Malaysian animeYou could say that anime popularity in Malaysia is increasing but there's still a lot more room for improvement. There's a lot of shops that now cater to our anime needs but because it is so small, the stuff are also minimal.
It's hard to get the latest Anime and Anime soundtracks. And if that's not enough, I am actually still waiting for the second box of 'Kino no Tabi' (the first box contained 4 episodes) that was subbed locally and it looks like they may not even come out with a second box. What about 'Gunslinger girl'? Where's the third and supposingly last box of this series?
I remember going into a forum and telling them about our quality of subbing and the guy replied that our animes are bootlegged, meaning they're not official. Understood, after all, they were cheap.
But still, do we really want to watch a show with translations that come straight from the Chinese version of subbing? And what about the quality of English? Malaysia's English is poor enough, add that to how our locals sub English in animes, no wonder some people can't even make a correct sentence.
Maybe this comes as a no big deal to people. After all, if I want better quality of subtitles, I should just buy the original DVDs and keep quiet.
But how many people can afford the DVDs? And aren't the VCDs original as well? Does the price go down just because it has bad subtitles?
Malaysia has done a great job in the manga line. Kudos to Gempak, Kreko and Arena Komik for giving the latest info on animes plus releasing the comics. My only gripe is what happened to One Piece (Budak Getah)??? It just stopped at volume 23 when it's very obvious that there's more where that came from.
Still, I prefer to get the Japanese mangas and the English ones because all the titles that I want are there. Malaysia will never translate Saikano, due to it's graphic and mature material, it'll be disastrous if a child gets his/her hands on this story (unless someone tightly wraps this book up and puts it plainly on the front 'ONLY FOR MATURE READERS'). Will Malaysia take the risk? After all, children can be rebellious and we are trying to refrain heavily sexual content. (Heh, this explains why we only have it in English... @.@)
Those who can read mandarin are definitely enjoying more anime than those who can't. Is Malaysia restricting animes to the Chinese only? (Although this can be fought with the fact that Chinese can get their versions of animes faster because of how similiar their language is to the Japanese).
Still, I'd love to see the day when Malaysia finally realises the significance of anime. It definitely is, now that they're playing Malay-dubbed Naruto on TV3. Plus, there was a newspaper article on Shoujo manga. ^^
But still, it can grow even more.
God bless!
posted by Michelle J Brohier @ 2:44 PM
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