SO something caught my eye during a 5-hour bus ride that I was travelling on this past weekend, as I sat in a cramped bus seat, thankful for a Wi-Fi connection, dreading the moment when my tank of a laptop would start flashing a low battery button. I got a link to this off of my Twitter feed, which shows a list of all the voice actors currently associated with the dub for an anime called ICE. Now this shocked me, firstly because I reviewed ICE way, way back as my second video review ever, and at the time I was reviewing it because it was obscure, kind of painful to watch if you want to take it seriously, and honestly felt like an amateur anime, which considering its less than known production studio was not a bad thought on the subject.
So there I sat, dumb-struck that this anime was licensed when so many others are still left on the wayside. Where’s the dub for EF – Tale of Memories? What about Bartender? The only reason I can deduce is because of the recent release of the new Last Exile anime that’s coming out this season and the involvement of Makoto Kobayashi who is the director of ICE and the production designer for both of the Last Exile series. Though even given that reasoning, why they licensed and are even spending time on a dub for ICE is beyond me.
ICE is just…well not good, the plot was so ridiculously flimsy with no real reason to care for most of the characters, the animation designed looks just as good as some fan-made Toho anime (ok well mabye not THAT bad, but you know…), and the plot got so ludicrous at times that I had no idea what was going on sometimes or even why.
In my review however, I speculated that should a dub ever be released, it might be able to fix the series in a lot of ways depending on how liberal with the original script the dubbers are. Just making the script have some sort of semblance of logic or understanding might take a bit though. However, I could be wrong. I may have just been a victim of an extremely poor fan-sub for an obscure anime that the subbers didn’t think anyone was going to watch anyways and that the script actually does make a lot of sense, but it’s the subbers fault that I didn’t understand what was going on because they were not translating anything properly.
So here’s how I think it’s going to play out. It’s going to get released on DVD (in November sometime, I think…) and I’m going to buy it (I have a thing about owning all the anime that I have reviewed). Then I’m going to watch it and either be really impressed, or laugh my head off because nothing has changed and I was a fool to think otherwise. It makes for good entertainment though. Here’s hoping.
