Moetan Special + Moetan Listening Radio #1
Apparently the new cast members of Moetan had to do part of their audition in English. The producers’ standards must be pretty low then, given Morinaga Rika’s wooden and horrible pronunciation. Tomatsu Haruka’s isn’t too bad; guess it probably helps that she’s still in school.
Moetan Special
Hosted by Morinaga (Ruriko the maid) & Tomatsu (Sumi with ahoge), where they do brief intros to the show, teach people useless English and eat nice looking school meals.
There was also a short chat with director Kawaguchi Keiichiro (currently directing Hayate no Gotoku!) where he was asked to describe Tomatsu and Morinaga. Tomatsu - shikkari (steady, level-headed) unlike her aho-character Sumi. Morinaga - hyperactive drunkard like Ruriko (Rika doesn’t actually drink). I had more fun watching the people in the background (circled blue above) reacording their lines though.
Nakao Eri is another previously unannounced cast member - she voices Mio, Nao(Ueda Yuji)’s younger sister. She’s still struggling in the presenting part of seiyuu work it seems ^^; Hardly said anything during the interview, leaving most of the chatting to Tamura and Nazuka and just occasionally giggling along. Unsurprisingly none of them can speak English.
I really like Tomatsu, she’s cute! She can do that sexy/tsundere voice a la Corti as well. And her teeth are straight! I dumped one of Haruka’s interviews about Polyphonica onto Youtube a coupla days ago….. she likes Orange Range ;_; and she doesn’t watch anime because they’re on too late at night ^^
And of course being the bizarre world of anime, Haruka voices a character who is supposedly the same age as she is in real life (17-years old) but looks more like her kid sister (below). Wooh.
I hate the opening song. The official site had described it as ‘a Super High Tension POP song’ and I was dreading it already - hearing it on the radio show made me cringe. It sounds less annoying with the visuals though.
Moetan Listening Radio
Updates every Friday, you can catch the full shows on either Lantis-net or Bandai’s Digital Beat. One of the radio corners is called Kojin Lesson - Oshiete Rika-sensei! where Morinaga is supposed to be teaching Tomatsu a couple of otaku-ish English phrases. This week’s pearls of wisdom were:
1. I’m more interested in 3D than 2D.
-Uh yeah. Most would prefer it the other way around no doubt. As Morinaga says, anime characters can have whatever hair colour and nobody would bat an eyelid. She’s probably just jealous of Ink-chan’s bright blue tresses~~~~ Rika’s hair actually seems to be a rather subdued colour now (for her standards), Haruka-tan’s is jet black probably cos she’s still in school (lol).Reminds me of how I tried to hide in the bicycle shed when my school did hair checks - girls always have this rebellious streak and do the exact opposite of what the rulebook says (dyed hair, rainbow coloured nails, massive crucifixes around the neck & six earrings in each ear etc ^^;;)2. Totally invincible no matter what!!
- This is actually a translation of a Galaxy Angel catchphrase (どうにもこうにも絶対無敵!! - Douni mo kouni mo zettai muteki!!). Somehow, Morinaga managed to butcher the pronunciation of ‘totally’ into ‘totality’ or something that sounds vaguely like that. Tomatsu’s was pretty spot on I thought.j1m0netan
Fair enough to be making fun of other people’s English, but how good is mine? The answer is… not very good. English isn’t my first language, but I guess I can speak it at an acceptable level. So a bit of fun, the following clips are me reading the two lines above in ‘proper’ English, broken Japanese and Manglish. I had to refrain myself from giggling half the time, and I pitched my voice lower than it normally is for a laugh.
1. Lousy English
2. Broken Japanese
3. Perfect Manglish with lame joke