like she definitely is i say this one is antagonistic for like

54:23 the first uh couple of episodes she's introducing like she throws a wrench in the group she turns everyone against nagara for because she trapped because she convinces them that his power is what actually sent everyone to is what said is what caused everyone to like be cast away to begin with when reality was actually means power the whole time i said and i don't know like i assume she knew that but again we don't quite know what her debt is anyway so like she probably knew but i guess she just wanted to manipulate the kids as an evidence either way she does have like a very like

55:08 manipulative presence and since it went out to gaza 18 he does a really good job it's just kind of like stringing came along and i thought that treated did a really good job of i did a really good job at selling that again i did think this again i didn't think she was going to be like much more of an entire antagonistic threat throughout the show but after those first couple of episodes after her introduction she's just kind of like leaning around the other kids uh she gives them some sort of at graduation after giving after like educating them on like how these worlds work and stuff and that she just kind of i guess well well she doesn't shuffle off but you know she gets out the kanji to fight war and that's kind of like the last big thing she does

55:56 is that like like it's very like it's a very interesting character but like is one of those things where it's like i was very intrigued by the character but i'm not totally sure what the purpose was after her introduction i i don't know so we could have that bit where it turns into the magic school bus for part of an episode ah that was really amazing i do i do appreciate that the show is very committed to never taking the easy way out if that makes sense oh boy does it oh yeah like you you could just make miss aki the villain but it's way more interesting to make her kind of a wrench but also someone who's maybe not actually trying to be antagonistic she's just mean question mark

56:44 she's not a villain maybe she's just an [ __ ] yeah and uh then uh writing it off uh robert mccollum's war was uh really interesting again this was a very bad kind of abstract character so i guess like what it was supposed to represent would be like any number of things but i thought that robert mccomb did a pretty good job of making his introduction like appropriately unsettling does that sound like something like something about this character just didn't quite feel right i mean uh because i especially like the way he kind of like opens up and like insulting i thought uh was that i thought that was like pretty

57:29 unsettling and robert did a really good job getting that across and especially and then essentially like when they're having that whole conversation as and he's just like showing off all these battles of all the people he's killed and it's like oh oh okay you're definitely bad news let's ass and um and yeah but this was a pretty uh interesting character definitely had like a very strong just a very strong presence but i'm not totally sure who was supposed to be like like representative of the concept of like war in general or just like death as a concept again because again this show is and like

58:16 again the show is not very clear when it's metaphors but either way it was an interesting character another robert did a good job with him um actually this is a good opportunity to um to go ahead and segue into you andrew um what did you think um okay cause you know what's good to segway because war was who i was gonna start with he's got a very small presence but he made enough of an impact that i thought it was worth talking about him because he's very odd with a really good design i like the fact that he doesn't really sound sinister despite having such this very menacing figure he kind of sounds like a guy who really wants companionship

59:04 but also is like really really [ __ ] uh in the head about how actual friendships and relationships should and do work yeah i told you you're disgusting because you seemed like you really wanted somebody to tell you you look disgusting because i wanted you to like me anyways um here's all the cool medals and stuff i can do a lot of cool things i can i can kill people because yeah no it's hard to die here um isn't that cool i brought you this cool thing you do you want to hang out with me that's like oh you are it's so uncomfortably like like innocent

59:50 awkward child in its horrific nature and like robert mccollum sells that like child like sincerity especially even when he's petting like yamabiko and it's just like oh you're a good boy but you're stuck inside your head it's just so odd but stand out and then there's miss aki trina is a [ __ ] and she's great at selling how much of a [ __ ] this character is just delightfully like sinister and mean and manipulative like like she just recognizes okay

1:00:35 i'm going to i'm going to groom this child with a cool power and an ego trip with my boobs and then he'll do everything i want him to do until he's no longer useful and it works until she eventually just gets bored with him and just kind of abandons him which man [ __ ] poor asakase where it's like man he kind of really [ __ ] up in the end himself where at the end he has nothing yeah that's a rough deal bro um but yeah i love miss aki's like sinister me drill sergeant [ __ ] she's got going for her and it's just like i think trina does a great job just elevating all of that

1:01:21 i think my favorite moment with her is uh it's when like they're on the mission trying to kill war with kosetsu and she kind of like stares into her eyes and she's like i know what you're doing and it's so creepy and the frame is so creepy and unnerving you're right it's just the eyes it's the eyes that don't look right because everybody else looks pretty normal down to earth but she just looks wrong and then there's frank tadaro as the voice of god himself what a strange he feels incomprehensible i feel like that's a great way to put it is that they made this godly figure

1:02:10 uh incomprehensible like a level of like eldridge chaos let you don't understand what his plan is you don't understand why he did it everybody that just goes to this middle school where he's the t where he's the principal at is just copied and is sent adrift into an unknowing impossible world and he's just like yeah that's that's just how the [ __ ] works sorry kids he's unknowable incomprehensible he doesn't even really seem like a villain he's more of just like i kind of wanted to see what would happen

1:02:56 because like he even at like the end of the series he basically is like there's nothing waiting for you i don't understand what you're going to get you're not going to find what you're looking for so why even try he's almost like trying to like he's always trying to like manipulate them being like i almost think in his mind he created a perfect world and i think that's fascinating and yeah and frank dotaro sells how like intimidating and kind of creepy but also how very ethereal and larger than life he feels and frank of taro sells everything about him perfectly and i was very impressed and i really think frank

1:03:42 dodaro is [ __ ] fantastic and i'm glad he's showing up in more anime lately he's great uh let me see where i am going to start um i think i'm going to go ahead with robert mccollum in war just because that's probably war is probably the biggest threat of sunny boy but at the same time like robert mccallum as war maybe gets like eight ten minutes of screen time at most um mainly within a flashback um it's great it's very intimidating wars seem

1:04:28 war seems like a child unaware of just what he is capable of like just the sheer ability of being able to take a life is something beyond what the being known as war like it's beyond his thought process but he thinks he knows he's trying to get the affection of everyone around him but doesn't quite understand that like the ability to to die and or cause death is not

1:05:14 something inherently good or at least as inherently good as as in his own head um so i'm going to go ahead and move on to um frank tadaro as the voice of god i actually love the idea that this is basically some sort of bored deity um trying to or at least in his own mind thinking that he's saving these kids from a lifetime of stagnation but at the same time especially in the final conversation between him and nagara in episode 12

1:06:01 where he's just like yeah you they're finally at the point where they can go home and he's just sitting there in this imaginary entryway to the school and he's just like yeah you don't you don't want to go there like there's nothing for you there and nagara is just like yeah but you also never said we couldn't leave this place and then he's like well you got me there that was a great point to just end it and um so good i i love frank tadaro just playing him it's very abundantly clear that he is

1:06:48 playing the voice of god as just like somebody who is very bored and has like all of these pieces available to him and he's just bending and manipulating them just to see what they do and it's just it's just so good uh and then oh my god trina nishimura as misaki oh god i can't remember the character's name but um this was where i was going to throw the analogy to um lord of the flies in because she's basically the one who she's basically the one who gets it into

1:07:34 the other kid's head about the beast she's very cold calculating manipulative um she's malevolent at times but not always um it's just great i i love it so much all all three of these care actors did such a great job with the with the characters so um with our next group um this is mainly they mainly have a presence in episode 8 uh via flashback but one of them sort of shows up throughout uh but it's a really beautiful story and

1:08:20 i wanted to um sort of cover bases with both of the characters um first of all we have yamada um a student from a class after after nagadas had drifted off um he has wandered through the many worlds for hundreds if not thousands of years five thousand years exactly five thousand years um he stumbles on to one with a girl who can basically create whatever she wants she's pretty damn near omnipotent yeah and more or less

1:09:05 he kind of falls in love with her and becomes something to her that she can um i don't know if it's if it was his expressed desire to become a dog or if that was i i think what she wanted but he basically turned into a dog which by the way god he's such a cute little boy oh my god look at that big borker look at that good boy look he may be a giant but he is still baby i i get that but he's like [ __ ] mastiff size dude i would hug and cuddle the [ __ ] out of yamabiko okay there's a good dog i'm not saying that's wrong he's just a he's just a big chunky

1:09:53 boy no he's still baby [ __ ] you he's good baby uh but any and um and so this girl kodama um becomes sick with some sort of it it almost seems like a metaphor for cancer i can't remember if she dies dies or if it's like they are all some stasis that is like metaphorical of death they they they are all not technically dead but they're all basically permanently crystallized okay and after she becomes non-functional yamado continues to wander the worlds and eventually bonds really

1:10:39 strongly with uh mizuho but ultimately he cannot travel with her or nagara back into the real world um but anyway um yamada is played by christopher waycamp and kodama by jill harris uh you would know works from chris waycamp as performances like miles edgeworth and ace attorney uh mack in megalobox 2 nomad and izola in my hero academia izola uh jill harris you would know as rika takarata in gridman uh a letter in restaurant to another world and mayaka in bara in hiyoka

1:11:26 all right let's see here um let's go ahead and start with andrew oh [ __ ] okay cool um sorry sorry you didn't catch me off guard i was just like because i was literally workshopping of realization as we were discussing about uh yamada or yamabiko and kodama specifically about the fact that he is a dog or becomes a dog kodama didn't want a dog she didn't want like an unquestioning loyal servant she wanted an equal to stand by her side but also challenge her

1:12:12 and like stand up for himself too she wanted to be by his side he she he didn't want him to serve her and i think that's ultimately what doomed their relationship and ultimately her in the end that's a very somber revelation i just had about this but i think man that that really works doesn't it yeah i mean we're dealing with a really kind of somber show here anyway so yeah also episode 8 is probably like one of like the the strongest episodes in the show

1:12:57 it's it is something to behold but no uh jill harris is great as kodama she's got this very nice like peppy but ultimately like friendly tote presentation to her voice you can tell she really cares about people she really wants to help everybody but at some point her her kind nature and desires fail her once her judgment is kind of compromised and for better for worse she kind of ends up putting her group in danger because of her nature to want to be a savior to everybody and that ultimately ended up doing dooming her in the end but i really like her relationship with yamato and i think it's a really great

1:13:44 dynamic and i i think she really did care for him a lot and really wanted to be by him side but you see her getting angry and sickly and it just gets like hard to watch as she's just kind of fading away and losing herself as yamabiko is watching this and just kind of has he can't really do anything to help her is for better for worse he's kind of doomed her in letting her effectively take control when he knows she's wrong about something by kind of being like a inactive force in her life he kind of destroyed that relationship

1:14:29 hmm man is that oh god oh god like i i thought it was interesting but the more i'm talking about it more like oh man we're talking actual relationship dynamics boy howdy yeah boy howdy speaking of which uh yeah no jill's fantastic i really liked her escodamo she really stood out for the episode she was in and made a big wave i love chris waycamp as yamabiko i adore him as this sort of strange like he's almost like an alien creature when you first meet him he is

1:15:14 kind and sincere but he's he's he talks like somebody who has been alive for thousands of years and has kind of lost their mind and humanity a little bit but he is still kind natured and really sweet also he does good doggo noises this is because there was one bit like or there wasn't a bid like earlier than two dumpsters like oh i'm not really dog i don't remember exactly what it is but it's like santa claus though you are actually dog and then he just makes like an actual dog door and i like almost done laughing it's it's pretty good it's pretty good i love how after a while like means just like

1:16:00 paw shake roll over who's a good boy who's a good boy and he's just yucking it up i'm like oh so good bang oh you're supposed to play dead he also has a goo he i also like his relationship with misuho's cats where it's kind of revealed in episode 9 that those cats can actually communicate and talk okay no they can't talk but it's that yamabiko can understand all of them yeah uh it was interesting stuff and i liked his i like yamabiko's dynamic to the characters and the group around him because he made a very good interesting companion

1:16:45 and like waycamp really gives him a level of warmth kindness and like stunted humanity that made him charming alien and really unique i think yamabiko is probably like one of my favorite characters in this not my favorite but he's up there he's up there and chris white does a good job i'm done okay um let us see here um i'm on why don't you go ahead and go next sure uh jill is just lovely as kodama um like i agree with pretty much everything andrew said uh you you can really you get the sense of why these people were willing to follow her so readily she is just such a warm

1:17:31 inviting person um even though as as you know if you've watched it like that ends up being used against her uh which really makes the whole thing so tragic because she she is so like kind and loving and wants to protect everybody and it makes it all the sadder that she is ultimately not able to do that um yeah that's she she does a really good job like with war like she leaves a strong impression and given enough time i think if i were to turn this it'd be like oh yeah that's that's right these characters are only in this one episode even though they feel like they should have you know they they they feel so impactful you feel like they're in more of the story than they actually are

1:18:16 um she's just she's just she's really nice it's a good like a good just for a one-off character she lives a ver leaves a very strong impression uh and yeah and christopher's he's great he's just great yamada's such a fascinating character he's i like i like that this like this show isn't like like super realistic looking but there is a certain kind of baseline reality that a lot of the designs are coming from and i like that he is like way more stylized than that like the thing he reminds me of is like um have you ever seen the fantastic mr fox there's like a wolf character who shows up a couple of times you'll only receive yes and he looks like he looks like that like there's something much more like

1:19:03 like like he looks like he looks like something i would see in like he he almost looks kind of like a stylized like deity in a sense he look he looks like something that like not like an actual egyptian hieroglyph but if you were looking at like a piece of art that was using that as an influence like that's what he looks like he looks like he looks like he should be two-dimensional frankly um and i i think christopher does a good job of getting into the humanity that's still there but like you were saying he come there's something alien about him he comes off as like being here has changed him you know despite being stuck in a place that is fundamentally very static being there has changed him a lot both physically emotionally mentally

1:19:49 and you know he can connect with the humans but ultimately like he's somewhere else now and i think christopher does a good job of balancing that of making him feel like a relatable person but also somebody who is he's not quite of that anymore he's moved on in some fashion uh and and yes the dog stuff is just very funny because he he commits to it it's the right level of serious but silly i appreciate it it's good yeah i think jet's up next oh yeah uh so uh let's see i will also start with uh kodama i thought that till harris did a very good job on the stairs dude [Applause] sorry sorry you're good my cat just

1:20:36 jumped up on the desk baby boy i love you please don't do that okay all right okay let me start that over uh so uh jill harris escodaba was a very interesting performance and this was definitely a character who had to uh who had to take on a lot uh sorry uh basically the so basically the whole deal being that she was like clearly very giving and everyone expected a lot of her but that sorry about uh maybe a little too much and but it wasn't necessarily like eating eating away eating away at her like directly you could definitely it's a antiplatelet with affecting hair

1:21:23 even if she herself wasn't really thinking that way and i thought that jill did a really good job but literally jill did a really good job of like getting that across especially like during a bit where uh could have been like first introduced in yamamiko is like having this whole conversation with her about how she looks now and like it's like i don't like a dragon and try his best to i mean i know i like not necessarily i guess downplay how like rabbids she is now but i guess that's but i guess you know trying to be sweeter so and i thought that whole conversation yeah did a really good job of like setting the mood for that episode and both of them did a really good job there

1:22:16 like pretty interesting with him being like very cynical towards her early on and like her artist is kind of like helping him to open up but then maybe a little too much to the point where he just kind of became very overly reliant overly reliant on her and putting her on a pedestal and how that all kind of backfired and said it didn't like a lot i didn't like her conversation with war was also really interesting because like it's a because like not if not necessarily a study character she's at least like very optimistic but the blacker covers stupid wars like maybe the one instance where you like see the character be very visibly shaken and jill did a really good job of getting that

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