アニメの概要
I didn't like the very specific part of...
They changed one word and I can't stand it!
Who are you, a Chainsaw Man fan?
Welcome back to 2AM OTTACK!
I'm your host Mayu, a born and raised Japanese non-otaku, and...
I'm Cisco, an American otaku.
In this podcast, we share our reviews of anime and manga through our distinct perspectives
with commentary on Japanese culture, history, and language.
Cisco, it's finally here, the anime that I was waiting for since last year.
Yeah, you've been really looking forward to this one.
I've been really looking forward for the animation, and we've watched first two episodes so far.
It's not much, but I couldn't wait to talk about it today.
So today we are going to talk about...
The Darwin Incident.
We have talked about the Darwin Incident last year,
so check that episode first if you like, and come back to this episode.
If you're okay with spoilers, go and do that.
Otherwise, today we'll try to restrict ourselves to talking about...
At least, like, spoiling the plot points that have only happened yet in the anime, right?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, cool.
Before we start, we'd like to hear from you.
Share your thoughts, ideas, questions, or even suggestions for what we should talk about.
Email us using the address in the description, or you can use the Spotify or YouTube comment sections.
少年Zの背景
The premise of the story is that 15-ish years ago, from the present that the anime is set in,
some animal rights activists attacked a lab that was doing research on chimpanzees and other animals.
And they freed a chimpanzee that was pregnant and looked like it was badly hurt.
And that this chimpanzee was carrying a baby that turned out to be half chimp and half human.
And the baby was born and survived and then was, I guess, adopted by some people who raised the human Z, as it was called, as their son.
He's 15, right?
Mm-hmm.
This is one of those things where, like, I mean, I think he's in 10th grade.
I don't think he's in 9th grade, right?
I don't know.
Because he's starting high school.
It's one of these things where, like, in Japan, high school starts in 10th grade.
But in America, high school starts in 9th grade.
And so, like, I wonder whether it's, like, a little bit of, like, there's so much about America in this show that is, like, deeply researched and really pretty accurate.
I guess it's, like, fine for his parents to have decided to just only start sending him in 10th grade.
But it felt like this, like, weird seepage from Japanese culture where, like, you would start going to high school in 10th grade.
And so, like, that's when he starts going, even though in America it would be like, why didn't you send him to 9th grade?
I mean, maybe he just wasn't ready or something, but whatever.
Anyway, I think he's in about 10th grade.
They live in Missouri, I think.
Mm-hmm.
In a, like, a suburban town.
Right.
It doesn't seem to be close to any major cities.
It's not a small town.
It's not very rural.
But it's not, it's definitely not a big city.
So, he starts going to high school.
And in the second episode, even in the first episode, he shows off his abilities as a human Z, which include moving super fast, like, being able to, like, jump out of windows and save people as they fall out of trees.
キャラクターの能力
I guess he can't, like, communicate with other animals, but it sort of seems like he has a better or more natural understanding of nature and the natural world than the humans around him.
And he can obviously speak English.
He can wear totally regular clothes, but sometimes chooses not to, like, especially shoes.
Does he have any other sort of powers so far?
He is very strong.
Yeah, because he has, like, huge grip strength.
So, he's, he's, like, really strong.
He's really fast.
He can jump really far.
So, he's got, like, I mean, chimpanzees can do some of those things.
Mm-hmm.
But he seems to, even in the show, they kind of comment that he can do things that neither regular humans nor regular chimps can do.
Right.
So, he's a little bit of, like, a superpowered character.
And he's kind of, he doesn't talk a lot.
He's sort of quiet most of the time.
He's quiet and doesn't show much emotions.
Yeah, he's, he only eats vegetables and fruits.
So, he's…
Vegan.
He's vegan.
And it seems like his family is too, right?
His parents, yes.
So, that's not, like, a him thing.
It's, like, his family kind of thing.
I guess in the second episode, you find out that the same animal rights group that broke him out of the lab when he was a fetus is now coming back, like, looking for him.
And that they are full-on terrorists who are, like, bombing restaurants and stuff.
So, they seem to be after him.
And he's also being surveilled by the local police because of some kind of incident that happened when he was younger, when he took out, like, a bunch of cops at once.
So, and then it was all covered up.
And he didn't kill anybody.
But, like, it seems scary for people.
So, he's trying to fit in and go to regular school.
And it's, there's a lot of attention on him because of the ALA, the Animal Liberation Alliance bombings and stuff.
But that's the setup of the show.
マンガとアニメの体験
You've read manga, and I've read manga all in English.
Mm-hmm.
Which worked perfect for me.
Mm-hmm.
Usually, when I read manga in English, it's fine.
I understand it.
But I'd rather read in my language.
You'd rather read it in Japanese than English.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that I can have better sense of the jokes or nuance and stuff.
But this time, for the first time, I felt like it was perfect reading in English because the setup is all in America.
Right.
So it feels like somebody wrote this in America in English, and I'm reading it.
It's like an American comic.
Yeah.
And it just, it fits the vibe really well.
Mm-hmm.
So when I started watching anime, it was fine.
I was listening in Japanese.
But the way line script delivered was a little bit strange to me.
Mm-hmm.
Because it sounded like the dub of American TV shows like Friends or Beverly Hills.
Oh, Beverly Hills 90210.
Yes.
Okay.
Japanese people translate English from English to Japanese.
And then the way they sound is like typical American image of lines.
Do you understand?
Yeah.
No, I do.
I'm wondering whether this was at least partly because you read the manga in English.
アニメと原作の比較
And then you expected them to speak English in the anime, and then they spoke Japanese.
And so then it felt kind of forced.
No, no, no, no, no.
Yeah.
The way they talk is like the dub you listen in Japanese from American movies and the TV dramas.
For example, you don't say kawaii.
Oh, anata kawaii ne.
Oh, anata cute ne.
Oh, yeah.
Is it just the English words, or is it the grammar of how they are speaking in general?
Grammar is fine.
The way they talk is something you've heard from like dubbed version of American TV dramas or movies.
Got it.
And is it a lot just the vocabularies that they're including more English words, or is it something else in addition to that?
I think so.
I think so.
I don't know.
Maybe, you know, other Japanese people don't care about it.
And then like it creates more like American vibe to the show.
Right.
But to me, I think I just don't, I'm not a big fan of dub.
So maybe that's why.
Like it sounds like a dub, even though the original is Japanese.
Yes.
And I think that's very intentional.
Right.
Yeah.
They're trying to make it sound in Japanese as if, oh, this is really America.
They talk differently over there.
We're going to throw in some more American words and stuff.
I wonder if the manga is like that, too.
Do you think the original manga written in Japanese is using all those words?
I actually played the first episode of anime, The Darwin Incident, as I was reading the first chapter of The Darwin Incident in Japanese.
Oh, OK.
You really researched this then?
I did.
Most of the lines are the same based on the original.
But like one word when I was just watching anime, I noticed this sounds really weird, which was like nerdy.
What do you say?
Yutousei.
Honor student.
It's the usual translation in an anime.
Yutousei will usually be translated to honor student.
It just means good student.
OK.
So like there's a bully and then Lucy was trying to, you know, help or rescue the cat on the tree.
And the bully was like that good student.
In the manga, it says inkya no yutousei.
OK.
Yeah, inkya means like a negative character.
That means like more like quiet student.
Kind of like an introvert or a maybe beyond introvert even.
Yes.
Like emo almost.
But in anime, it says naado no yutousei.
Oh, OK.
I don't know why, but I like that phrase like stuck with my head.
And I was like, I had to go back and check the original manga and anime.
And that's one of the only few parts they changed.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Why did they have to say nerd?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, like, do Japanese people, you think, understand nerd as an insult?
That's my question, too.
Like inkya is so much like a common word people use these days.
And it's much more like slangy.
Like it makes them sound like actual high school students to say inkya.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
And then they changed inkya to nerd.
Weird.
I didn't like the very specific part of...
They changed one word and I can't stand it!
Who are you, a Chainsaw Man fan?
アニメとマンガの声の違い
OK.
So that's a tiny thing.
And then like a manga you just read through.
And in anime, the human characters like gestures or like stuff like a little bit too much for me.
What did you think about that part?
Or you didn't really notice?
The gestures in the anime are too much?
Yeah.
I mean, I guess like in the manga, you can't really see full gestures.
They're like these snapshots.
And so you have to like fill in the blank with your imagination and stuff.
I don't know.
I think the manga is sort of over the top in that same way.
And somehow in my mind, like Japanese people seem to have a stereotype of Americans as like always behaving that way.
Like always being kind of too big and over the top.
And like certainly Americans can be like that, you know.
And I know some who are.
But I don't think everyone's like that.
I didn't really notice it in the anime.
But I have to sort of agree that the anime in Japanese sounds like a dub.
And I think part of the issue for me is that, well, there are a lot of manga that I've read first in English and then watched the anime of.
So maybe it's because this one is set in America.
Reading the manga in English, I like came up with sort of voices in my head for most of the characters.
And had kind of firm ideas about what all of them would sound like.
And then watching the anime in Japanese, the voices don't really match what I expected.
Like I expected Charlie to have like a much deeper voice.
I expected, you know, Feyera Bend to have like a much smoother voice.
Right. And like Feyera Bend speaking Japanese like doesn't really work for me.
Like the voice actor is great.
He's doing a really good job.
I like his voice a lot.
And it's somehow like not really what I thought he was going to sound like.
So like Lucy, fine.
She sounds exactly like how I pictured her, more or less, actually.
I think the other thing is like in the manga, the sort of school bullies and like even the regular other characters at school, they all speak English.
You know, the translation is quite good.
They come across as passable American students.
They're still behaving in a way that feels like what Japanese people think American high schoolers behave like, which in some cases to me feels like overdone, too stereotypical, like not super realistic.
But in English, they don't sound weird.
In Japanese, they kind of sound weird.
Like it doesn't really it feels even less normal.
So, yeah, I think like that's all a fair criticism of it.
And it's not really destroying my enjoyment of the show, even though I feel this, you know, weirdness about it.
So there's information about Charlie's voice.
The anime studio or the director and manga artist did audition for Charlie.
There are potential like a possibility of man's voice.
But after they did the audition for Charlie, they couldn't find one.
They couldn't decide.
And Shun Umezawa was like, it could be, you know, women's voice, but not too low.
And then somebody brought Atsumi Tanezaki's voice.
And then everybody was like, that's it.
Interesting.
Atsumi Tanezaki did voice for Free Ren as well as.
I'm sorry, Charlie is Free Ren.
That is blowing my mind.
And Anya from Spy Family.
Yeah, that also.
What?
OK.
She's really talented.
Yeah, I'll say.
So that's how it decided.
So, you know, Atsumi Tanezaki didn't have to have an audition.
It was just decided after all the auditions by other people.
OK, interesting.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I was picturing, you know, a little bit like a deeper voice.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know that I pictured Charlie with a deep voice exactly.
Deeper than like, you know, women.
Yeah, he sounds really high pitched.
And I mean, I guess chimps do have like in my imagination, like high pitched voices.
So like I sort of get it, but I don't know.
Yeah.
You know, his personality is very calm and like seems like a very smart.
And then later in the manga, you know, there is like very intense moment with Lucy.
And I kept, you know, hearing man's voice in my head when I was reading the manga.
Yeah.
Anyway, I think Tanezaki Atsumi is doing a really great job.
I think it was a really difficult audition to do.
Even though like Umezawa Shun didn't have like any good idea of like what Charlie's voice should sound like.
Yeah.
I mean, well, and that seems fair.
You know, it's a brand new species.
No one's ever heard of before.
It might be hard to like decide on a voice for it.
マンガのテーマと舞台設定
So anyway, theme of the manga is, you know, human and animals rights and also discrimination and terrorism to talk about or discuss about it.
It would be better to bring the story in America rather than in Japan.
This is something the author said or something.
Like, I can't imagine Charlie being accepted at all by anyone in Japan.
What do you mean?
I feel like if the story was set in Japan, like he would just wouldn't go to school ever.
Like he would just be like, absolutely not.
Like he cannot fit into human society.
No, period.
Whereas like in America, it's like, oh, we're going to try it.
You know, like maybe it'll work.
Right.
Yeah.
And like, it's also really hard for me to conceive of like the ALA doing like any terrorist actions in Japan.
I feel like there's not like Japanese groups like care that much about animal rights.
Like one, like people don't even really understand vegetarianism in Japan very well.
And two, I mean, I guess there's like religious cults that do terrorism in Japan.
But like, I don't know.
I think like he had to set it in America to be like a country where people are free to express their beliefs and disagree with each other and like try to live together despite their differences.
Whereas in Japan, it's just like, no, like we're not doing it.
That's a good point.
So Shun Umezawa had never been to foreign countries when he was working on this manga until last year.
I've been following him on Instagram and he's very active on Instagram to be honest.
So last summer when I was in Japan, I was checking and then he posted a picture of like a scenery in Bakersfield, California.
And I was like, oh my God, he is in America.
ダーウィン事件の背景
And I think he went to St. Louis later.
Okay, good.
I was like, oh no, like, you know, we missed each other.
Not that I'm going to see him, but that's how I felt.
And then after I came back to California, I saw his post on Instagram.
Like he was in Akita.
What?
What the heck?
Dude, you gotta tell me.
You gotta tell me.
Oh my God.
Why does he go to the places like we've been?
And then like we went to St. Louis last spring.
St. Louis.
Yeah.
I don't know.
And he posts like the bar he goes to all the time.
And you can see like the location and everything.
I'm tempted to go there next time in Tokyo.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
You're going to stalk this guy.
I know, right?
I don't want to stalk.
You're going to be in the next chapter of the Darwin incident.
No, I don't want to have this crazy Asian who's a vegetarian stalking him.
Yeah, that's weird.
No, I'm not going to do that.
Anyway.
Manga, the Darwin incident is his first long series ever.
Wow.
Until then he was just, you know, working on short stories.
And he realized short stories, you can't earn that much money.
And I need to pay my food.
It seems like I'm going to live more than 40 years.
So I have to do something about this.
Like if he was only going to live till 40, he just wouldn't bother.
I think he didn't really expect living more than 40 years.
Okay.
Was there a reason for that?
Like he was like, I'll probably just die before 40.
I don't know.
He sounded like I listened to his old interview and he sounded like he doesn't understand this world at all.
Since he started living on this earth.
Okay.
But he like knows a decent amount about America in order to be able to write this series.
Oh yeah.
He did so much research.
He read and he loves movies and American TV dramas, which makes sense.
Like because the Darwin incident looked like something you've seen on American TV drama.
It actually makes sense to me that like the stereotypes of the school bullies are things that he picked up from watching like American TV shows that came to Japan.
In the nineties and early two thousands.
Like that.
Back to the future.
Right.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
Like he didn't grow up in America and has no like actual sense of it, but he watched some older American movies and was like, oh, this is like what it's like then.
Okay.
Right.
That makes sense.
Exactly.
He watched like the breakfast club and he was like, that's real.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Got it.
The anime has not yet get into an episode that has like a lot of action in it, but there is some decent action in the story.
I'm sort of excited to see how they handle that in the anime.
I hope that they really give it like the attention it deserves to like make it look cool.
アニメの展望
So far it's felt a little bit throwbacky and slow and that doesn't strike me as like what this anime is supposed to be like.
So maybe it's just not representative in the first two episodes, but I'm looking forward to that.
The opening theme song is pretty good.
And I watched the music video that the band made for it, which gave me a lot of vibes of the video that Creepy Nuts made for Otonoke when they like created their own.
Because it relies on a lot of like the same sort of strobe-y lights effects.
And it's basically just a band playing in a room, which like looks like the, you know, the music videos that bands made in like the 80s and 90s in America.
And then it has like a lot of kaleidoscope kind of imagery, which is fun because Lucy's name in the anime, they like, you know,
Feyerabend makes a reference to the girl with the kaleidoscope eyes, which is a Lucy in the sky with diamonds reference from the Beatles.
And you can just see some of those influences on the song, the lyrics, even the music video.
It's got like a sort of older rock feel to it, but I dig it.
And, oh, the other thing I want to say about the music is, or that opening song rather, is the English, maybe this is because I watched it on YouTube,
but I feel like the English lyrics just do not do the song justice.
It's like a rap song almost in terms of how many, how much, how important the rhyme scheme is to the Japanese lyrics.
And the English translations that I've seen so far don't replicate the rhyme scheme at all and make it sound kind of bland.
Whereas like the Japanese is like pretty catchy and has like a lot of really cool like rhyming.
In a way that like strikes me as more common in English music, like a lot of times English songs, the rhyme scheme is really important.
And Japanese songs, the rhyme scheme doesn't usually matter that much.
But this one, the rhyming really works.
And so the English translation kind of doesn't capture the feel of the Japanese lyrics that well.
I haven't learned the song, but it sounds like you may feel really good when you sing.
Yeah, could be. I don't know. I feel like it's going to be fun.
All right. Let's do today's word of the day.
What is today's word of the day?
アニメと権利の概念
I think today's word of the day is kendi, which means rights.
And this is an anime that is very much about rights, about human rights, about animal rights, about what we do.
If there's ever like a new species that's also as intelligent as humans.
And, you know, what do we treat it with rights or not?
And so the notion of things having rights seems really important here.
And so that felt like a good word of the day to introduce.
I've got this feeling like people in America knows their rights and demand their rights more compared to people in Japan.
Yeah, well, for a long time, people in Japan didn't really have a concept of like individual rights very strongly at all.
Right. Like, I don't think there were any rights that people like were assumed to have under the shogunate.
Right. Like it was just like whatever the shogun says, like that's the law.
Like regular people can't be like, no, you can't do that. Right.
Even in the Meiji era, like the rights of the citizen were not really the important rights.
The rights of the emperor were like the important ones.
And like some rights were protected, but that wasn't really the point.
The point was like national unity.
投票権の歴史
And so until I mean, you know, in the early Meiji era, not everybody can vote.
It's not until the Taisho era in the 1920s that everyone like I think even all men can't vote until the Taisho era. Right.
I think women probably couldn't vote until even later after World War II.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, now Japan has more rights because America wrote the constitution after the war.
But prior to that, the idea of individual rights wasn't like a super important notion.
It was more about like, you know, mutual responsibilities, but not so much like quote unquote rights, I think.
All right. So rights.
Yeah, I think good to know the word.
Yeah. And it's good to know your rights.
And you might hear this word from now on, on Darwin incident.
I don't know how many episodes going to be in this season, but I hope like the story goes fast like manga did get to the some, I don't know, the point, like a really exciting and then actiony part.
Yeah, I'm kind of worried.
The manga is not over.
And at least as far as I've read in the manga, like there's still kind of like big stuff that like hasn't happened yet.
漫画とアニメの関係
And it's not that long.
So I feel like this is probably a 12 episode core while they like wait for the rest of the manga to get finished.
Or, you know, like other like manga, you know, in the anime and then manga hasn't finished or like still going, but anime had to end.
Has to have like an ending.
Yeah.
I don't know how they're going to handle that.
Yeah, I don't know either.
All right.
Well, we'll find out together.
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Peace.
