damn anime companies!

When are you going to get some voice actors who can pronounce words correctly. Japanese pronunciation ... not that hard. What was really bad was how they completely screwed up the names in Noir. Seriously, a film-noir-ish anime about French femme fatales, and Mireille becomes "Miriel" (think "Muriel" with an initial "Mi" instead of "Mu")?

Anyway, I figured it might be interesting to see how Funimation decided to pitch Aquarion, given that you can stream the first episode from IGN. The intro was somewhat amusing for its military-esque description of Deava, which is more or less accurate, but made it seem a little too sci-fi-ish when I think Aquarion belongs in the middle of the fantasy genre. The hilarious part was at the end of the introduction voice-over, when it suddenly got hints of American Idol: "which of these youngsters are going to be chosen as the final pilots of Aquarion?"

Well, what can you do? It takes a lot of money to get into anime publishing these days, and the Japanese studios are pretty wary of modern distribution systems.