The high school idol group phenomenon gets a new release with a dub this time. Is it worth checking out?
Love Live! School Idol Project Season 1. Released by NIS America, February 2016.
The Review: (Please be aware of plot spoilers in this dubbing review)
The Show
If you have not heard about the Love Live! phenomenon, you probably have not been paying much attention to anime coming out of Japan in the past few years. It may have started earlier, as it began life as a multimedia experiment by ASCII Media Works’ Dengeki G’s Magazine, anime music label Lantis (which is owned by the behemoth that is the Bandai Namco group), and animation studio Sunrise (another company under the Bandai banner) in 2010 that produced music CDs and other material before the first anime adaptation came in 2013. One could hardly be faulted for thinking that the anime would merely provide another outlet for merchandise and promotion of music sales, but stunningly it became something of a phenomenon in its own right as home video disc sales went into the stratosphere. It is generally thought that 10,000 units per volume is a big hit. Twice that for any title mainly aimed at the otaku crowd is considered outstanding. Love Live regularly topped 5 times that and often achieved close to 6 digits per volume. Very few properties reach this high altitude of sales, most of them being franchises with appeal that reaches outside of anime/manga fans.
What is it about the show that generates so much interest? That’s harder to pin down. It’s a very simple tale at heart: Honoka Kosaka is a fairly average high school girl in her second year at the all-girls Otonokizaka High School. She’s carefree and not particularly gifted in any area. Her psyche is dealt a near-mortal blow, however, when it is announced that the school is in danger of being closed (falling enrollment threatens the viability of the school. This is not so rare or uncommon in Japan where birthrates have been negative for some time and the population has already begun a slow decline from its post-War heights). Desperate to prevent this from happening (Honoka, bubble head that she is, is revealed to be under the misunderstanding that the school will close at the end of the year and she’ll have to take entrance exams again to get into a new high school; the reality is that the school would simply cease admitting new students and would close after all current students graduate), she searches for something that will save the school. By chance, she stumbles upon the current fad of school idols: idol groups based in high schools (while most schools bar students from working jobs while enrolled, this whole idea is not actually as incredibly alien as it might sound as a good number of real life Japanese idol singing groups have members that are of high school age, at least in their training groups, and high school is not compulsory in Japan, though the overwhelming majority of Japanese attend high school). Honoka decides to form an idol group in order to draw attention to her school and prevent its closure. Thus µ’s (pronounced “muse” as in the nine daughters of Memory who were the patron goddesses of the arts in Greek mythology, not just music as is erroneously mentioned in the dialogue, an error owing to the original script in Japanese) is born.
The Dub
I realize I haven’t done one of these in a long, long while. Sure, I still do a dub review here and there, but at nowhere near the rate I once did. There are reasons for that, mainly in that I hear far fewer dubs than I used to during the Boom (Bubble) Era of anime between 2000 and 2007/8, when the market cratered. Dubs have fortunately not gone away, but many shows I watch and enjoy seem to be passed over for dubbing these days when released on home video, while shows I have little interest in do get them, which has added to my feeling a bit out of practice in many ways. But maybe my personal drought works to heighten my appreciation when a good dub comes along. The feeling is especially strong with shows getting a dub out of Los Angeles, which seems to be getting work mainly for marquee shows from a certain overpriced distributor, shows which have less appeal for me. It’s not that I’ve been ignoring LA’s output since the market collapse, which largely means BangZoom! Entertainment’s output. Some of the stuff they’ve produced since the dearth of 2008-9 I have heard in one way or another and have been suitably impressed with: Squid Girl, K-On!, and Kill la Kill are all notable in different (good) ways and I have listened to the first few episodes of Toradora and think it fits the show very well. The last time I weighed in on their work was back in March 2014 when I took a look at the first half of Accel World, which I thought was a professional, but somehow lacking, dub. Perhaps it’s time to talk about one that gets a more positive response from me.
A mixture of names that have been more prominent in recent work and some industry veterans in smaller, supporting roles, director Tony Oliver gets one thing very, very right with the sound and feel of Love Live! in English: the dynamic movement forward that is created by the energy and enthusiasm of the performers in the original version. Emi Nitta’s Honoka was a bundle of spastic force propelling the action and the other characters relentlessly forward…in a relentlessly cheerful fashion as a colleague of mine here at the Fandom Post once said in describing the series as a whole. It would be important to get that feeling into the dub. BangZoom! has traditionally been very good at casting voices that reflect (some might say slavishly reproduce) the sound of the original performances and casting director Mami Okada has done a perfectly respectable job there, but much more important to me has been the need to give the English dub the same feel in terms of drawing out the same emotional responses from the English-listening viewer.
I am happy to say that pretty much from the start Marieve Herington manages to do that. Her Honoka may not quite have the same cuteness (a very hard to pin-down quality and a bit less important in English than in the original Japanese, where it seems to make or break the career of many seiyuu—also, it’s very much a case of mileage variance, so take that comment for what it is and move on) as the original, but the drive, the energy, the relentless (there’s that word again) optimism of Honoka all shine through. Honoka’s highs and lows get presented here in their full gusto without any holding back. That’s exactly how Honoka should be. Honoka at times is not so much a character as a force of nature, bulldozing a path through obstacles and carrying others along with her. That same feeling of forward dynamic movement is present here in Ms. Herington’s Honoka.
The two characters first dragged forward by Honoka are her close friends Umi Sonoda and Kotori Minami: the former an athletic but shy girl, the latter a scatter-brained ditz with one of those quirky voices the Japanese seem to love but which can grate a bit on English-hearing ears. For the former, Kira Buckland gives Umi the deeper sound and solid foundation which matches the personality of Umi to a T. She’s just as adept at showing Umi’s cuter and weaker sides, her embarrassment at the thought of wearing a skimpy costume in front of a large audience and her stage fright. For the latter, Cristina Vee, whom I would have thought a shoe-in to play Umi, largely reprising what she showed us for Mio Akiyama in K-On!, instead is given the quirky ditz and plays it well. Kotori is pitched in a way that is slightly odd in comparison to more natural voices for high school girls in English speaking contexts, but that matches how Kotori sounds and yet does not become a distraction. It’s a difficult balancing act as certain purists (who are unhappy with…well…everything) would complain if Kotori did not have that same kind of squeakiness she has in the original, while those who actually appreciate that this is an adaptation, not a carbon paper reproduction, would likely be somewhat put off by a voice that sounds too outlandish. I think Ms. Vee arrives at a happy enough medium while also portraying Kotori in an appropriate way throughout.
As µ’s grows, so does the cast with significant screen time. The group is composed of three trios, one from each year, and the next trio to join are the first-year students Hanayo Koizumi, Rin Hoshizora, and Maki Nishikino. Maki is actually the first of the three to have more speaking lines, as she is pointed out early on as the music talent among the bunch, an accomplished pianist who can compose as well. Maki is a shy girl who covers up that shyness with haughtiness and aloofness, all of which is conveyed well by veteran actress Caitlin Glass, who will be most familiar from her many roles in dubs made in Texas. It’s a recognizable voice from her, not in any strange range or pitch, but most important is the tone and feel of the voice, which brings us Maki’s aloofness covering up her shyness very well. She sounds reluctant but really does want to have friends, even with all the inconveniences that come with them.
G.B. Smith
Greg Smith has been writing anime reviews and a review column on anime dubbed into English for several years, first at AnimeOnDVD and now for The Fandom Post. His occasional column on English anime dubs, Press Audio, appears whenever he comes across a dub worthy of a closer look. He is also the deputy editor for our seasonal and year end retrospectives.