The Life and Times of Inoue Marina #2
Another month, another Marina update.
I’m sure you’ll all know from one of my earlier posts that she has shifted agencies from Voice & Heart to Sigma Seven. The move would mean very little to your typical casual anime/seiyuu fan as on the surface, not a whole lot will be diffrent. It’ll be business as usual for Marina in terms of voice work - what you can expect is changes on the music and promotional side of things. Maybe a record deal with Starchild or King Records is coming? She’s certainly been doing a lot of promo for them on Zetsubo-sensei and Minami-ke related stuff. Moving on…..
A Monthly Roundup of News and Blog Posts.
Inoue Nana visits Inoue Marina
Feet. Yeap, feet. The picture is taken from Nana’s blog entry, though she didn’t mention Marina’s name. Exactly what she said:
Who’s this?
On the left, it’s me.
On the right.
On the right?
It’s M.
It’s M-Na (Ｍ奈).
I’m sorry, Saki.
Ok, it seems everyone is into poking fun at the ‘lovely’ couple of Marina and Fujita Saki nowadays. Anyhow, Nana and Marina are castmates in ‘Suteki Tantei Labyrinth’ these days and this picture was taken when Nana visited Marina’s house at night on the 15th of December. Sato Satomi (Yaya-chan in Labyrinth) was also there.
But that was not the main event of the night; all the Labyrinth girls ended up going to Paku Romi’s house after that - that includes Ueda Kana and Sawashiro Miyuki but not Horie Yui. Featuring the usual eating, drinking, girly talking and salad making - seems they enjoyed themselves so much they want to have a second meeting….. they’ll have plenty of time, there’s still 2 months+ of that wretched detective show to go -_-
Speaking of Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, Marina’s Rakuta character song CD will be out tomorrow (16th January). If it’s good I might end up buying it, along with the Minami-ke: Okawari opening theme which is out next week (23rd January).
Christmas Eve was spent….
…..eating. And eating. And eating. Cake, cake and more cake. Cake in the morning, cake sent to her by some publisher, cake given to her by staff members after morning recording sessions were over. Funnily enough, a picture of the exact same cake (though from a different angle) surfaced in Kitamura Eri’s blog so I can only imagine that it must’ve been a Minami-ke recording they were at.
Busy Eve for Marina, she still had night recording sessions, this time for the last episode of Suisui! Fish!. And what did they eat there? Yeap, cake. It happened to have been seiyuu Okamoto Asami’s (Kano in ‘AIR’) birthday on 22nd December so the cast all pulled crackers to celebrate along with the cake.
Christmas Day
More cake. I really want to know what damn diet Inoue is on cos if I stuffed myself with all that cake I’d end up looking like Dawn French (or Johnny Vegas). More recording on Xmas day, this time for the last episode of ‘Bakugan Battle Brawlers’, a show nobody watched. I survived about 4 episodes myself before coming to my senses…. the only plus point was that it had some of the coolest episode titles (all famous Jpop tunes) around. Anyhow, Marina didn’t have a regular role in the show - instead she voiced loads of bit-part characters, usually ugly kids.
Marina bangs her knee on her door.
And writhes in agony on her bed as Fujita Saki laughs and snaps pictures. The duo seem to have been spending a lot of time together lately, with Sakki staying over at her place again on the 29th December - they’d already planned this way ahead during the last ‘date’. As Sakki herself says “Aren’t we seeing a lot of each other lately? But, I wanted to see her.” Ahem. They continued their previous Wii Biohazard 4 session, and finished it this time around. The next day Marina met up with a bunch of her old university friends for a nabe (hotpot) party, the first time they’d met since the summer holidays as everyone was busy with their new jobs.
Moving agencies, and moving to a new blog…..
……with changes to the comments system. There had apparently been a wee bit of abuse of the open comment system used on her old blog at Playlog so with her new blog on Yaplog, approval is needed before comments show up. Too bad I never actually got to see what sort of rubbish comments there were before they got deleted. And strangely enough, I actually recognise some of the names of those people who comment regularly on the blog from listening to all sorts of anime radio shows. - seiyuu stalkers, these guys ^^; Oh, and this isn’t the first time Marinavi’s been on Yaplog; the old one was here, then it was moved to Aniplex, and then Playlog and now back to Yaplog.
Fans’ new year wishes
Despite Marina’s move to Sigma Seven, Voice & Heart still forwarded all the new year wishes fans had sent in to her….. though she only got them on 10th January. And spent a long time arranging them into what you see above. She also attended Sigma Seven’s new year party, and being a newcomer was forced to give a mini-speech. There were other more interesting news pieces at the party though, including the fact that it’s the agency’s 20th anniversary this year, and that a post on fellow Sigma Seven seiyuu Mizusawa Fumie’s blog seems to suggest that two of the agency’s seiyuu/staff have gotten married - I wonder who the heck they are?
Marina also talked about about recording for a drama CD which she had been looking forward to very much (I suspect it’s Minami-ke), plus interviews for a bunch of magazines. There was one where she mentioned that all the staff members were arguing for an hour over how to best realise Marina’s ultimate dream of being a dojikko, or as she put it - 放っておけない女 (a girl you can’t leave alone). And their conclusion - it was 無理 (impossible). 絶望した！. Wasn’t being a dojikko last year’s resolution though ^^;; I thought she wanted to be a spoilt brat in 2008 
Rather off-topic but…………
Does anyone remember how the old Marina used to look?
I’d kinda forgotten how chubby (in the face) she used to be around the Cossette period. I think you can pretty much see how different she looks nowadays by comparing the Hoseki and Beautiful Story PVs. Also look at some of the older pics on the Aniplex site. Marina’s lost quite a bit of weight over the last 2 years or so - she looks like a bamboo stick nowadays really. Incidentally, I didn’t really like her until Yakitate Japan!, where she voiced the ultra-cool, ultra-short, ultra-pink Kanmuri; who along with Sophie (voiced by Mizuki Nana) were my favourite characters.
As a reminder, it’s Inoue Marina’s birthday on 20th January (this Sunday)! Minakike will be having a Marina b’day special show on Friday, and apparently Hara-tan (Chihara Minori) has prepared an original birthday song for the occasion………… must tune in! Too bad I’ll be at a boring training course the whole day and won’t get to hear it til at night. 絶望した！
Oh, and as a freebie - here’s the full Beautiful Story PV for DL so y’all can er….. have a spastic dance-along to it. It’s WMV, the quality is middling but don’t complain cos it’s better than Youtube ^^;
Until next month, さよなら！(it’s a SZBH thing).
January 17th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Thanks, I really enjoyed that post. Ever since Gurren Lagann and Minami-ke, I’ve been really interested in Inoue Marina. Hopefully there are big things in store for her this year. ^^