Pick a side, Producer!
Putting anime in my superhero comics? It’s old hat. But putting The Idolm@ster in my blockbuster Hollywood hero brawls? Now that’s something I can get behind! From the galactic heroes at Bin1 Production comes a nice mashup of two cool things, namely The Idolm@ster franchise and Captain America: Civil War.
The result is Captain @merica: Civil War, a tale of rivalry and high action that places Idolm@ster luminaries Iori Minase and Yukiho Hagiwara in the roles of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers as they battle over the threat of government control and the fate of Bucky Barnes (Makoto Kikuchi). The best girl, Black Widow, is also played by the best girl, Takane Shijou. The whole thing plays to the beats of the Japanese trailers for Civil War, and between the timing and artist Taku’s apparent mastery of the art style used in A-1 Pictures’ Idolm@ster anime adaptation, the thing comes across as some great trans-Pacific fan service.
As with the Persona 5 trailer, I took the liberty of translating and subtitling the lines in the video. Watch it and some related art from Bin1 Productions below, as you decide the most important question you’ll ever face: Team Iorin-Man or Team Yukipo? We already know which side Harada is on.
As a fun/depressing side note for fellow Japanese-learners, translating the trailers reveals more about the desperate state of Japanese-language localization. Aside from slight tweaks to give a few lines a more Idolm@ster feel, the vast majority of text in Captain @merica is taken from official Japanese trailers for the movie, like this one and this one.
That’s a problem, because the lines are kind of awful, especially compared with what’s actually being said. Several key exchanges between Tony and Cap, like the “Looking a bit defensive/It’s been a long day” scene and the “He’s my friend/So was I” scene are completely flattened, drained of wit by a translator that simply threw up his or her hands and settled for a line that communicated the “gist” of the meaning instead.
If this is indicative of what Japanese audiences are getting in their subs and dubs when foreign films and games open there, then things haven’t progressed much since the Modern Warfare 2 fiasco.
